Mortgage and Foreclosure Law Blog

Hi Again Dear Internet Readers! Today I'd like to start a multiple part series on Bankruptcy and How you can protect your Mortgage from Foreclosure.

Did you know you can avoid or delay foreclosure of your home by seeking bankruptcy protection? We love to help borrowers like you work out a deal with their lender to modify your mortgage to a payment you can afford. That is our main goal. However, there are people who are in such bad shape financially that the Bank just won't work with them or qualify them. For these people the bank proceeds with foreclosure. If you are facing foreclosure and cannot work out a deal or other alternative with the lender, bankruptcy may help.

The foreclosure process takes several months. You should always pay attention to letters from the bank and especially from their attorneys. You should have plenty of notice before you come home to a locked house with an eviction notice. During these several months you should be working with your bank or an attorney (like me ;-) ) in order to try options to "save your home." However, if you've already tried and failed with these measures, now is a good time to consider bankruptcy as a possibility for avoiding or stalling foreclosure. Here are some ways that filing for bankruptcy can help you:

The Automatic Stay: Delaying Foreclosure

As soon as you file for Bankruptcy the court issues an order commonly referred to as the "automatic stay". This is an order to all your creditors to immediately cease all collection activities against you. Make no mistake, your lender is a creditor of yours. In fact, this procedure is so powerful you can file for bankruptcy and get a sale date stopped in the same day! Please don't ever do this though. The automatic stay will typically last about three to four months.

Your lender can file a motion to lift the stay. If the lender obtains the bankruptcy court’s permission to proceed with the sale (by filing a “motion to lift the stay”), you may not get the full three to four months. But even then, the bankruptcy will typically postpone the sale by at least two months, or even more if the lender is slow in pursuing the motion to lift the automatic stay.

There is much more to this and I'll go over it in my next post....

Hello all,

Welcome to S.J. Mobley & Associates, LLC's blog! This is our first post so I'd like to introduce you to our Firm and primary areas of practice: mortgage law and foreclosure defense. Whether you intentionally found us while searching for foreclosure and mortgage information or you randomly clicked on this link out of boredom, we hope when you sign off you're glad you visited. I'll keep this post short and sweet and hopefully leave you wanting more...in which case, stop by in a few days because we'll be posting several times a week! Be assured, the posts will have more substance than this one does. But for now, I just want you to get a feel for who we are, what we do, and why we do it.

First, about our Firm. We are a group of consumer advocate attorneys who entered the legal profession with the goal to help people and improve society. Yes, I'm sure that's what all attorneys are supposed to say, but we live by these principles; each of our attorneys has a passion for volunteering, working with charities, and helping others (children, elderly, animals...you name it). The legal profession IS about the law, but even moreso it's about you, our client. We develop a personal relationship with each of our clients and put our all in every matter we touch. Nothing makes us happier than to hear a client say how comfortable they are with us. That's the way an attorney-client relationship should be. Enough about us...

So, what is mortgage law? Most of my friends who know I practice mortgage law think I deal with foreclosures day in and day out. Granted, in this economy we have our fair share of clients facing foreclosure, but mortgage law is much more than foreclosure defense. Mortgage law is a fairly complicated field because it deals with many areas of law: contracts, securities, landlord/tenant, collections, and most importantly federal and state consumer protection laws. We even occasionally run into mortgages that require us to look at criminal statutes or wills/trusts. Every day brings a new challenge and an opportunity to help people in need. We examine loan documents and conduct loan document audits, looking for federal and state violations to use in foreclosure defense or leverage in loan modifications. We negotiate with General Counsels for all the major lenders and work out solutions to let our clients stay in their homes. There's a lot of long days but it's all worth it when we see the look on our clients' faces when we tell them their house is no longer in foreclosure or that we just saved them hundreds of dollars on their mortgage payment.

That's just a bit about us. We would love for you to stop by the Firm or drop us an email so we can learn a bit about you. During the next few weeks I'm going to address the mortgage crisis: how we got here, why we aren't getting out, and when we can expect it to go away. We hope to see you back here often!

(Hmm....so much for short and sweet. Hey, I'm an attorney what do you expect?) Have a great day!