Chapter 13 is often the best option for holding onto your home. That may be simply because it solves one of your major home debt problems, or instead because it solves a bunch of them all in one package.
Although Chapter 13 is often the go-to prescription for hanging onto a home in financial distress, like most strong medicine it comes with side-effects. The simpler Chapter 7 "straight bankruptcy" may be the better solution for both short-term relief and long-term financial health.
Your vehicle loan, home mortgage, account at the appliance or electronics store, and maybe a debt that's resulted in a judgment lien--these debts with collateral are the ones that grab the most attention during a bankruptcy case. And that includes the attention of the creditors, very interested in "their" collateral.
Homeowners who lost their homes to foreclosure may need to commit perjury to get restitution payments through the settlement. That would be the deepest kind of insult on injury.
What qualifies you to receive the $1,500 to $2,000 restitution payment for losing your home to foreclosure? More clues have just become available.
Under new rules coming on line, HARP is now available for refinances no matter how far your home is underwater. The 125% loan-to-value cap is no more.
Powerful Chapter 13 gives you tools to solve your mortgage problems from a number of different angles. Plus it gives you other tools to deal with tax, support, and judgment liens on your home.
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.
