Part 6 (Excerpts)

Arizona is not a recourse state, so chances are you will not owe 1099 C Income

In Arizona, typically its not a recourse state, so if they are telling you that theyre going to garnish your wages because you didnt pay back your entire mortgage, there is a local bank ,that was threatening a very good colleague of ours about a small second mortgage that person had taken out. Threatening to send it to collections and garnish her wages. It simply isn’t going to happen.

But nevertheless, there is still the tax implications that apply, if you need to navigate through this maze. There is a lot to it, you need to protect yourself. You talked about bankruptcy is one of those exclusions, right? One of the problems with bankruptcy is people dont understand the bankruptcy laws. They are so tight now and your feet are really held to the fire from the federal government right now. It’s not like you just didn’t make your mortgage payment, so you go file bankruptcy, it’s just not realistic. Assuming bankruptcy is the last resort option for everybody. And we certainly want to avoid that, it would not be sound financial advice from any credible source that I can think of.

Let’s walk through a case scenario, somebody who is listening to this broadcast, their head is spinning right now, they’re thinking, oh my gosh. I should have known about the tax implications, a short sale versus loan modification. Let’s start at the top and work through a quick scenario. And then we’ll point out the specifics of what they should be considering right now.

For example, we talk about this all the time and to your credit Michael Barnes and to Velocity Financials credit, you were early in bringing out the loan modification for people who were in a distress situation regarding a mortgage, maintaining or keeping up with the mortgage payment. So you started going down the path where the refinance started to become a much more difficult option, with new constraints and all the other factors that led to part of this economic crisis, a loan modification has become a buzz topic today. Driving to the station today, driving down Camelback Road, I see a sign on the corner. You know, one of those stick in the ground, homemade jobs, that says don’t refi a Loan, modify, with some success rate and the phone number.

Hang on there I want you to say the success rate. The sign literally said, 99% success rate, and it goes back to the point that you made when they say that they can reduce your mortgage principal by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars, thats the absolute last resort for any lending institution. Thats not what this is about, so let’s start with that, then we will work on the tax ramifications of how that might work in the overall financial strategy.

I am familiar with the loan modification industry here in Arizona. There is no regulation, unfortunately. We at Velocity Financial work with a national network of attorneys, so if you’re the guy in El Centro California, or youre in Phoenix, or youre in Alaska it doesn’t matter where you’re at. We have someone who is an expert in that field in that state because the laws are different. But without the regulations some person with the ugly yellow sign on the side of the road says he has a 99% success rate, I don’t believe him it’s probably not using an attorney, who knows, dont buy into that garbage. Were going to tell you the truth, if we cant do a loan modification, we will tell you that we cant do it. And if a loan modification is not the best thing for you, you can find the some of these other options.

Duration : 0:5:19

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Duration : 0:6:49

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Expert: Richard Blake
Bio: Richard Blake is a licensed real estate agent that has closed more than 20 times the number of transactions per year than that of the average realtor for the last three years.
Filmmaker: Christopher Rokosz

Duration : 0:2:17

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Part 8 (Excerpt)

The pitfall of forcing your bank to rescind your loan for lending violations

I have a question on that, it is my understanding and I could be wrong, but they dont need a copy of the note, they need the original note.

You are correct. Your attorney of course will get a copy, because they are not going to send them the original.

Items that your attorney is going to ask for, and I forget the number, I think its 47 different items that the attorney could ask for. Heres one. I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and I just heard this term a couple months ago, it’s known as an alonge. What the heck is an alonge? Well apparently it’s one of the documents that has to be in the file.

While essentially the whole purpose of this is to catch the bank, the lender having messed up your loan somewhere along the way. Because if it is true that they violated some kind of Federal Law in the past when they gave you the loan or are in violation of the loan now, you can then take them to court. And you can sue them. You can have your loan rescinded. Which basically means it comes off your credit report. This loan never happened. As good as that sounds that may not be the best thing for the home owner.

