This disaster started about eighteen months ago when we requested a Home Affordable Modification Plan through our mortgage company 'Central Mortgage Company' in Little Rock, AR. As appears now, from many destroyed former home owners, this Government sponsored program was sabotaged, as was ours, by the mortgage companies responsible for running it.
It took exactly one year for that process to reach a conclusion, by which time we were almost bankrupt having had to ensure full and timely mortgage payments, as indeed we had for the whole life of our mortgage with them.
Having refused the Modification Plan, we were then forced, by financial hardship, to stop paying the mortgage but immediately asked for a 'Dead in lieu of foreclosure' as we owed less than the value (not our value, theirs!) of our home.
Again, we were subjected to the same demeaning round of intimate personal disclosures and the same accusations that documents were missing and the same threats of cancellation unless a document is re-sent in 36 hours.
This lumbered on for a few weeks with constant calls from us to ensure all was well and going forward as we started to finalize our plans to re-locate on the time scale which we were advised to expect. Suddenly and without warning, we received a letter from a lawyer acting on behalf of Central Mortgage Company that the house was in foreclosure and would be sold in three weeks!
Needless to say we were in shock, but immediately phoned Central Mortgage to find out how this could have happened. We did not receive a straight forward reply and we were told that the only way they could stop the foreclosure lawyer was for us to send them $820 which was, apparently, the cost of filing a 'Short Sale process'.
We had no option but to agree this change of direction and requested the relevant documents by which we were being forced to pay this unexpected sum. A week passed and I was due to work out of State. As my wife is disabled, I was scheduled to take her to her daughters home, by luck in the same State I was going to work.
Still awaiting the vital documents and payment method instructions for the proposed Short Sale, we phoned them the day before our departure but could only leave a message as the relevant department failed to answer. To cover ourselves and knowing how threatening the company is, we arranged for my elderly Mother-in-law to collect our mail each day, especially for anything from Central mortgage Company. We had also call forwarded our home phone to my cell phone to catch any calls.
In total we were away for five and a half days and during that time had not received any mailed communication from them or any calls from them to my cell phone. However, on our return we learned that our efforts to call forward the phone had failed, and in the hand full of messages on our answer machine were two from them. We immeditely phoned them as it was only mid-afternoon in their time zone. We were told that someone would contact us from the relevant department the next day.
That evening my wife was taken ill and the next day, when the call came, she was unable to take the call which was directed to her. The young lady on the phone had an attitude which was immediately aggressive and made it absolutely clear that she did not believe anything I said and simply kept asking why didn't I just put a check in the mail, or why didn't I phone them whilst we were away.
She would not respond to my question of how I was supposed to just put a check in an envelop and send it to a large corporate office without any accompanying and relevant documents for a process which we had not even been officially notified of. Equally she would not accept that I should have called them whilst we were away. Her manner became combative and she went away almost shouting that she would talk to her supervisor but told me that our inactivity would almost certainly be punished by the collapse of the short sale procedure. Half an hour later, with a bounce in her voice, she rang to say the house would go in to foreclosure, end of call!
Quite clearly because of an accident in setting up my phone system, we had played straight into their hands to seize our home. Furthermore, now with my wife still in hospital with a continuation of the illness mentioned earlier, we were faced with a cheery Real Estate Agent who delivered a Foreclosure options notice telling me that we could expect a Sherriff to knock on the door with two weeks notice to empty our house or they would. Two attempts to contact the originator of this notice 'Freddie Mac' have both resulted in being shunted from one department to another and the assurance that someone will contact us.
Can anyone help us? Please tell us what to expect next as we need honesty from someone! We need time to complete our packing and dispose of the contents of our home. I advise anyone responding to this to remain anonymous as clearly Central Mortgage have already shown that they are ruthless and can readily destroy someone's life on the whim of an angry young women's report. Thank you for reading this and Good Luck.
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