I was watching Fox News last night and saw their free loan modification story. They made it sound so simple and enticing that I could immediately tell that none of the people involved in the production, filming, or writing of the piece had ever tried to do a loan modification without an attorney. Well I have tried, and I’m writing this to say that even if I had completed my modification it wouldn’t have been worth the wasted time and aggravation spent pursuing it on a day-to-day basis.

In fact, the one thing I was waiting for was a couple testimonials from people that had done it themselves. Needless to say, there were no testimonials. I know why, too. Even if they had found someone that had seen their modification through to the end I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t be happy about it. Maybe relieved, but not happy. In my own experience after months of hold time, snotty people at my bank, and hundreds of unreturned calls all I wanted was for it to be over and I didn’t care whether it happened or not. I just wanted it over. Any testimonials like that would not have fit in to the sunny disposition of the report so in the back of my mind I knew I wasn’t going to be hearing from any success stories.

I’ve got to say, the piece actually upset me a bit because what was being said on the show was nothing like the reality of trying to get a do-it-yourself one done. I actually went to a couple non-profits that provided counseling and information but came away from them feeling like maybe I had taught them more about flying solo than they had taught me. At any rate, I didn’t walk out of one of those meetings feeling like I was loaded for bear and ready to represent myself in an actual negotiation. Part of that was because my mortgage was really complex with negative amortization and a bunch of moving parts that determined my interest rate.

Dealing with my bank was a pretty horrendous experience too. The bank wasn’t very helpful at all during the times where I didn’t understand what they were talking about or had questions on things like what to do next. A pretty common response was “We are your bank but we are also re-negotiating a contract you signed. It is not our job to walk you through the process to help you negotiate with us.” That seems to be a pretty common mentality as I found out from chatting with many people with similar experiences.

I should mention this as well. My house was fast coming up on a foreclosure so time was becoming more and more precious. The most wearing part of the whole thing was knowing that there was nothing I could do, being reliant on people that really weren’t interested in what happened either way.

It wasn’t until an acquaintance mentioned that (Intentionally omitted by article’s author) Law Center had done his loan mod that I first heard of the company. He said his was done by an attorney and considering that my payments were a bunch of months late that should think about using one too. By that point I was more than happy to pay whoever wanted to take over the job for me. I handed everything over to them and they got the loan mod done.

It just seems that there was so much naivety in the Fox News thing that I wanted to share my experience. I hope it helps

 

Read the full article at: http://mandelman.ml-implode.com/2009/04/holder-and-geithner-lied-about-loan-modification-scams/