John Anastasio is a foreclosure defense attorney in Stuart, Florida. At the Law Offices Of John Anastasio, he specializes in helping consumers facing bankruptcy or foreclosure. Here, he explains how families can afford to hire an attorney while they’re going through a home foreclosure.
A foreclosure attorney can save homeowners money in so many ways. Even if, at the very least, all an attorney does to help a homeowner is negotiate a modification on his mortgage to get the interest rate reduced by 1%, 2% or even 3%-well, over the lifetime of that loan a reduced interest rate could end up saving the homeowner hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Even if you are not able to get your home loan modified to the point where you are saving money on interest, there are still plenty of ways an attorney can help you out. For instance, foreclosure attorneys commonly save homeowners thousands of dollars by negotiating their loans in a way that ensures the money problems or late payments will not show up on that homeowner’s credit report.
In addition, attorneys should be able to negotiate with a lender to get rid of the deficiency judgment that can sometimes show up on a homeowner’s credit report, too. Anything you can do to protect a homeowner’s credit score is going to save you money on future loans, since you will be able to get those loans with a much lower interest rate than you would be able to otherwise.
While there is any number of ways that a foreclosure attorney can help cyou, it really is the financial impact of those things that seems to stick out the most to people. That’s also what saves people in the long run. Even if, even after a modification, you still can’t afford your home loan, a lawyer can still help there.
Rather than abandoning your home at the first sign on trouble, a competent attorney can help you stay in your home for the months while that foreclosure lawsuit is going on. Meanwhile, you won’t be paying a mortgage during that time because there’s no need to pay until a final settlement is arrived at. So using that logic, the vast majority of homeowners will come out ahead—even after taking legal fees into account—right there, by staying in their homes for months without being forced to pay the mortgage.
I can confidently say that even if everything went wrong in your case, as long as you have a competent foreclosure attorney on your side, then things should still turn out okay. By helping you stay in your home longer, a foreclosure attorney—even in the worst of scenarios—will always save you more money than if you’d moved out of your home right away and started paying rent while their foreclosure case was ongoing.
Going back to credit reports, too, is another area where hiring a foreclosure attorney can save homeowners money. If you move out of your home due to foreclosure, that means you will have a foreclosure blemish mark on your credit report for years to come. So when you go to an apartment rental or leasing company, they will most likely run your credit report and see the foreclosure right on there.
There are times when people who have gone through foreclosures have trouble just renting a home because the landlords are hesitant to lease with a foreclosure on that record. Poor credit scores can also hurt job prospects for individuals working in some high-security industries like police work and national defense.
By hiring an attorney, though, your credit report is one of the things that can be negotiated. You may be able to get that foreclosure blemish taken off of your record if you have an attorney negotiating on your behalf. So that is another consideration.
Foreclosures can do a lot more than just take away your house. They can ruin your credit, hurt your chances for employment, and lessen your chances of finding a landlord willing to rent to you in the future. And, most importantly, it can ruin your chances of being able to borrow money to buy another home in the future. Even for those who are able to snag some type of home loan, the interest rates are usually higher—even after a matter of years have gone by—than for those without blemishes on their credit records.
All of these issues can add up to some significant financial burdens for people. That’s why hiring an attorney who can help negotiate a way to get this foreclosure off your record will end up saving you more money in the long run, even once legal fees are taken into consideration.
