The Journey-Loan Mod.-hired atty

[Mike]

This thread is to give folks facts and anecdotal comments about the process of handling the modification and the issues with our loan by hiring an attorney. *August 4th, 2008*Today I sent a federal express package and payment to the attorney. I understand that next we will take steps to give the attorney information that the attorney will use to deal with the loan modification and the forensic review of the loan will begin. After the forensic loan review is done, we will conference with the attorney. From there, the attorney's firm will begin the negotiations following much the same procedures suggested on this website. The hammer in this are loan violations, which we feel exist, and hopefully the forensic review will confirm.*What is the goal of all this?*Our goals are first to obtain our modification and then file a lawsuit (because of other issues with the loan) or if they will not modify AND correct servicing errors, we will file a lawsuit. *Why did we hire an attorney and not do this ourselves? An attorney could be a lot of money. *We realized after 6 months we were being lead by the nose. Banks are not regulated regarding aspects of servicing the loan, so, they can do whatever they want to do-with our payments or their promises. In our case, there are some very detailed issues that happened at loan origination, during the transfer of the loan from one lender to another, and the broker and realtor . It requires expertise to see the violations and substantiate the facts. So we made a business decision this month to stop horsing around with the servicer and get some expert help. Yes, it involved making some decisions that normally we would never make, but we had to decide who to pay first and deciding what our best chance is to save our investment AND correct the wrong doing.*Check References on the attorney and know _for sure_ what you want to do. *We debated about this for two months and did some reference checking before we committed with the attorney. Even before the problems with the bank we knew some things about our loan origination were fishy and as we learned more, we knew we were in big trouble. *How often will I post?*Our updates might have breaks in between, but I want someone contemplating attorney help to have a real life "blow by blow" on what this experience is like. I will try to post every few days, even if it is a minor update. I will be posting for a long time because this will not be easy or short. Sometimes I won't be able to fully describe events due to legal restrictions, but I will share what I can. Hope this helps who ever reads along as it progresses. Persistence