Buy Time to Sell Your Home with Chapter 13

If you are behind on your mortgage, and are thinking of selling your home, you can often delay selling for many months or even for years. 

Our last blog post was about the relatively long time Chapter 13 gives you to catch up on your mortgage. Besides the 3 to 5 years it gives you, Chapter 13 also protects you while you’re also dealing with other important debts. So filing a Chapter 13 case is a powerful way of buying time and gaining flexibility for your home.

That is just as true if you want to sell your home instead of keep it. Chapter 13 can buy you time and flexibility. You can often prevent being rushed into selling when the markets not right. You can prevent having to sell when doing so causes personal or family hardships. ln many circumstances, you can hold off on selling your home for many months, and even years. You will have to pay your mortgage in the meantime but you may be able to hold off on paying some or all of missed mortgage payments until the sale.

We’ll give you two examples when this can be extremely helpful.

First Example

Assume that you are 5 months behind on your mortgage payments and just got a notice of foreclosure. You’d lost your job a half year ago and just started at a new one for slightly lower pay. After discussing the situation with your bankruptcy lawyer you’ve decided that it’s best that you sell your home.  But your home has a lot of deferred maintenance, mostly superficial tasks that you can do, but it’ll take time. You’d like to spend the next 6 months getting the home ready. Plus it’s right around the corner from the winter holiday season, not a good time to get the best price. You’d like to list the home for sale in the spring when the most buyers are in the market. Plus, home prices have been rising in your neighborhood so a delay would likely increase your sale proceeds.

If you filed a Chapter 7 “straight bankruptcy” case there’s a serious risk you’d lose the home and its equity. Your mortgage lender would likely push to proceed with its foreclosure unless you’d start making catch-up payments right away. You could barely afford the regular mortgage payments so that wouldn’t likely happen. Usually Chapter 7 would not be a good option.

The Chapter 13 Solution

So how does Chapter 13 “adjustment of debts” buy you more time and flexibility here? 

Your Chapter 13 payment plan would propose having you make full regular mortgage payments right away. That would include insurance and property taxes, to protect the lender in those ways. You would agree to list the property for sale in 6 months. The equity you have in the property would protect the mortgage lender now. The sweat equity you’ll be putting into the property, plus the increasing property values, would keep the lender protected for the next 6 months and then through the home selling process.  The bankruptcy court would very likely approve such a plan.

You’d work hard to get the house ready for sale until the spring. You’d make only the regular monthly payments on the mortgage. (Plus you’d be paying a plan payment on all the rest of your debts, usually much, much less than you’d be obligated to pay otherwise.) You’d put the house on the market as agreed. When it sells you’d pay off the remaining mortgage debt, including the missed payments.

What you’d do with the remaining proceeds of sale depends on the circumstances. In some situations you might use it to pay off all the rest of your debts. Or you could use all or part of it for your upcoming home or apartment rental. Or it might even make sense at that time to convert your case into a Chapter 7 one. In any event, you would have succeeded in your goal of buying time to sell your home in a way and at a time that would maximize the money that you could get out of it.

Second Example

Assume a similar situation except that you want to wait two or three years to sell the home. You don’t want to sell before then for important personal or family reasons.  Maybe you have a kid or two in the neighborhood schools and don’t want to move them. Or maybe that’s when you can downsize because of kids moving out. Or you and/or your spouse will be ready for retirement in that time. These personal reasons may be combined with wanting the home to build more equity before you sell it.

Delaying a sale for that long is possible in the right circumstances. It may require making partial catch-up payments, especially if there’s not much of an equity cushion. It would very likely require being fastidious in keeping current on the property taxes and insurance, and the regular payment, at the risk of foreclosure if you don’t. These all depend on the facts of your case. In any event it is not unusual for Chapter 13 plans to allow for a home sale a year or two or even longer after the filing of the case.

Conclusion

Chapter 13 could allow you to put off selling your home until the time is right for you. If the home has some meaningful equity, you may even be able to delay paying some or all of the missed mortgage payments until selling the home. So in the meantime you wouldn’t have to worry about a pending foreclosure or other pressures from your mortgage lender. Instead you could focus your financial energies on making the regular monthly mortgage payments, and any other high-priority obligation(s) being handled in your payment plan. Then you’d sell your home in an orderly way that would serve you and your overall financial and personal game plan.  

Related posts:

Chapter 7 and Chapter 13–Selling Your Home in the Near Future and Protecting Its Increased Equity Flexibility in Selling Your Home through Chapter 13 Making Sense of Bankruptcy: Does Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 Better Protect Your Home? Making Sense of Bankruptcy: Protecting Your Home from Foreclosure with the “Automatic Stay” Mistakes to Avoid–Selling Your Home to Prevent Its Foreclosure