I want to back up just a little tiny bit, you mentioned the alonge, there’s more to the alonge then it sounds like. The bank needs to have the original alonge, more importantly, the person who signed the alonge has to have been authorized by the licensed entity to sign that alonge. And I know for a fact that several people in this town, in this industry, were signing alonges because they needed it signed before the loans could fund. And they were not qualified to sign.

So let’s go back to this discovery process, when we find the lender has to rescind. And I will admit after being in the real estate and mortgage industry for over 20 years, I would have to say that almost 100% of the loans that are originated, if you look at them hard enough you could find something wrong with them. Something wrong, where there could be a reason for you to rescind this loan.

So let’s say you go to that point and push it and get the bank to rescind your loan. Here’s the problem. The loan is gone, it is no longer on your credit report, but let’s say you have a $200,000 loan you took out two years ago, in that time, you would’ve paid about $35,000 in interest. You get a credit for the 35,000, and let’s say you had attorney fees to fight the bank, let’s say $10,000, I don’t think it would be that high but we are just throwing out numbers here. And $5000 in closing costs when you bought the house, so that total is $50,000. You get a credit for $50,000 off of the $200,000 loan, which means you still owe $150,000 on the house. You have to pay the difference.

You have to pay back to the bank $150,000. So its nice that we filed suit and won but frankly in this market where are you going to get the $150,000 from? I think it would be very difficult to find a bank or lender right now that will lend you $150,000 for your house. Chances are you may be several months behind on your payment and although the lender cant show your payment history because the loan was rescinded more than likely the new bank is going to say they need a mortgage payment history. And you say you have been in the house for two years, but the loan got rescinded and they say you need payment history, you cant produce it.

In this marketplace today you are not going to get that loan done. And so the attorneys know that and that’s why once they get the lenders attention they say to the lender, we dont want to rescinded the loan, we dont want to incur a ton of attorney fees but we will if we need to, if you dont want to play ball with us. What we want to do is to work together to get the best possible loan modification for our clients. So we can keep them in their home, keep their family intact.

The reality of a it is, here what we are doing we are working with a national network of attorneys that care about you and you first.

You can go to http://mortgageanswerman.com where there’s going to be information about everything including, one thing I’ll add really quickly. I have something there that is known as a Decision Matrix. The Decision Matrix will walk you through step by step by step, every single step of the process regarding what you should do with your property, should you do a short sale, should you do loan modification, should you just let the bank foreclose? Is bankruptcy an okay idea for you, or not? What are the tax consequences?…

Duration : 0:6:54

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Part 3 (Excerpt)

Re-Default rates on Forbearance Agreements done with banks reaches 58%

In studio with us today on this fine New years eve is Dan Havey, the co founder of the modification hotline as well as the author of The Foreclosure Sharks a great white paper he put together. He is also the author of Real Estates Future and this segment we are talking about loan modifications and some specific information.

You also have a great story to tell about this to. Well unfortunately I have too many stories about people who have had to go through foreclosures, bankruptcies, loan modifications. The one story I want to talk about real quick is a friend of mine who unbeknownst to me went out and did a loan modification on her own and not to get into a whole bunch of technical details on it she ended up getting a pretty decent interest rate because they actually cut her mortgage payment in half and she was pretty happy about that.

She owed a little bit more than the house was worth, she wasnt terribly upside down, but by the time they got done with her she certainly was going to be because the modification, and actually I should not call it a modification, I should call it a forbearance agreement, what they did to her was to say, OK we will cut your interest rate in half, we will cut your monthly payment in half, but we will take all of that deferred interest and tack it onto the back end of the loan. So that by the time her interest rate went back to where it had been, it was going to adjust up over the next five years, so that within that five year time period she was actually going to owe $60,000 in back interest on top of the principal balance that she had before she went to go talk to her bank.

