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There really is life after foreclosure. But only for those who act.

March 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We have been telling you for a long time now that the banks have already taken much of what you have.  What you may not be aware of is that they are coming after the rest.  Many people are saying to themselves, I don’t have much left to take.  These thieves are more interested in making sure that you keep giving them money each month whether you owe it to them or not.  They are changing the rules and the laws at will and they won’t stop until they have all of the money, including yours. 

Here is the first of our 4 part video series to help you better understand that you have options.  Most people will be better off if they can eliminate the banks from their lives.  Take a look and forward this on to anyone that could use some help.

Filed Under: Banks, Economy, Housing, Life After Foreclosure, My Credit, My Personal Finance, Preparedness Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Now may be the best time ever to give your house back to the bank.

March 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

If you have tried to get a loan modification or do a short sale, you already know that the banks are not helpful.  Their goal is to get you to continue to pay them for your upside down mortgage.  They don’t give a rip about your situation, how you got here or even what is in your best interest.  All they want is for you to keep paying.  In short, they are no help at all in helping you get right with what has turned out to be a terrible investment.

Most underwater homeowners have considered giving their houses back to the bank.  If you are upside down in your home and you have not considered it yet, You will!  As housing prices continue to slide over the next few years, even those of us who have never willingly broken our word or made a late payment on anything will come to realize that our houses are just an investment gone bad and it’s time to cut the strings and move on with our lives.   The one word of caution we have for you is that it is possible to wait too long and limit the benefit you can gain from the window of opportunity that is now open.

The banks are under intense pressure from many different angles.  They are trying to settle with the Attorney’s General aroung the country for the fruad they committed on homeowners in what has come to be termed, Robosigning.  They are being sued by the investors that bought their mortgage backed securities for the the alledged fraud included in the documentation on those securities.  They are dealing with class action lawsuits brought by homeowners that were defrauded in the Robosigning scandal.  To pile on, the banks have 8 million homes that they are trying to sell, more and more people every day quit paying on the houses the banks have financed and the tide of public opinion is shifting away from the big banks.  People are moving their money to smaller regional banks and credit unions.  If they hadn’t stolen so much money from us, we might feel sorry for them.  Suffice it to say, we don’t feel sorry for them. 

What this means for those who get it, is that we now have a window of opportnity to live for free in our houses while the banks fumble around trying to figure out how to take them back legally.  They have tried the bully and intimidate method without regard for what is legal.  They got caught.  Now they have to follow the rules and they are just learning how to do it.   By catching the banks when they are disorganized, you could live in your house free for a longer period of time just because of their disorganization.  

Attack when you enemy is weak.  Here is an article to consider.  Foreclosure Activity Slows Sharply in February.    This story was picked up by the news services.  You can find it at just about any location.  Here is another one from the Huffington Post Tim Geithner: All Parties ‘Have A Strong Stake’ In Quickly Settling Alleged Mortgage Abuses. 

If your house payments are $1500 per month and the banks take an extra 4 months to come get it, that is an extra $6,000 in your budget.  This is in addition, to the time it legally takes them.  The actual time frames for a foreclosure vary from state to state but the point is that right now, you get extra bonus months.   Unless you are willing to stay in your house for the next 10 years, this is an option that you will consider at some time.  

The common thread here is that they are trying to save the banks, not you.  You will have to save yourself.  It makes financial sense to make your move while the opposition is disorganized. 

www.financialrevivalgroup.com

Filed Under: Banks, Economy, Housing, Life After Foreclosure, My Credit, My Personal Finance Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Warn your friends. More housing crash on the way.

March 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

There are so many people out there me included that are making predictions.  We hear predictions on  everything from when Charlie Sheen’s tigers blood will will boil over again to when Florida will get snow because of global warming to the housing market. 

We came out with our prediction over a year ago that the housing market has at least another 20% to fall and that the bottom of the housing market is still at least 3 years away.  We are being proven right every day in our housing predictions but without the national media attention that many get, you may not have known it.  One guy that gets it right most of the time is Robert Shiller, the Yale economist and co-founder of the S&P/Case-Shiller home price indexes. 

Mr. Shiller dropped a bomb earlier this week when he said,

“There’s a substantial risk of home prices falling another 15%, 20% or 25%,”

To read the full MSN Money article, please consider Home Prices:  The double dip is near.

The point I want to make is that our members already know where they are at with their underwater homes.  It is vitally important that we do everything we can to help others understand where the housing market is going so that they can make decisions based on the best interests of their families and their financial future. 

If you don’t own a house now, good for you.  Rent cheap, save your money and you will be rewarded if and when you do decide to buy a house.  If you are one of the over 16 million upside down  homeowners today,  you will be joined shortly by millions more. 

