The best way to stop foreclosure is to save All of your financial documents.
Start today, do yourself a BIG favor–or keep on doing it–Save all of your financial documents. And I do mean all of them:
* If you want to stop foreclosure
* If you want the best loan modification
* If you want the biggest short sale discount
* If you are thinking about filing a lawsuit against your lender
* If you have IRS tax issues
* If you decide to file bankruptcy
* If you need credit counseling
* If you need government assistance
I can’t stress this point enough–save ALL of your financial documents.
When I say save all of your financial documents, I mean every last one of them!
Your original loan documents: title report, loan application(s) insurance documents, settlement statements, appraisal, and documents from your realtor. I mean copies of your monthly mortgage statements, check stubs, bank statements, homeowner association (HOA) payments, tax documents, and more. I mean all documents of repairs and remodeling and repair estimates–all that financial stuff. Starting to get the idea?
Now I want to talk to you about what you and I may think of as the garbage documents. You know, all those notices pertaining to being late and foreclosure. Save every last one of those late and foreclosure notices, folks, every last annoying one.
All of this has to do with good record keeping that we should all practice, but I dare say most of us don’t. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who has pay stubs dating back to the 1980’s…and he now has a dialing for dollars plan for those documents.
Why save those documents, especially those late notices, that once they start coming, they seem to get delivered to your mailbox, everyday? The reason is very simple. Your documents are a financial snap-shot of your life. You and your lender will never meet, but they WILL pass judgment on your life through your documents!
Even if they care about you, your documents will have to tell your story and sell your story. And the more good and factual material you have, the easier that will be.
Many of us would like to believe that there is some secret and magical way to stop foreclosure, if we only knew what it was. The fact is though, there isn’t. But if you believe in magic and miracles: start practicing good record keeping if you have not been doing so, and keep doing it, if you have, and your genie just may appear.
You should know too that you waste your money and the time of professionals without good documentation. In fact, smart professionals may refuse to serve you without it. More importantly, many lenders will deny your claim with poor or incomplete documentation.
Some big lenders are receiving between 3000-5000 telephone calls a week from people wanting to do workout programs–so we need to be clear on this point–a lender may not hesitate to deny your claim with poor or incomplete documentation.
And the way they do it is to simply put your incomplete package at the bottom of an increasingly larger growing stack. Then you run of time, your house is foreclosed on and you are forced to move.
This is one reason you may want to seriously consider hiring a professional to get you out of this mess. You will probably have only one chance to tell your story to your lender.
If you really want to save your home from foreclosure, you also need to understand that the professional working with you is under immense pressure to perform– but without the documents or poor documentation–we are dead in the water. We simply cannot provide you with the high quality service you deserve and we want to provide you with.
I am not saying give up if you don’t have good documentation. What I am saying is if you have not been doing good record keeping–for your own benefit, please start doing it from
now on.
And don’t think I don’t need to ‘practice what I preach’; I do. I have been opening my mail over the trash can, just like you. But I’m in the business of loss mitigation now–we help people save their homes–so I spend all my waking hours thinking about how to more effectively help and serve you, and I have recently discovered that this is the most simple and powerful way in which you can help yourself, help your specialist, and get what you need from your lender.
In summary, save all of your financial documents pertaining to your house–every last one of them. And save all your bank statements, monthly mortgage statements, taxes–that kind of stuff, too. Those documents are paper, like money is paper, too. So think of those documents as you would money–and you may not be far from the truth–if you find yourself, at this hour, trying to stop your foreclosure.
Tags: Foreclosure Help, Foreclosure Information, Foreclosure Process, stop foreclosure, stopping foreclosure, understanding foreclosure