What kind of a deal is that? I didnt think it was a very good one and she ended up eventually not taking it and just recently let the house go back to the bank, because she just looked at it and said, Wait a second here, I am already $20,000 upside down, by the time Im done with you guys I will be $80,000 upside down and so great I get a cheaper payment for a while. She moved into a rental property that was even cheaper then what she would have had to pay to stay in the house and from what she tells me the house is nicer.

Some of the unfortunate scenarios that come up that we get to see. Unfortunately we talk to lots of people that have similar situations, trying to do these on their own and it is possible to do a loan modification on your own. We know that, the program is designed for you to do that. The problem is it generally does not work out.

The re-default rate on loan modifications done on your own is significantly higher than loan modifications facilitated by an attorney that is representing you, for a number of reasons. Number one you have to pay an attorney to represent you. The other is that I think you are going to get a better modification based its not just a negotiation between you and the loss mitigation department for the bank. We are talking about using a professional attorney who is a trained negotiator to negotiate on your behalf with another attorney. By the way, theyre not talking to the same loss mitigation people in India that you may be talking too.

Here are some numbers that just came out from John Dugan who is the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and they did a study of the loan modifications that have been done to date. In many cases these were forbearance agreements, not loan modifications. If an individual talks to his bank, generally speaking he will not get the same as result as what an attorney would do, so most of these are really forbearance agreements. And in that case, 36% had defaulted or were 30 days past due after 6 months and 58% were in default after 8 months. Again that is 58% in default after eight months and I saw some numbers the other day and unfortunately I didnt bring them in with me today, that according to some study of the very few modifications that have been done using an attorney, I say very few, but it is still thousands or tens of thousands, but few compared to what is getting done directly with the bank, the number is only like 5% of the ones done with an attorney have re-defaulted and again I dont have the numbers with me so I cant site the source…

Duration : 0:5:47

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Part 7 (Excerpt)

Attorney negotiated loan modification process Going thru the Legal Door

We have Dan Havey with us talking about loan modifications. This segment we want to talk about the specifics of the actual mechanics of, how does it actually work for the homeowner? Let me just start it off and if you would then explain the back end of how it works. Our job is to determine where you’re at now, be very specific about where you’re at with your mortgage now, what the rate is, what it’s done, those specifics. How much you make? We have to help the lender with one thing which is to establish a hardship which is crucial to this. You can’t be making half $1 million a year paying $5000 a month in a mortgage, they are not just going to lower your interest rate because you want it. There actually has to be some sort of change, financial change, hardship.

We determined that and then there is a significant amount of paperwork involved, Velocity Financial takes care of that for you. We fill out the paperwork along with your help, review all of the documentation, we then recommend be right loan modification, whether it be an interest rate reduction, or extending the term of your loan, waiving some of the balance that you owe which is very very rare. To make sure that once we’re done with this whole process you can sustain and live in that house and be happy forever.

So the process itself really is not that much different than what people went through when they got their loan in the first place. That is correct and it’s kind of funny, this has to be exactly the reverse. There is paperwork that we need to collect on your mortgages, we check the value of the property to see where you’re at and in most cases youre underwater with the value. We dont do an appraisal though, there is no credit analysis, we do review your finances, and these sorts of things but essentially it’s just like doing a loan. What we’re trying to determine is exactly what is sustainable for you.

So what we do at the modification hotline at Velocity Financial is to put together the entire package, just like we do for a loan package because we basically send this to a underwriter, theyre not known as an underwriter they’re known as a loan modification coordinator but at modification hotline we are the first set of eyes. We work with you directly, getting all the paperwork in, getting it put together because we know exactly what has to be in that file, how it has to be stacked, how it has to be presented, before it goes to the loan modification coordinator who works for the attorney.

Then once it is at the attorneys office with their modification coordinator, they take a look at it, they make sure that everything is in there, they make sure that it is a doable modification. This all happens before it is ever presented to an attorney.