For you there is life on the other side of this but only if you take action to protect yourselves.  Don’t expect anyone to do it for you or to make it easy.  We can help you do the research.  The decision is yours.

www.FinancialRevivalGroup.com

Filed Under: Banks, Economy, Housing, Life After Foreclosure, My Credit, My Personal Finance Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

More proof! You need to be making your purchases in cash.

March 10, 2011 By Leave a Comment

We have long been an advocate of making your purchases in cash.  Even if you are not underwater in your house today, chances are you may be in the future.  If you ever get to that point and want to look at any kind of break, the banks will force you to give them all of your financial information so they can decided if you are “worthy” of help or not. 

If you use a debit card, credit card or even checks, you leave a trail of every purchase you make.  One of the major banks recently told one of our members that they spent too much on food each month.  If they cut their food bill, they could afford to make their mortgage payment so no help would be offered by the bank.  By the way, are you following how fast the price of food us going up.  This family did not eat out much but they do by organic at the store. 

If you use the banks less and spend cash, there is no electronic record of what you do, where you go or what you spend your money on.  If  you ever do get into a situation with the banks or the government, they will not be able to make determinations about the way you live your life based on your electronic footprint.

Now for those of you that like to use their debit cards.  JP Morgan, Chase has announced that they are getting ready to limit debit card purchases to $100 and maybe even as little as $50.  Why?  Because with the new financial reform law, they can’t charge the merchant as much for debit card transactions.  They will make more money on fees if they force us to go back to writing checks. 

The greed sickness in the boardrooms of the major banks is disgusting, don’t you think? 

Anyway, to see the full MSN Money article, Debit Cards: $50 Spending Limit Coming?

We have been telling people to get their money out of the big banks for years.  Get your money into a small bank or credit union.  On top of that, use more cash and have it available in a safe place at all times.  As we move forward in this messed up economy, you will be glad you did. 

www.FinancialRevivalGroup.com

Filed Under: Banks, Economy, My Personal Finance, Preparedness Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

More proof! If you trust the banks, they will take your money.

March 10, 2011 By 1 Comment

As part of our process to help our members stay in their homes free for as long as they can, we encourage some of our members to look into the short sale option.  If you get an offer on your house, the foreclosure process stops until the bank can work through that offer.  Since the banks are so disorganized, we have seen this process take up to a year.  All the while our members are living in their homes for free. 

If you have one loan on the house that you live in, most states will not allow the banks to come after you for any money they lose in a foreclosure.  However those rules don’t apply if you short sale your house.  You have to negotiate any deficiencies with the bank prior to the short sale. 

One of our members has a short sale offer on their home and got the short sale approval letter from Bank of America.  The letter states that the bank reserves the right to come after them for the deficiency (the amount of money the bank will lose on this deal).  The homeowner rejected the approval telling the bank that they could just proceed with the foreclosure.  Within a couple of hours Bank of America issued another letter stating that they would waive the deficiency on the loan. 

Both letters are shown below.  Notice the highlighted portions and the date.  These are both form letters so it was easy for B of A to make the change.  

 

 

 

 

 

Click image to enlarge

 

 

 

 

This is just further proof that the banks (and that is all of them, not just B of A that is show in this example) will use every trick in the book to take advantage of people that don’t know the game.  We see these types of issues not just in short sales and foreclosures, but also in loan modifications and deed in lieu of foreclosures as well.  The bottom line is that the banks will take your money.  

Had our member not been coached in how to deal with this, they told us that they would have just accepted the first letter which would have put them on the hook for another $54,000.  When dealing with your house, don’t cut corners.  In this arena mistakes are expensive.  

www.FinancialRevivalGroup.com

Filed Under: Banks, Economy, Housing, Life After Foreclosure, My Credit, My Personal Finance, The Legal Side Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A “60 Minutes” story that you should see.

March 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

I have to admit that for many years I rationalized not getting too upset about the unemployed or the homeless.  I thought that anyone who really wanted to work, could.  That is not the case any longer and I believe that the worst of this is still ahead of us. 

I set my DVR to record off the east coast feed so I get 60 minutes at 4:00 on west coast.  I don’t know why but I really like to watch that first minute of the show where they show the snippits of the 3 stories they are covering this week.   I was puttering around the house yesterday afternoon and turned it on to see what they were talking about this week.  The first expose’ was about what  unemployment and foreclosures have done to kids.   I had to stop, sit down and watch the whole thing.

This story was about people like you and me, those who are willing to work and do whatever it takes to care for their families.   Some of these people went from owning a home to living in their car to living in a cheap motel.  Others were taken in by friends or neighbors and still others had to split up their families to survive.  This story could hit any of us and made me wonder what it is doing for the generations that are coming up.   Needless to say that it touched my heart and pissed me off. 

