Borrowers are entitled to Temporary Relief from Federal Student Loan Payments and Collections – Coronavirus Stimulus Bill 2020

Section 3513 of the Coronavirus Stimulus Bill suspends student loan payments through September 30, 2020. Monthly interest will not accrue while the suspension is in effect. During the suspension, the student loan borrower’s credit report will not reflect missed payments.

Section 3513 suspends all collection actions involving a student loan including the suspension of wage garnishments, reductions of tax refunds or any other reduction of a federal benefit payment.

Latest Student Loan, Mortgage Loan and Foreclosure News - 9-26-2018

The Growing Culture Of Student Loan Defaulters Fighting The System With Strategic Default

Strategic default is simple: it's the intentional act of going into default on your student loans. However, there's still a misnomer here Joshua Cohen, a student loan debt attorney, sums it up best: "First, when we say strategic, that almost sounds like it’s purposeful. I think that’s incorrect. Many of these strategic defaulters have no choice but to default. They simply cannot afford the payment. When I say strategic defaulters, it means there is a plan to deal with the debt, not that they actually default when they could afford the payment. It’s not the default that strategic, it’s the what to do after it defaults that is." And it's that idea - what you do after the default that is strategic - that is powerful for borrowers. Read more at Forbes.

NYC is suing lenders over “Zombie Homes”

The city is taking on lenders of “zombie homes” — decrepit, vacant, distressed houses with unpaid mortgages, which have forced the city to conduct emergency repairs and maintenance. The city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development is seeking more than $1 million from CitiMortgage, Wells Fargo and other home lenders who have allegedly failed to maintain houses on the brink of foreclosure, the department announced. Read more at The Real Deal.

Consumers can now freeze their credit for free 

Each state has different rules around credit freezes, but in some states, it costs $10 to place a credit freeze on their account and another $10 if they want to lift the freeze. Not anymore though. Going forward, consumers can freeze their credit for free at Equifax, TransUnion, and Experian. A credit freeze prevents lenders or other credit providers from opening a new account without a consumer unfreezing their credit. Read more at Housing Wire. 

NYC Foreclosures Flatline in Q2 2018

In the second quarter of 2018, New York City foreclosures stagnated both year-over year and quarter-over-quarter. 881 homes were scheduled for auction for the first time, compared to 911 in Q2 2017...Citywide, the number of foreclosures is stable but high. Read more at PropertyShark.Com.  

Latest Student Loan News - 10-2-2017

Half all Millennials would Give up Their Right to Vote to have Their Student Loans Forgiven
It's not news that millennials are in debt. 42.3 million Americans owe a total of $1.33 trillion in federal student loans, according to the U.S. Department of Education. 20-somethings pay on average $351 a month, reports the Federal Reserve. The median monthly payment for that age range is $203. Now a survey from Credible, conducted through Pollfish, offers insight into just what millennials would be willing to do to be free of those loans. The most popular answer the 500 respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 chose for what they would be desperate enough to sacrifice: suffrage.Half of them said they would give up the ability to vote in the next two presidential elections. Read more at CNBC

From studentloanhero.com - The Complete List of Student Loan Forgiveness Programs and Options
Have you ever wished your student loans would just go away? While there’s no way to snap your fingers and have your student loan debt magically disappear, there are ways to get it forgiven. There are various student loan forgiveness programs out there for people who work in public service, education, and other areas. Some states are even helping debt-saddled graduates pay off their loans. Whether you’re struggling with six-figure debt or looking for “free money” to pay off your student debt, student loan forgiveness could save the day.

Latest Student Loan News - 7-18-2017

As Paperwork Goes Missing, Private Student Loan Debts May Be Wiped Away
Tens of thousands of people who took out private loans to pay for college but have not been able to keep up payments may get their debts wiped away because critical paperwork is missing.

The troubled loans, which total at least $5 billion, are at the center of a protracted legal dispute between the student borrowers and a group of creditors who have aggressively pursued them in court after they fell behind on payments.