There are a whole lot of steps and there is a lot of paperwork. The process like you said is very similar to a loan with the exception that there are no costs of the title company and all that other stuff. Those dont exist, we dont charge an upfront fee, and we do collect a retainer for the attorney. At some point during our process we make our recommendations and we turn it in. Then the attorney does their due diligence and thats where I really want you to explain what happens, what are these attorneys looking for?

Well this is where it completely goes off track, versus what a homeowner would do if they were doing their own modification, because they would do everything we just talked about, they would fill out the paperwork, get together tax returns, pay stubs, whatever the lender wanted and they would present all of it to the lender. Now they probably wouldn’t know exactly how to stack some of the paperwork, and how to calculate some of the things that we know how to calculate, but they would put all that they work together.

Where the difference comes in is once it gets to the attorney because the attorney ultimately wants to get you a loan modification but they can’t just call up the bank and say hey I want loan modification, because he is going to get the same result you did. So what he has to do is he has to go through the file, and he has to look for things like, I am going to use a bunch of acronyms here, he’s looking for things like TILA, RESPA, HOEPA, HUD violations, all these different guidelines that the lender was required to meet while giving you the loan.

Duration : 0:6:47

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Duration : 0:10:13

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Part 4 (Excerpt)

The pitfalls for trusting your bank one more time; Beware The Foreclosure Sharks

This whole loan modification thing reminds me a lot of the old Peanuts comics where every fall Lucy would get out with the football and she would set it down on the ground, and she would coerce Charlie Brown into coming along and kicking the football. Well of course as we all know Charlie never got to kick the ball, Lucy always pulled it out from underneath him and I kind of look at the mortgage industry, the servicing end of it in particular that way.

You have to think about it, in many cases the loan that you were put into was not a good loan in the first place. The person who gave you that loan knew it was not a good loan, the Wall Street banks that came up with these crazy ideas should have known better. Now admittedly they didnt otherwise they would not be out of business today, but they should have known that these were not good products.

Yet when you are faced with an issue regarding your house so many people go back to the bank, like Charlie Brown going back to Lucy and believing that THIS time Lucy is not going to pull the ball away. Well what is going to keep the bank from not pulling the ball away from you this time? Absolutely nothing.

I love that analogy; everyone remembers the Charlie Brown show and the comic books like you said. Another thing I want to point out too, going back just a little bit, you mentioned the lenders who put these home owners into these loans knew that they were not good loans. My thoughts after some of the mods that Ive seen, that you and I have seen doing the forensic audits, the home owner could have qualified for an FHA loan in those times, but it was so much easier for banks to put them into these sub prime loans because the documentation was easier, and it was just easier.

It is not just that they are easier; I know that your firm, Velocity Financial is FHA approved but what percentage of lenders today when, we probably have maybe 30% as many lenders as we had two years ago, what percentage today is FHA approved?

In the state of Arizona, of all the lending institution, less than 15% of all mortgage firm, banks, credit unions, less than 15% are licensed by the federal Housing Administration. Velocity Financial is proud to be one of those firms.

What I saw back in the peak of the market is of course everybody thought that real estate was going to go up for ever. Every body wanted to jump on board and buy 3,4,5,6 properties and I always tell the story that I knew we were in trouble, I knew we were hitting the top of the market long before I developed any of the models for Real Estates Future when I walked into our bank one day and I saw that they had a loan that was 100% financing for someone to buy an investment property and they didnt have to prove their income and they only needed a 620 FICO score.

Which considering everything now, I mean, to get a Fannie Mae loan today what kind of a FICO score do you need? If youre an investor? If youre an investor you need 720 and probably 20% down, at least 20% down and certainly it is not stated income anymore. No that doesnt exist, and significant cash reserves, the whole nine yards.

