A Mortgage Isn't a Life Sentence

This is the segment I did with someone who walked away from his mortgage, his home, and his $120,000 down payment after wrestling with the bank for months. It's powerful, and it's hopeful. "It feels great," Burton said without hesitation. "I'm starting again. I've still got my talent; I've got my intelligence. I've got my health. At least I'm free of the enormous amount of stress that I had and the frustration of doing the best I could and it wasn't good enough. It wasn't working. Ultimately, I made a decision that my physical and mental health was more valuable than this house and my investment in it." At this point in the housing crisis, if you're having problems, it's clear that no authority is coming to help you. Not bank regulators. Not Obama. Not the Republicans or Democrats in Congress. And especially not your bank. But the good news is there is hope. You have options. Ryan Grim, Lucia Graves, and Arthur Delaney interviewed 50 people thinking of walking away from their mortgages, and then interviewed them a year later. They wrote up what they found. For those who were able to walk away, it was a profoundly liberating experience. The hatred of the banks was searing, not because they owed money, but because the banks were often entirely unresponsive and dishonest. A mortgage isn't a life sentence, it's a contract. Your house is the collateral for that contract, and if you stop paying the bank gets the house. That's in the contract. There's nothing immoral about not paying your mortgage, you need to see your relationship with your bank as purely contractual. The bank certainly sees you as a number. If you're thinking of walking away from your home, you need to consider a couple of things. First, hire a lawyer who can give you good advice and negotiate on your behalf. There are legal traps to be aware of. For instance, depending on the state, if you stop paying your mortgage, your bank might be able to sue you for additional assets. This isn't common, but you should check out this list of states. Some are non-recourse, which means banks can take your house and stop there, while some are recourse, which means that banks can take your house, and sue you for assets for the difference between the loan amount and what the house fetches at auction. There's also your credit score. While it's true that your credit score will get hit for walking away, the formula for calculating it is secret. Some people report getting credit card solicitations within months of walking away.

 Read the full Article here A Mortgage Isn't a Life Sentence

Here is a related article from my blog several months ago.  It is nice to see someone else having the common sense to say the same thing. 

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Glossing over fraud, forgery and perjury. Court system taking sides?

How to gloss over perjury, forgery and fraud......and expect to come out unjustly enriched. 
excerpt from an article at published at 4closurefraud.org

"1. Blame “the borrowers.


2. Hire an excellent PR team.

3. Hire excellent criminal defense attorneys.

4. Research countries that do not have extradition agreements with the United States.

5. Minimize the misdeeds by using light words such as “improprieties” and “irregularities”.

6. Downplay the implications, consequences, and repercussions at every opportunity.

7. Prepare a repertoire of arrogant, indignant expressions and vocal tones to be liberally feigned at the merest hint of holding corporate financiers accountable for known and admitted crimes.

8. Acknowledge the fact that America’s top financial institutions & their corporate officers need not comply with rules, regulations, laws, or quaint, arcane state & federal Constitutional rights of or belonging to the serfs the American people.

9. Remind the Administration, lawmakers, judiciary, regulatory agencies, and law enforcement of #8.

10. Expect some inconsequential fines as the cost of doing business.

11. Anticipate record bonuses in a few weeks.

12. Maintain the status quo of the financial industry where the ethical operative upon which a highly successful and lucrative business model is predicated upon massive, dangerous, abusive, predatory, and criminal fraud.

13. Plan on longevity.
Just wait until word gets out that the fraudulent documents are not limited to affidavits of indebtedness! Interesting responses indeed to be expected in response to the revelations about verifications, assignments of mortgage, satisfactions of mortgage, robosigned nonsensical documents that do not match the MERS data, fraudulently backdated documents, free-for all with the stamps of notaries, affidavits that previous satisfactions of mortgage were erroneous (here and here), refinances that never paid off the original mortgage, photo-shop endorsements of promissory notes, fabricating documents that never existed and swearing to the accuracy of facts not known on practically every document touched by the mortgage securitization ghouls and their corrupt law firms.
How they gonna “redo” all that?
Maybe. Just maybe. Maybe millions of families across America would like a similar opportunity; one where they jump at the chance to escape accountability and repercussions by a simple “redo” of their participation in an abusive, predatory financial transaction that left them completely tapped out and facing homelessness?"


We certainly should not have the expectation of fairness in everything but it would be nice of the court system would protect the individual as well as it does the too big to fail banks.  The case is still open as to whether or not the courts will hold the lenders and lender servicers accountable for their fraudulent activity.  I wish I could say otherwise but it sure looks like the courts will eventually take sides with the banks.  The banks have been given enough money and enough power to bend accounting rules and deceitfully claim solvency as they illegally take homes from Americans.  We have no idea how many lost their home even though the bank had no legal right to take it from them. 
I have mentioned before that the banks likely turned loans in to unsecured notes by failing to abide by the Pooling Service Agreements for the securitization trusts.  Allowing the banks to move forward with any default notices or foreclosures is ridiculous.  There needs to be a freeze on everything until they sort out who owns what mortgages and whether or not they are secured.  The courts are allowing people to be run over by the larger institutions that have not been able to prove most of their claims as to having rights to property.