Another tale of WAMU woe...

[Joel Fraser]

Thank you in advance for listening to my lengthy, depressing story.There's probably nothing very new here but I appreciate the chance to get if off my chest. Here goes... We bought in April of 05. Unbeknownst to us it was pretty much the height of the market. Our lender was Continental Mortgage Services. We did an 80/15/5. We put $45,000 into the deal and had 6 months reserves. Our credit was in the 7s. We had to go subprime (2/28) due to the fact that our property was what lenders considered non-conforming, meaning that it was a lot of land (24 acres) with not much structure on it(1500 sq. feet.) But hey we weren't worried. In 2 years (after the prepay was up, we would refi, no problem.) We did stated income because I am self employed but we verified all our assets. When it came time to refi (3/07) we found out that property values had fallen quite a bit. We were upside down. We were stuck in our crappy loan. We asked our lender (WAMU by that time) for help but as we were not behind at that point, they weren't interested. In 6/07 we had our first rate adjustment & (double whammy) our interest only period expired. Our payment shot up. In an effort to get WAMU's attention we stopped paying. By 10/07 WAMU was ready to talk. In December, they offered us a mod if you could call it that. It was a 6 month roll back of our interest rate. That was it! It seemed amazingly pointless to me and I asked what good it would do either of us? Their answer was to tell me that it was their only offer, take it or leave it. They also said that anything could happen in 6 months and that we could "revisit" the situation then. So we went for it. It was December and cold and raining and snowing and right before Christmas. We didn't want to go anywhere so we grasped at their straw and hoped for the best. A month before the rollback was to expire I called WAMU to "revisit" only to be told that "modifications are only granted once during the life of a loan." The person I had spoken to back in December (whose name I still had) could not be located and there were no references to re-visitation in their system, surprise. Then I realized how it had benefited WAMU. We had paid them another $17,500 in payments only to be back in the same position we were in June of 07 only poorer. Doh! By the way I know that that 1 time mod thing is BS. A close friend is going throught the same thing right now w/a different lender and they are working on their 2nd mod at present. I guess I am just lucky to be with WAMU (oh yeah, now it's Chase, that's right. WAMU got bailed out!) No such luck for me and my family though. We're just poor working cl**** tax paying schmucks. We don't matter. Anyway, we stopped paying again back in May. No sense throwing good money after bad. Our house is worth half what we paid & our rate adjusts up 1 point every 6 mos. We can't afford the payment anymore. We basically have nothing anymore. No savings, no credit, nada. 12 years of working, saving, building our credit and a nest egg for the future and it will be all gone if we lose this house. No one at WAMU will talk to us now except the collections bozos most of whom have probably never owned a home, know nothing about mortgages or how they work and have one track minds. All they say is: "can you pay now?" "why can't you pay," "when will you be able to pay?" and of course the always pleasant: "you signed a contract, you shouldn't have done that unless you could afford to pay," and so on and so on. The end is drawing near but I am not going without a fight. I put thousands of dollars into this place and I am not just going to roll over. Anyone who has any ideas on what else I can do, please feel free to chime in. Also thank you for these forums and this website. They really help with lots of good info and support.