So these banks knew the kind of garbage that they were giving to people and yet we are supposed to trust them to get us good loan modifications. I think that in one of the later segments we are going to talk about the newest guidelines that just came out from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac regarding their new fancy-schmancy loan mod program and to be honest with you I dont think it really does much for people at all. We will talk about that in the next segment and to the people who are in the mortgage or real estate industry or who have been in the real estate or mortgage industry it is going to sound a little bit like a comic bit because this might as well be bath tissue, I dont even know why they came out with it.

We are going to talk about that along with a few other things, so real quick I know we havent had too much of a chance to talk about The Foreclosure Sharks, Dan but we will touch on that a little bit later. How do people get a copy of this white paper, The Foreclosure Sharks these are things that people need to be looking out for?

Yes, for The Foreclosure Sharks you can go to my website, http://mortgageanswerman.com. There will be a link there you just click on it and pick yourself up a copy and it will help if you are in a foreclosure situation if people come knocking on your door it will help you to at least know what to look out for. So mortgageanswerman.com for The Foreclosure Sharks…

Duration : 0:6:54

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Part 1 (Excerpt)

Why you should use a licensed attorney to negotiate your loan modification

Dan Havey thanks for taking the time to be with us tonight. Thank you Michael for having me and you are absolutely right 2008 for many people was a very tough year. Tough year for pretty much everybody that I know, how many banks have we lost in 2008? Hopefully the bleeding is gone; hopefully there arent too many more banks to fail. Quite a few banks have picked up some of the slack, but the reality of it is so many people have been faced with such hardships, we have solutions that we are maybe going to talk about today that they can look forward to, to make 2009 a great year.

Definitely that is what we are doing here with your organization at Velocity Financial and with the Modification Hotline and with many of the other things I am working on right now to help people out. When I first got into this business it was back in the late 80s, I moved here from Wisconsin after getting a degree in finance and I started selling repos for Fannie Mae, Countrywide, and the RTC. The Resolution Trust Corporation was responsible for getting rid of all the real estate owned by the over 1,800 S&Ls that failed. So I cut my teeth selling those reposed properties and got to know a lot about the laws and worked with a lot of attorneys and then in the mid 90s I moved into the mortgage business, and I immediately started there working with bankruptcy attorneys for the most part.

I was helping people get out of their bankruptcies, chapter 13 bankruptcies, to avoid bankruptcies, to stop foreclosures and I did that up until the fall of 2007 and at that point the market really changed for me as we know most of the subprime financing went away. Some people might look at me and say, my god you gave people subprime loans, well if you are in a chapter 13 bankruptcy and your payment to the trustee is $1,500 a month and I can get you out of bankruptcy and reduce your total monthly outlay by $1,200, your mortgage payment would go up a little bit, I think this is a really good use of a subprime loan. And I certainly never had any complaints from anyone when I got them out of bankruptcy or I stopped their foreclosure and saved their home.

So late last year I moved out of the mortgage business for a while but I never really left it because it is pretty much what I have done my entire adult life. Over 20-25 years I have been involved with real estate, mortgages and finance and I worked for a while for about 6 months last year on a model for an idea that we came up with of being able to accurately predict the top and bottom of all real estate markets and we perfected it for Arizona and most of California. It worked really well to the point that we could actually predict the bottom of the market 6 months in advance and then after the bottoms hit all across the country we kind of stopped working on it.

It is one of the things I am going to start working on again over the next few months. The title of the book is Real Estates Future and you can go to my website at http://realestatesfuture.com and get a copy of that if you want to, it is not available yet but just put in your information and I am going to give away a whole bunch of free copies of it.

The reason why I went through this entire story is because a few months ago Michael and Velocity Financial came to me and said he was going to do loan modifications and I had been approached by other people and I had seen a bunch of garbage on the internet and the thing that he said to me that sold me was, You know Dan, you have to understand, were using attorneys to negotiate these loan modifications.

