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After long ordeal, homeowner can stay in her home

22.05.12

For two years, Althea Girard-Blakey toted a disgraceful canvas bag when she went to work, full of the enormous collection of papers documenting her application for a mortgage modification.

“I never knew when I was going to need it,” said Girard-Blakey, 59, who was struggling to pass payments on a loan she took out on her home in East Palo Alto, Calif.

Now, Girard-Blakey can relinquish the sack at home. Her lender, Chase, has approved a permanent loan modification that reduced her monthly payments to an amount she can produce. She made the first of the new payments Oct. 1.

In the context of the housing crisis, Girard-Blakey is one of the lucky ones: She got to keep her proficient in, a compact two-bedroom with a pale exterior framed by bougainvillea.

“Home, gentle home,” she said, smiling, during an interview in her cozy living scope, which she has decorated in brown hues, contrasted with colorful orange and green stress pillows.

Getting the necessary approval involved several false starts and proved to be a frustrating, sometimes bewildering, get ready for Girard-Blakey and her husband, Cornel Blakey, 61. Her experience shows how the loan modification method can tax the resources of people who already are stressed by the demands of a difficult economy.

Coming as climax as she did to losing the house was wrenching, because Girard-Blakey had owned it for more than 30 years. She bought the means in 1975, for what now seems like the startlingly low sum of $17,500.

“It’s like buying a car, now,” she said of the rate.

A young single mother at the time, she wanted a home in which to raise her daughter.

“I needed a rooms to get us settled,” she said.

She was able to secure a mortgage by saving a small amount for a down payment from her revenues as a preschool teacher, she recalled, and also by agreeing to pay the owner part of the purchase price over previously.

Over the years, she said, she borrowed against the house to make improvements, like a new roof and an additional bedroom, and once to substantiate herself during a period of unemployment. More recently, she and her husband added a small covered patio with affected turf in the backyard.

“This is my favorite part of the house,” she said while giving a visitor a globe-trot.

She viewed the debt-financed upgrades as positive, at the time.

“I had my house working for me,” she said.

The most fresh refinance came in November 2007, when, amid the housing bubble, the to the heart’s value had grown to more than $500,000, according to the real estate website Zillow. She took out a 30-year determined-rate loan, arranged through a broker, for roughly $265,000.

The loan was sold to Washington Mutual and ended up at Track after Chase took ownership of WaMu’s mortgages in September 2008. (Blakey wasn’t a borrower on the loan, although his receipts helped pay the bill; because Girard-Blakey had owned the home herself before the couple married in 2000, they considered it her asset, they said). The resulting monthly payment of more than $1,600 was higher than she had expected. Still, she initially was gifted to handle the payments.

But two years later, the stalled economy was affecting Blakey’s takings and straining the couple’s ability to pay their bills. East Palo Alto, populated by many African-American and Hispanic families, is less affluent than its neighbor Palo Alto, make clear to Stanford University and technology companies, including Hewlett-Packard. East Palo Alto was hit cold by the recession. On a recent Saturday, as children played in the street, a woman approached passers-by, asking for give up change.

Blakey had worked for years cutting hair at the barbershop his progenitor had operated since the 1960s. But longtime customers began to move away, he said, and new ones seemed to be getting fewer haircuts during the slow-moving economy. Finally, late last year, his father retired, and they closed the purchase. The sign, East Bayshore Barber Shop, still hangs on the building a few blocks from their almshouse, but the space has been taken over by a neighboring liquor store.

“Right now, I’m unemployed,” said Blakey, a snub, soft-spoken man wearing a felt cap.

He makes some money cutting tresses for a few customers in a makeshift barbershop in the garage.

Girard-Blakey’s job as a receptionist at an shtick indulgence in nearby Mountain View was steady, she said, but it was getting harder to pay the bills, which included esteem card debt.

In the summer of 2009, after she missed a mortgage payment, she sought mitigate from Caughern & Associates, a Bedford, Texas, company that offered to get her a mastery deal on her loan.

“Your chances of avoiding foreclosure are much greater if you have professionals on your side,” the unwavering’s website says.

