When does filing a Chapter 7 "straight bankruptcy" case help you enough so that you don't need a 3-to-5-year Chapter 13 case?
A short sale of your home is sometimes your best alternative. But short sales often do not successfully close, and even when they do you may get a rude surprise.
Will Fannie and Freddie finally be making mortgage principal reductions now that their own analysis shows that doing so would benefit their own financial health--and make them better able to repay billions owed to U.S. taxpayers?
Now that Fannie and Freddie are essentially owned by the taxpayers, why aren't these institutions doing more to help homeowners? Particularly, why are they so adamantly against allowing mortgage principal reductions?
The bankruptcy world played a quiet but significant role in bringing about this controversial $26 billion settlement. So, fittingly, the settlement terms require the banks to make significant changes in their behavior in bankruptcy court.
Most of the $26 billion or so in this national settlement is designed to help current homeowners keep their homes. But $1.5 billion of it will go to about 750,000 who have already lost their homes to foreclosure. That’s about $2,000 each.
The settlement documents of the deal that was announced more than a month ago were finally completed and filed at court on Monday, March 12. They catalog page after page of serious wrongdoing by the banks in their servicing of mortgages and processing of foreclosures.
The settlement anounced on Feb. 9 has been publicly released so far only in a broad outline of its terms. Any day now the actual agreement will be finalized and filed at court. In the meantime here are some tantalizing tidbits.