And that is, I didnt mean to interrupt but that is the key; that is one of the reasons it took us so long to get in. Even though Velocity Financial was at the very beginning of this mad craze, heck you cant drive down the street without seeing a sign that says loan mod, kind of like back in 2006 in the heyday of the mortgage business where you couldnt drive down the street and see a sign that said, if your mortgage payment is more than 1% you are paying too much. Well now everybody is jumping into the loan modification game and it is dangerous.

And that is exactly it, it is every unemployed loan officer has gotten into the loan modification game and I guess I am guilty of the exact same thing. It is just after having 20 years experience of working with attorneys, I know what they are capable of doing, I know how they can go in and negotiate and the biggest thing is they are there to protect the home owner, to protect the consumer, to protect their client because they have a fiduciary responsibility to that client…

Duration : 0:6:29

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Part 8 (Excerpt)

B of A and Countrywide pay $150M fine for deceptive mortgage practices

I have here in my hand something from the office of the attorney general Terry Goddard, this is in regard to B of A and Countrywide. The state has alleged that prior to 2008 that Countrywide used unfair and deceptive tactics in its loan originating and servicing activity and placed borrowers in structurally unfair and unaffordable loans. These are not my words folks this is from the office of Terry Goddard the Attorney General of Arizona

They are talking about lowering peoples rates for the first year only. Look a good loan modification, you dont need a 12 month reprieve if you are 2, 3, or 4 months behind on your mortgage, it is going to take a little bit more than 12 months to get back on your feet.

I was going to say what an important point that you are making is because the announcement today by Paulson regarding the money not being used to buy these bad mortgages any longer, because of Barney Franks comments about how banks need to do more to help avoid foreclosures for mortgagees, what that really is amounting to for me as someone who studies the financial marketplace every single day as part of my profession, what that really amounts to is banks being able to set terms, and the short term reprieves, and the importance of what you are doing right now is critical for people to understand.

You are ahead of the curve, you go to the bank for these modification purposes, you take the proactive steps to make the terms suitable for you, my point is if the bank, by Terry Goddards letter, already has erted that they have made some type of poor judgment in the way that they treated their mortgagees or the people that they gave loans to, why would you then go back to that bank as the owner of that mortgage and try to negotiate with them on your own? Why then would you have the trust in them that it was going to work to your best possible out come? I find that to be absurd.

You are absolutely right; they have essentially admitted to it, they have a $150,000,000 settlement. I just want to throw one more thing out there, they have a $150,000,000 bill that they have to pay because, according to the Attorney General, deceptive business practices, a hundred and fifty million dollar check that they have to write, somebody is going to have to make that up.

And that is a good point, the point of this would be to take this action yourself prior to these banking institutions making the decisions on your behalf, theyve already done this, they have already made those decisions on your behalf, whether or not you knew exactly what type of loan program you were getting involved with when you took out the loan and all of that.

If you find yourself in a position of not being able to maintain your existing mortgage payment under the terms that you have been issued by the bank, modification is something you should consider, you make the terms going forward, you should use the professional expertise and the negotiating abilities of these attorneys that specialize in this area and make this work for you before the rules are placed at your feet yet again.

We talk about people doing this on there own, what I see being the problem is they are going to send you out a packet of paperwork, maybe email it to you or fax it. I have seen the paperwork that they send out, it is more than 36 pages of legalese, once it goes back it is going to sit in front of the loss mitigation department in a stack, Ive seen the stacks, literally thousands of cases sitting there waiting to be reviewed by someone who may very well not be qualified to make a real decision, in my opinion using the loss mitigation department at the bank you may be dealing with a clerk that was answering sales calls for someone else two months ago.

Versus going to the legal department and dealing with those individuals directly. There is no doubt you absolutely have to use professionals, you need to put your head on the pillow and turn this over to somebody who knows what they are doing, an expert negotiator, a paid attorney that does this for a living, put your head on your pillow and keep your family safe in your home…

Duration : 0:6:10

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