At our Los Angeles Bankruptcy Specialist blog, we get questions. In fact, we love getting questions. The tougher the question, the happier we are. Sometimes, people contact us long after they should have. When that happens we still do our best to help them.
Here’s a sober example of asking for help when it is already too late. We can’t do much for this questioner. But you can take away some powerful lessons from this. Suppose you are in foreclosure and you want to save your home. If so, you can’t screw up much worse than Norman did. See below. You can read the Los Angeles Bankruptcy Specialist advice that we gave to this reader.
Email Request for Los Angeles Bankruptcy Specialist Advice:
Dear Leon, In February 2009, I lost my home to foreclosure. My lender was GMAC. I hired an attorney to help me and I was paying the lawyer $2,000 a month. Two weeks before my house goes to foreclosure sale he tells me there is nothing he can do. He says forget about my house. He said I can buy another house later! I paid him a fortune for nothing.I later hired another attorney to go after the first attorney. I was able to recover some of my money. But I had to pay attorney fees and other costs. Befor I hired the first attorney I tried to fill out a loan modification. It was horrible no one would get back to me, so thats why I decided to hire a professional. My question is am I eligable for some form of compensation? I have my foreclousure paper and I have heard that GMAC is one of the lenders that had a lot of flaws in its foreclosure procedures. I hope you can help me. Thank you. Norman. |
The Los Angeles Bankruptcy Specialist Replies:
Dear Norman,
I have great sympathy with you. You got scammed by a crooked foreclosure lawyer. Then you lost your house in foreclosure. Now, you are hopeful that some of your loses will be made good from the National Mortgage Settlement.
Norman my friend, get ready for more confusion and frustration.
Here is the web site of The National Mortgage Settlement. It was negotiated by the state Attorneys General and the federal government and announced in February 2012. The site has FAQ’s and general information. I can find nothing on the site which tells whether your loan is covered. I can find nothing that tells what the compensation might be.
It is very difficult to make sense out of the settlement. The actual Settlement is a big as a phone book. It is 328 pages in length. You can read it HERE.
As best I can determine, standards to determine the payment of compensation are being left up to some future decision. The claims decision looks like it will made by a committee of states attorneys general. Decisions will also involve a claims administrator who is to be appointed by the committee.
There seems to be some media confusion over the claim deadline. Various news media, including the Los Angeles Times, were reporting the application deadline as Friday, January 19, 2013. See, http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-mortgage-settlement-20130114,0,7545984.story.
However, an update was issued on January 21, 2013 by The National Mortgage Settlement. Essentially, the update is saying that the deadline was was January 18, 2013.That you can file your claim late if you want to. They might consider your claim even if it is late. But that maybe they won’t consider a late claim. (Go figure.)
Here is the actual January 21, 2013 update, (reproduced below in all of it’s arrogant stupidity):
“The January 18, 2013 deadline to submit a claim form has passed. Consumers will soon no longer be able to submit a claim form online. Although the deadline has passed, the settlement administrator may still be able to process properly filled out claim forms that are received or submitted online in the next few weeks. Therefore, if you wish to submit a claim form under the National Mortgage Settlement, you may still do so. However, please note that there is no guarantee that a claim form submitted after January 18, 2013 will be accepted. To maximize the likelihood that your claim form can be accepted, please submit it as quickly as possible.”
The National Mortgage Settlement impacts borrowers with loans serviced by five following major lenders, including yours, Ally/GMAC. Under the settlement terms, there may be payments for certain borrowers who lost their homes to foreclosure between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2011. If you are eligible, your lender was supposed to have mailed you a letter and claim form last September or October of 2012. It sounds like you didn’t get the notice? If you didn’t get the notice, it is probably because your loan is not eligible. (Of course, one could justly conclude there is a possibility that all eligible borrowers did not all receive the notice.) You can contact your lender to inquire about your status by calling them at Ally/GMAC: 800-766-4622. You can also contact the National Mortgage Settlement Administrator at 1-866-430-8358.
Quick links for timely information: See our Bankruptcy Hub.
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