Frustration rises over mortgage relief program

John W. Schoen Senior producer • Profile • E-mail

After months of dead ends, rejections and runarounds from bank representatives, Dan Binder is still in loan modification limbo.

When Binder lost his job as a media researcher, he and his wife left their southern California home in July 2008 and relocated to North Carolina where he found a new job in the media business.

Since then, he’s never missed a payment on the three-bedroom home in Riverside County, Calif., he said, though it's lost about half its value since he bought it in 2005 for $418,000. When his wife lost her job after the move, he called his lender, Wells Fargo, to see if the bank could rewrite the loan to lower the monthly payments.

Since then, he said, he’s gotten conflicting responses from multiple bank representatives, one of whom said he was days away from a new loan that was subsequently rejected.

At one point, after assurances that he submitted all the appropriate paperwork, he was told a form was missing. When he provided it, he was told the remaining paperwork was more than 30 days old and he would have to update and resubmit each document. At another point, he said, he was told his file showed a sizable credit card debt he didn’t owe.

After his latest rejection he asked for an explanation.

“They said the notes from the investors (holding the mortgage) said, ‘You spend too much on food,’ ” he said.

If all this sounds familiar, it's because homeowners around the country have been jumping through similar hoops with the same fruitless results.

Nearly two years after the federal government’s first program to slow the relentless rise in the pace of home foreclosures, the latest attempt, known as Making Home Affordable, is turning out to be another painful disappointment for millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes.

Dozens of e-mails from msnbc.com readers report months of futile effort to modify their loans.  The list of problems includes misdirected calls, lost paperwork and conflicting advice from multiple representatives for the same lender.

A Wells Fargo spokeswoman said the company can't comment on individual customer's loans due to privacy restrictions. But she said the company is "working with all of its customers who experience hardships and need assistance with their mortgage payments up the point of actual foreclosure sale.”

“As the government guidelines have changed and as we have gotten more options to help people, there has been some communication confusion that we are working to absolutely get on top of and correct for customers,” she said.

HUD-approved housing counselors — the frontline professionals trying to help borrowers modify mortgages — have expressed frustrations with a variety of roadblocks, bureaucratic snafus and ongoing confusion about the program.

“Even if (the homeowner) gets hold of somebody, that person might not necessarily understand the complexity of (the program),” said Helene Raynaud, an executive at the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, an umbrella group that certifies and sets standards for housing counselors. “Counselors end up talking to different people as well, which makes it very difficult. Depending on who they talk to, and the level of seniority and the level of training and the different servicers (they deal with), they get completely different outcomes."

Downward spiral
Despite recent signs of a bottom in the housing market, the pace of foreclosures shows no signs of slowing.

More than 13 percent of homeowners with a mortgage are either behind on their payments or in foreclosure, the Mortgage Bankers Association said Thursday. As of June, more than 4 percent of all borrowers were in foreclosure and about 9 percent had missed at least one payment. A separate report found that more than 272,000 borrowers were at some stage of foreclosure in July, up 8 percent from June and 55 percent from July 2007, according to RealtyTrac, which maintains a national database of foreclosure filings.

The continuing rise in foreclosures delays any meaningful recovery in the U.S. economy, in part because housing typically leads the economy out of recession. Although there have been recent signs of life in home construction and housing sales, they have been weak and from extremely depressed levels. Every new foreclosed home increases the unsold inventory on the market and cuts into demand for new construction.

Foreclosed homes sold in distressed sales or auctions also push nearby home prices lower. Unless the pace of foreclosures can be slowed or stopped, millions more homeowners who are current on their loans will be forced "under water" — owing more than their house is worth. Those homeowners become new candidates for default. One recent research report from Deutsche Bank estimates that roughly half of all U.S. homeowners will be under water by 2011.

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