Judges have already dismissed dozens of lawsuits against former students, essentially wiping out their debt, because documents proving who owns the loans are missing. A review of court records by The New York Times shows that many other collection cases are deeply flawed, with incomplete ownership records and mass-produced documentation... Read More at NY Times

Your Student Loans Might Be Forgiven Thanks to Some Lost Paperwork
Ah, student loans. The first of many bad decisions you made in college. At the time, they seemed like a great idea. After all, how could you be expected to get a job in the modern world without a four-year degree in English literature? It's not like they're going to let you make money in this world if you don't have an informed opinion on Shakespeare's comedies! But now that years have passed and you've realized that you could probably have the exact same career that you have right now if you just started interning after college while picking up bartender shifts on the side, the $60,000 you owe is beginning to look a little ridiculous. Throw in all the recent news stories about Betsy DeVos and the Trump administration's plans for the Department of Education, and the picture begins to look a little terrifying. Well, have I got some potentially good news for you! According to a new report from The New York Times, a combination of lost paperwork and the shady way in which private student-loan debt is handled has conspired to potentially wipe away your loan debt... Read More at GQ

Latest New York Foreclosure News - 5-9-2017

Repeat foreclosures in New York City have reached an all-time high

New York homeowners are in default mode — again. The city leads the nation in repeat foreclosure filings and the winner in all this is the residential mortgage servicing industry, which collects monthly payments and cashes in on fees for every homeowner’s misfortune. The number of repeat foreclosure filings in New York City far outstrips that of other major cities like Los Angeles, while New York state is No. 1 for repeat foreclosures, outpacing every other state and the US as a whole. In a report prepared exclusively for The Post, Attom Data Solutions found that in New York City last year, roughly 4,900 — or more than half of all new foreclosures filed — were repeats, up from just 5 percent in 2008. Read More at NY Post

QUIET TITLE NY - Mortgage Eliminated and Removed from Property Due to Acceleration of Mortgage Loan and Statute of Limitations. 

In a pair of decisions in which lenders lost the right to foreclose a New York Supreme Court judge and a New York Appellate Court each decided that the 6 year statute of limitations prevented the lender from collecting the mortgage loan. In Augustine Diji v. Deutsche Bank, a judge for the New York State Supreme Court, Kings County, wrote a decision eliminating the plaintiff, Diji's, mortgage. The judge ruled that Diji's mortgage loan was accelerated in 2007 and after 2 failed foreclosure cases Deutsche Bank's time ran out to file a foreclosure. Based upon Deutsche Bank's failure to file in time the mortgage was removed from the property. In a highly watched case, the Appellate Court in Beneficial Homeowner Service Corp. v. Tovar, ruled that the lender's foreclosure case must be dismissed because the statute of limitations had passed. The Appellate justices said that even if a homeowner is not served with foreclosure papers a lender's acceleration of a mortgage loan still remains valid.          

CoreLogic: Foreclosures sink to lowest level since 2007: Serious delinquency rate remains relatively high on East Coast
Serious delinquencies and foreclosures continue to drop, hitting near decade lows in February, according to the Loan Performance Insights Report from CoreLogic, a global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider. Mortgages delinquent by 30 days or more, including those in foreclosures, made up 5% of the market share in February, a decrease of 0.5 percentage points from the year before, according to the report. “Serious delinquency and foreclosure rates continue to drift lower, and are at their lowest levels since the fourth quarter of 2007,” CoreLogic chief economist Frank Nothaft said. “Moreover, the past-due share dropped to 5%, the lowest since September 2007.” Read More at Housingwire.

Brooklyn court moves to dismiss thousands of foreclosure cases: Lawyers say homeowners will be negatively affected by the action
The court said it planned to dismiss all cases filed before Jan. 1, 2016 that have seen no court activity after Sept. 30, 2016. It quietly published a notice of the administrative dismissal in the New York Law Journal on Thursday, April 27, giving parties until Monday, May 1 to contact the court to keep their cases alive. Foreclosure defense lawyers say that while it might seem like a good thing for foreclosure cases to be dismissed, it would in fact be extremely negative for homeowners battling lenders. For one, all of the motions a homeowner had filed taking issue with the lenders' claims would be lost. In addition, many of the delays could be due to the lenders dragging their feet, lawyers say, but dismissing the case without fault to either side would allow the lenders to relaunch their case with a blank slate. Read more at DNAInfo.

Latest Foreclosure News 11-1-2016

Freddie Mac Plans to Make Crisis-Era Foreclosure Prevention Permanent 

Freddie Mac is working with it's regulator the Federal Housing Authority to "create permanent foreclosure-avoidance programs as" HAMP is set to expire this year, December 31, 2016 and HARP is set to expire on September 30, 2017. Read more at HousingWire.com.

Boomerang Borrowers are Here!!

