John Anastasio, an attorney at the Law Offices Of John Anastasio in Stuart, Florida, explains the reasons why hiring an attorney can help in your foreclosure case.
The individual outcome of a foreclosure case—when you put up a defense—is ultimately based upon each person’s goals. If you are looking to get out from underneath a house you can’t afford, without having to leave your home immediately, then there is certainly a benefit to hiring an attorney and building your defense in that type of case.
Many people tend to think that if they leave their home after receiving a foreclosure notice, that the problems will end there. But that, unfortunately, isn’t the case. The problems don’t end once you’ve moved out of your home. Not only will the lender end up taking your home, but many banks will also go after you for the difference between the amount you owed on the mortgage and how much the home sold for—in addition to the mortgage interest, late charges, attorneys fees, and so forth. So they will go after homeowners for the full amount owed minus whatever the house sold for on the auction block, and that right there is called a deficiency judgment.
Hiring an experienced lawyer can save you money in that case, because I can help clients stay in their homes for longer and owe less money in the long run. Whereas other lawyers will try to delay or stall a foreclosure case indefinitely, that’s not what I do. I build my clients’ cases and help them get their lives back by negotiating deals with the lenders in many cases.
Foreclosure is hard enough, but what can happen after foreclosure is oftentimes even worse. When a person has a foreclosure on his or her credit, he oftentimes can’t get another mortgage and won’t be able to buy another house for many years. So the only option, in cases like that, would be to file for bankruptcy. In the absence of filing for bankruptcy, having a foreclosure on your record could ruin your chances of getting another loan or mortgage and moving into another home.
Not only that, but your credit can impact other areas of your life. Employment prospects can be diminished for people who have foreclosures on their record, especially for those who work in the nuclear power industry or handle certain kinds of police work. If you are hoping to get a job in the defense community, for example, a foreclosure can impact your security clearances and cause employers to have concerns. If you have a huge debt on your shoulders, then the worry is that you could be subjected to outside pressures to do crazy things for additional funds. So that’s another one of the reasons why having a foreclosure on your credit record can really impact you in ways that many people don’t even initially think of.
Like I said, one difference between hiring me as an attorney and going with some other foreclosure lawyers is that I will work to negotiate a favorable settlement on behalf of my clients. While there is no guarantee in this, part of any settlement I negotiate could have to do with repairing my client’s credit. Mostly, what we will do is tell the lender that we’ll try and work this financial problem out. But in return we want the initial loan deleted from the system as if it never existed.
If you can get the lender or mortgage company to do this and delete the loan rather than deeming it a foreclosure—and you have gotten rid of the home, put aside some money, and perhaps straightened out your credit in all other areas—then this is a home run for clients. You are in a financial position where, assuming your credit isn’t shot otherwise or you’ve been trying to repair it in the meantime, you could still buy another home while the market is down and interest rates are still low. And you’ll still be in a better situation than where you started.
This is just a home run scenario, of course, but you have got to have a goal somewhere. I look at these foreclosure situations in many cases not as a disaster but as an opportunity for my clients. Most other lawyers agree to defend someone and say they’ll try to delay the case as long as possible. But that just isn’t what I do.
Trying to get a whole new financial plan for my clients is what I do. And I think I’m different than any other lawyer out there right now because of this. I’m taking a global approach to straightening the finances of my clients throughout the foreclosure process, and that’s how hiring an attorney like myself can help you avoid disaster—and actually come out ahead—in a foreclosure case.