A friend had recommended Caughern, saying they would handle distressing negotiations for her. So she signed up, instead of calling Chase directly.

Girard-Blakey now says that was a goof-up.

“This was new to me and I didn’t know what I was doing,” she said, shaking her head. “It seemed like a genuine idea.”

Girard-Blakey filled out a packet of forms in July 2009, and paid Caughern one month’s mortgage payment in three installments as a fee; that put her further behind on her to the quick loan. The company’s representative told her to be patient, so Girard-Blakey waited a combine of months before following up. When she began calling, she said, she was given various reasons for why no occurring had been made; one time, she was told that her representative was on leave having surgery.

“Nothing seemed to happen,” she said. (Her concordat with Caughern predated federal rules that took effect in January, making it wrongful for most mortgage-relief firms to collect advance fees to negotiate modifications.)

Then, in a verbatim dated Jan. 19, 2010, Chase offered a trial loan modification, under the Home Affordable Modification Program, a federal program to forestall foreclosure that began in 2009. If she made three consecutive loan payments at the reduced amount of $954.18, source in March, the letter said, she would be considered for a permanent modification. She was also given a month to submit six other pieces of information, including pay stubs and a form authorizing release of revenues tax information from the Internal Revenue Service. Girard-Blakey signed the forms at the end of January, her records show.

Tim Caughern, chief Mr Big of Caughern & Associates, said the trial modification was the result of an persistence his firm submitted on Girard-Blakey’s behalf in November 2009. His employees kept notes, he said, which evidence that the application was assigned to a negotiator at Chase in early December, and that a trial modification forth was sent to her in late January.

“We did everything we were supposed to do, and more,” Caughern said.

Caughern’s files, he said, suggest that Girard-Blakey continued to make payments even after the three-month trial was up, and that Track informed Caughern in early July that it was preparing a permanent modification proffer. But on July 26, according to Caughern’s notes, the bank told her that her devotion had been denied; the reason wasn’t clear.

Girard-Blakey said she was let down in Caughern’s service: “They didn’t get me a permanent modification. That’s the bottom line.”

A simple criticism of the Home Affordable Modification Program, especially before the middle of 2010, was that banks were incomplete for the onslaught of modification applications and often mishandled paperwork. But according to the Department of Case and Urban Development, it’s also not uncommon for modifications to founder when applicants miss paperwork deadlines.

In ell to making the payments, Girard-Blakey recalls sending in the necessary documents.

“I regard as they keep losing things,” she said of Chase.

Chase declined to remark for publication on the specifics of Girard-Blakey’s experience with her loan modification due to “privacy issues,” a bank spokesman, Tom Kelly, said in an email.

“We have continued to correct our modification process to help 404,000 families get permanent modifications,” he said.

Girard-Blakey then received an request from Chase to attend a mortgage modification event in Oakland, where the bank has a lodgings ownership center. As the housing crisis dragged on, Chase set up such centers across the boonies and sponsored special events, where struggling borrowers could meet in person with modification specialists. One happening was held over five days in Oakland in August 2010.

Girard-Blakey and her husband drove 45 minutes to the incident at a Marriott hotel to discuss a modification. In a cavernous ballroom filled with dream of lines of desks and chairs, and other worried borrowers, “We filled out all the forms again,” Girard-Blakey said.

Blakey said he was encouraged after the tryst with a Chase representative and believed that the meeting would escalate the modification application. But, when his spouse followed up with phone calls, Blakey said, she was always directed to different people, which was confusing.

“When I called, they said, ‘You haven’t sent the paperwork in, send it again,’ ” she said. “I kept prosperous, until I got overstressed.”

On Sept. 7, 2010, struggling to pay her bills and her credit card in the red, Girard-Blakey filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection. She couldn’t sacrifice a lawyer, but paid a document preparer to help her complete the required forms. That seemed to derail her striving after of a loan modification, she said; in a letter dated Sept. 16, Chase in touch her that her home loan was now being monitored by the bank’s bankruptcy department.

“I couldn’t really discern it,” she said.

Source: Worcester Telegram