Housing Wire reports on the rise of the "Boomerang Borrower". Essentially, a "Boomerang Borrower" is a borrower who has established "responsible credit behavior" and "improved" credit scores. These borrowers, once hit by the 2008 and 2009 financial crisis (foreclosure, short sales, etc.), are now experiencing the removal of negative credit data from their credit report due to the seven year limit for negative information. Thus the opportunities for this "group to qualify for mortgage loans" are growing. Read more here at HousingWire.com.

New York Foreclosure Alert - 9-29-2016

New York recently adopted sweeping legislation to reform the foreclosure process. New York's Governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, signed legislation into law that:

1. Enhances the effectiveness of settlement conferences for homeowners by prescribing the rights and duties of the parties and clarifying how the process should work to best protect homeowners contesting foreclosures and prevent them from losing their homes.

2. Establishes a Consumer Bill of Rights informing property owners of their rights in foreclosure proceeds to prevent people from losing their homes.

3. Creates the Community Restoration Fund (CRF), a new tool for the State of New York Mortgage Agency (SONYMA) to assist homeowners facing mortgage foreclosure. CRF will purchase defaulted mortgage notes from other lenders and offer favorable mortgage modifications to keep homeowners in their residences. CRF will have the ability to forgive a portion of a loan’s principal and make the loan affordable in areas where home values have declined or where a homeowner has experienced a decrease in income.

4. Imposes a pre-foreclosure duty on the banks and servicers to maintain vacant and abandoned properties. The bank has a duty to maintain and secure a residential real property where there is a reasonable basis to believe it is vacant and abandoned, and faces civil penalties up to $500 per violation, per property, per day for failing to do so.

5. Expedites foreclosures for vacant and abandoned properties.

6. Requires a lender to auction a property within 90 days of obtaining a foreclosure judgment. In addition, a foreclosing party would be required to take action to ensure that the property is reoccupied within 180 days of taking title.

7. Establishes an electronic registry of vacant and abandoned properties.

8. Provides a mechanism to “expeditiously complete a foreclosure” and work with land banks, Community Development Financial Institutions, and other local nonprofits to rehabilitate properties and resell them to new buyers.

Latest Foreclosure News 5-3-2016

Ocwen responds to National Mortgage Settlement foreclosure holds 4-28-2016
Early Thursday morning, Joseph Smith, the monitor of the National Mortgage Settlement, announced that Ocwen Financial was not in compliance with one of the performance metrics of the National Mortgage Settlement and prohibited the nonbank from taking foreclosure actions on more than 17,000 loans. According to Smith’s office, Ocwen “was delayed” in implementing its Corrective Action Plan for the failure of Metric 31, which relates to the mortgage servicer sending a loan denial motivation to a borrower, because of “difficulties in resolving the technical issues that led to the original fail.” Smith’s office said that because of those issues Ocwen must place 17,496 loans that "could have been affected" by this issue on foreclosure hold... Read More at the Housing Wire

Ocwen foreclosures frozen after National Mortgage Settlement compliance failure 4-28-2016
Less than one day after posting a massive loss for the first quarter of 2016, the nonbank has run afoul of the terms of the National Mortgage Settlement and is now forbidden from taking foreclosure actions on more than 17,000 loans. According to Joseph Smith, the monitor of the National Mortgage Settlement, Ocwen is not yet back in compliance with one of the performance metrics of the National Mortgage Settlement that it failed in the second half of 2014. Smith’s office announced in October that Ocwen failed metric 31, which tests whether the mortgage servicer, Ocwen in this case, sent a loan modification denial notification to a borrower that included the reason for the denial, the factual information considered by the servicer in making its decision and a timeframe by which the borrower can provide evidence that the decision was made in error... Read More at the Housing Wire

Greece Economic Crisis : Pros and Cons of Debt Forgiveness

A recent Bloomberg article provided, in my opinion, the most succinct analysis of the pros and cons of debt forgiveness.

Bloomberg reported on the economic plight of Greece. Greece basically "strategically defaulted" on its debt due to it's inability to pay its creditors. Greece fell victim to Europe's debt crisis when Wall Street imploded in 2008. All of the risky investments finally caught up to Greece like so many other countries, companies, and individuals. A group of European countries tried to help Greece (to keep it from destroying the European Union) by providing several bailouts to Greece totalling, at least, $264 billion. At the same time, the International Monetary Fund (as a condition to lending money) has been pushing for the forgiveness of Greece's debts by its creditors.

