I was lucky. My family got mortgage relief and we kept our home after I lost my job in 2009. Of course, we had to go through 8 months of applications and faxing our financial information and pleading and sucking up and ultimately filing bankruptcy to force Chase to add our outstanding payments to the backend of the mortgage (which reset back to 30 years), all to get a 2% mortgage which I could then afford when I was (luckily!) rehired for $10k less than what I had been making.
Ultimately Chase will not lose a fucking penny. But still, I know people who tried to get their mortgages renegotiated and have some forgiveness to desperately keep their homes and their bank lost their paperwork, more than once, starting all over again in the process while fearing that any day they could be foreclosed. I know people who were foreclosed. I know people who abandoned their homes, so underwater it didn't make sense to stay. So I feel fortunate that it worked out for me and my family. We kept our roof. We can afford our mortgage. We're underwater but not hopelessly. Lucky!
But apparently not as lucky as the people who don't need the luck at all.
I don't even know what to do with this information but I was so incensed when my sister-in-law told us that she got calls from her two banks (because she has two mortgages on two homes worth in the area of $1.8M together) asking if she'd like to redo her mortgages at lower rates.
That's right, the banks actually called and solicited my wealthy sister-in-law with a 4,000 square foot family home and a second million dollar "beach" house, who has not had the slightest problem paying her mortgage, in fact she pays extra every month to lower her principal! THEY CALLED HER and solicited her to get a lower rate.
She doesn't need it. And I can't help thinking that those two banks (Citi and BofA) did not call some family that needs that help, that is struggling. They called her, a wealthy person who does not.
Anybody else know of situations like this? Is this a thing? Is this a way for the banks to take the government money and pad their stats to say they're helping homeowers, but really they're helping their best, most well healed, customers who don't need the help, but are more likely to use the more high end wealth management services offered by the bank?
I'm outraged that we had to work so hard to get relief, some can't get it at all. But this well off family got it when they didn't even ask for it. Sick fucking shit.