You should watch this.

Once you watch it, if you react like I have, we cannot allow the media and the government to get us caught up in the petty, childish games our politicians play.  We have to hold them accountable.  If politicians in your state are working on something petty, tell them to work on the economy.  Period! 

Government does not create jobs, but the they can get out of the way of business so that business can create jobs.  Tell your elected officials to figure out what they are going to bring in without raising any more money and spend only that.  This recovery will not be led by government but will be done in spite of it.

Filed Under: Banks, Economy, Housing, Life After Foreclosure, My Credit, My Personal Finance, Preparedness, The Legal Side Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

“They” Have It Backwards

March 3, 2011 By Leave a Comment

So, I saw an article yesterday on a CNBC blog entitled, US Housing Recovery Hurt by Unrest in the Middle East. You can read it here if you’d like: http://www.cnbc.com/id/41868388/

The mainstream media, the banks, and the politicians have been spending a lot of time lately assuring us that housing has bottomed out, or close to it.  Now it appears “they” will look to blame what’s going on in the Mideast for any reversal in this so called housing recovery.

The problem is, they have it backwards:  there has been no housing recovery, and the reason there’s so much unrest over yonder right now is because there is high unemployment and rising inflation, especially in food prices – symptoms of an ONGOING problem.   The worldwide recession/depression (whatever you want to call it), has not bottomed out in the areas that effect real people and their families – jobs,  housing, food and fuel.  About the only place that a recovery could be claimed is with the big banks and Wall Street.  It has not trickled down to middle class America, let alone to  many places in the rest of the world that are in worse shape than we are.  The current news is concentrated on the overthrowing of dictators.  While that is what’s happening, the protests began by people simply trying to put food on their tables!   When those at the top have too much, and those on the street have too little, this is what’s going to eventually happen (did you know that the protests that started in Algeria began with chants of “Bring us sugar!”).  In this “chicken or the egg” scenario, (1) the protests overseas are something that we’ve been predicting for almost a year now at the Financial Revival Group – it’s the logical next step in the economic evolution we’re living through, AND (2) housing was not recovering – only to be derailed now by the overseas unrest.  It’s all intertwined and ongoing.

By the way, the only reason we aren’t feeling the pressure from food inflation at the level of the rest of the world is because the U.S. dollar is still the world’s reserve currency.  We don’t expect that to last much longer.   Right now Americans spend on average about 13% of their income on food.  In comparison, Egyptians spend 40%.  Last year food prices in Egypt went up 20%.  If that happened here in the U.S, we’d move to about 15% of our income going to food.  If another 20% hike occurs in Eypyt this year, 48% of their income will be spent on food.   The U.S. dollar is weakening and we believe that at some point in the next few years it most likely won’t be the world’s reserve currency any longer.  If that happens, we won’t be immune to massive food inflation.  When Americans have to start spending 30% of their income on food, do you think we’ll see some protests on our own streets?  And what would THAT mean for housing?  Food for thought.

This post was written by Lynn Rogers    lrogers@joinfrgi.com

Filed Under: Banks, Economy, Housing, My Personal Finance, Preparedness Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

More propaganda to keep us paying on underwater mortgages.

March 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In another puff piece to try to beef up the sinking real estate market, Fannie Mae released a recent poll that said that only 19% of underwater homeowners would seriously consider strategically defaulting on their homes.  They said this figure is down from 25″% in 2010.   I notice the spin in these articles and we hope that you do too.

In 2010 it is estimated that over 30% (approx 300,000) foreclosures were strategic in nature.  That means that the homeowner made a financial decision to stop paying on their toxic mortgage.  In our experience in coaching underwater homeowners, we find that higher income people make the decision earlier on that their real estate is a loser and will continue to drag them down.  Once this judgment is made, they want to seperate themselves from it right away.  We are now seeing this strategy moving down the income chain.  As we move down the chain, we find that middle class working people will not consider giving their home back until they have exhausted most or all of thier other resources first.  Until they are about out of money, they won’t consider giving the property back. 

We believe that the polltakers can manipulate the results of a poll.  Is that what has happened here, we don’t know.  What we do know is that people will consider things they hadn’t before when the need arises.  The media has been trying to convince us that if we hold in just a few more months, we will get through this.  This is another example of that strategy on their part.

When it comes down to keeping an underwater home or walking away in order to get a fresh start, most everyone will walk away at some point.  When the reality hits “Working America”, the numbers will go up until the banks and the government deal with the real issue of negative equity.

For the housing wire article reporting on the Fannie Mae poll, please consider: Fewer distressed borrowers consider defaulting on mortgage debt

Filed Under: Banks, Economy, Housing, Life After Foreclosure, My Credit, My Personal Finance, The Legal Side Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,