The article briefly outlined the benefits of debt forgiveness as follows:

Strategic Default Alert

2 factors driving the trend toward strategic defaults for student loans 1-13-2016
The term “strategic default” was added to the financial glossary during the housing crisis of 2007-08. It meant homeowners made deliberate decisions not to keep making mortgage payments because they believed foreclosure would ultimately cost less than continued ownership of underwater homes. Now, the trend is gaining ground among recent college graduates with student loans--but it is impacting certain types of students and schools far more than others. Nationally, about 14 percent of all federal student loans default within three years after students leave college. A default generally is declared when a student fails to make timely payments for 270 days, and the consequences are severe including wage garnishment, loss of Social Security benefits, and confiscation of federal tax refunds. Read More at BenefitsPro

Short sale tax break on verge of being extended until 2017 12-18-2015
Homeowners who had short sales in 2015 are about to get big break on their taxes, thanks for a massive federal spending bill that’s about to be signed into law by President Obama. The Mortgage Debt Forgiveness Act was set to expire at the end of 2015, and without an extension, any mortgage forgiveness achieved in a short sale would have been counted as income for homeowners whom banks allowed to sell their homes for less than the amount of their mortgage during 2015. But an extension to the Mortgage Debt Forgiveness Act was included in the fiscal 2016 federal appropriations and tax relief bill, which passed both the House of Representatives and the Senate on Friday. Read More at the Housing Wire

Student Debt Monitor

The Student Debt Monitor page is our newest project dedicated to providing news and information relevant to this rising issue which has been plaguing many young Americans. Aside from the links leading to general articles discussing this topic matter, we will soon be updating with original content which dives into the major concerns, roots of the problem, and the potential solutions surrounding the student debt crisis.

JS Can't Pay A Student Loan & Sallie Mae Is Taking Her Tax Refund

GOT QUESTIONS?

I went to school back in 2005. I attended Lehigh Valley College, during second semester found out that they were going to forcefully shut down or be sold due to money scams with Sallie Mae to get more money from students and the courses not being creditable. I have my student loan through Sallie Mae. At the end of 2nd semester i stopped attending. I have been unemployeed since the end of 2008 and have three children under the age of three. I have not been able to make my loan payments and Sallie Mae has already took my total tax return from last year. Was just wondering if there is anything I can do cause I really can't afford to pay my loans. I can't even get a job cause i don't have a car and where I live we need a car. I was planning to buy one with my tax return so I could go back to work but Sallie Mae had taken the whole return. I don't know if there is anything I can do, and if so how I go about doing it. Thank you and I appreciate any info you have. Thank you JS

GET ANSWER….

Dear JS:

Thank you for writing to me.

Unfortunately you are in a difficult situation. Sallie Mae has the right to collect on the loan using every legally available means. You should consult with an attorney or a non-profit legal services organization regarding your allegations of fraud involving Lehigh Valley College and Sallie Mae.
These are some of your options:

• Contact Sallie Mae and enter into a forbearance or reduced payment agreement. You can request that they stop all collection efforts until you find a suitable job. Once you do find a job then you can ask for reduced payments. You can ask Sallie Mae not to take any future tax refunds. Of course, if there is an agreement it must be in writing.

Please try this link to learn about different options for repayment: http://studentaid.ed.gov/PORTALSWebApp/students/english/difficulty.jsp

• Normally bankruptcy does not discharge a student loan, however there is an exception to discharging student loans. A student loan can be discharged if there is a provable undue hardship. Undue hardship is defined as the permanent physical inability to work. You must prove in bankruptcy court that:

o You’re physically unable to work
o You’re likely to be unable to work for most of the loan term
o You’ve made a good faith effort to repay the debt
o Paying it would prevent you, your spouse, and your dependents from maintaining a “minimal” standard of living.

You need to consult with a qualified bankruptcy attorney to see if you can qualify.

• There are also loan forgiveness programs. The Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program was created to encourage individuals to enter and continue to work full-time in public service jobs. Under this program, you may qualify for forgiveness of the remaining balance due on your eligible federal student loans after you have made 120 payments on loans under certain repayment plans while employed full time by certain public service employers. You can go to this link to learn more.

http://studentaid.ed.gov/PORTALSWebApp/students/english/PSF.jsp

So stay strong. I believe something will work out for you.

Thank you.