Chase Success-New to Forum

[Mike]

Hi all, I wanted to share our story with all of you. It is long but I hope you will find it is worth the read. My husband and I filed a Chapter 13 BK in 2001 due to me being laid off of my job after the 9/11 disaster. We kept up our payments and the BK was discharged in 2005 two years ahead of schedule. We found that we needed to move to a new school district for our kids and decided to move but knew it meant purchasing a house. We found a broker who helped us purchase a house in May of 2005 but at a subprime rate of 10.5%. Skip to our refinance with Chase about six months later. We started with a mortgage company who never sent us a good faith estimate and promised us a 8% interest rate, much lower interest rate than the 10%. Of course by the time we got to the closing table the rate was 9.75% and by this time and did not feel like turning back. Our original purchase price was $421K but with a 2% prepayment penalty and closing cost the new loan amount that was eventually sold to Chase was approx. $438K. My husband was military and we managed to make all of our payments on time. Then disaster struck when May of 2007 my Mom was diagnosed with a terminal lung disease. She could not work anymore or care for herself so my husband and I decided that I would move back to the Virgin Islands to care for her as I am the oldest daughter. It was hader than I thought without my husband so in June 2007 on his 26th year in the military my husband decided to retire and come to the Virgin Islands to help me with the kids (we have a 9yr old and 11yr old) since I had to travel to Puerto Rico quite frequently to the hospital with my Mom. Insurance did not cover alot of her expenses so we paid for most of it. This meant that we lost the income from my husband for housing, sea pay, separation, flight deck pay and half of his gross monthly salary. I was unable to work because of the schedule of caring for my Mom so we lost that salary too. We opted to put the house up for rent because we were in a new subdivision and the builder kept on building and was giving options and upgrades away in the newer houses for much lower price than we paid for our home. Also the people that were military that had to move sold their houses at bargain basement prices so the value of our house dropped from $480K to under $460K. In 2006 we had taken out a 2nd mortgage with our credit union to pay for our fence, landscaping, irrigation and some other upgrades which totalled $25k. We had no room to sell because our appraisal was not in our favor. We were only able to rent for $1895/per month because that was average market comparasion for a five bedroom rental in our area. We started falling behind in our payments late last year. First it was thirty days then I waited too late to send a payment at the end of one month and it did not get posted until the Monday and that put it over sixty days. To make things worst our loan adjusted to a 10.33% interest rate in March and our real estate taxes were placed into forced escrow because we were behind on those too. This put our new payment to $4912. Talk about pouring salt into an already gaping wound. I called Chase after we received a letter of intent to foreclose and one of the representatives told us about the loan modification program. I was afraid we would not qualify as we only had about a $200 surplus each month that would most often get eaten up by unexpected medical expenses. We sent in our paperwork in January anyway and I was told it would take 90 days and I needed to give them time to work so I did not call. We found out three months later that the package was never received. I was so distraught. By this time we were still trying to play catch up and at the end of May one of the collections agents called us and when he asked my husband for the next payment my husband told him he would have to talk to me since I had been handling all the bills. The collections representative then proceeded to call my husband a "dead beat" who obviously did not know how to take care of his business. I had never received treatment like that from anyone at Chase before. I will tell you all that my husband is one of those people that will listen to the life story of a telemarketer...that is just his temperment. He politely ended the call with the agent and called me. I immediately called to speak to a Collections Supervisor and I told him what transpired. I pointed out to him that with the high interest rate we had already paid over $90k in interest to Chase in the past two years and until this problem arose last year we never had any problems making our payments. I told him I felt it was UNACCEPTABLE for the representative to speak to my husband like that. The supervisor apologized on behalf of the agent then gave me the option to split our past due payment into three payments and that would get us caught up by July. I had to give him three checks that were scheduled to be paid on the 30th of May, June and July. I asked him why no one ever gave us that option before and he did not have an answer. He then encouraged me to contact the loan modification department again and I faxed our information on 6/9/08. They gave me the same speech about it taking up to 120 days this time and to call once a month. Well to be honest I was calling every week. I tried not to get discouraged but it was hard. Then out of the blue around the second week in July we received an email from someone who stated they were trying to reach us to get additional information and that she was a Chase underwriter. She said she had a hard time getting through to our number in the Virgin Islands so she decided to email us. I was skeptical but she had all the details of the loan and the information we faxed in. She asked if we paid rent in St. Thomas, for us to send a copy of our monthly expenses and if there our was any additional income. I immediately responded to her and sent her all she needed amd she acknowleged that most people do not respond that quickly so it holds up the process as their file ends up being put aside until they send in the information. Then within two days I got another email that said she reviewed everything, it all looked good and she was forwarding our file to San Diego. She was recommending us for a modificaiton but she could not give us any details other than to continue making our payments as best we could. Well I started calling every other day and the representatives seemed annoyed sometimes and others would just politely tell me to call back in two weeks. I finally told one rep that as long as it was not a bother for them to take a couple minutes to take a quick look at our account it was not an inconvenience for me to make the call. I also was not going to wait another sixty days to find out that our file had fallen through the *****s again. Unfortunately one rep also told me that there was no way I could have gotten an email from an underwriter because they do not communicate with the homeowners. Well I told him her name and lo and behold she was in their system. He did not even apologize for essentially calling me a liar. Well it took more than a couple to weeks to hear the good news but it finally came. I was not able to call for a few days because I had flown to Colorado with my Mother to take her to a hospital there for 12 days. I called on 8/14 and the rep told me "Congratualtions your loan modification has been approved since 8/12." I tried not to get too excited and she proceeded to give me the terms. We needed to send a down payment of $2125 as soon as possible. No payment is due in September and the new payments would start October 1. Our interest rate went from 10.33% to 2.25% for the first 5 years, 4.25% in the sixth year and 6.25% for the balance of the life of the loan. Our new monthly payment is $1792 and with the $330 for our tax escrow the total is now $2122. She also stated we would just be receiving a form letter since all they did was reset our interest rates. No docs would need to be signed. I told her we had not made August payment yet and she said that was the reason for the down payment. Remember our payments were $4912 with our escrow payments. This means a $2790 reduction in our mortgage payment for the next five years!!!!!! We have made sure to give credit to our Lord for this awesome blessing because we are counting this as a miracle. However, we have to say a HEARTFELT THANK YOU to the folks at Chase for allowing him to use them as the instrument to pull us out of the black hole that we were in. I would like to say to all that are going through and waiting on this process, don't give up. I also realized that even when you get caught up on your payments you can still qualify for a mod. In addition it is critical that you can show that there is a way for you to continue to handle your payments once the mod goes through. I don't know the equations or what qualifies for a mod but our situation I hope can be a guide to someone out there that feel that because they have been through a Chapter 13 they cannot pull themselves back together. Remember the key is that we kept our payments up until the hardship and we only established secured debts with our credit union to build our credit history after the BK. This helped to get our credit scores in the 620+ range. So don't give up and we congratulate all the successes before us and wish all the best to all those who are still waiting.