Citimortgage Loan Modification

[Joel Fraser]

Well, my story begins with my husband's dream of building our own home. We were approved with a program that allows people with less than perfect credit to build their own homes. He worked very hard for 10 months building our home and working his full-time job at the same time. Over 90% of the work on our was completed completely by him. In August of 2007, we finished! Because of the market at the time and our less than perfect credit score, the "only" loan we were offered was a 30-year fixed mortgage with an interest rate of 11.575%, making our payments $2,700 per month. I knew we couldn't do this forever. Our mortgage officer told us to sign and then in 6 months we could refinance into a lower interest rate loan. Well, we were in that process, all the way to underwriting in April of this year. I was told that I wouldn't have to make the May payment and HOORAH I got caught up on other bills. Guess what - the refinance fell through in underwriting. I have not heard from my mortgage officer since. I then panicked, knowing I didn't have enough for the May mortgage payment. Citifinancial could not help me at that point because we weren't yet behind. I continued to call everyday begging for help. Nothing could be done until I was behind. Well, now I am behind. In all of my calls to Citimortgage I was given conflicting information. I completed a Workable Solutions Packet and returned it on June 10, 2008. I was told not to make payments and that it would take 2 months to hear from anyone. Needless to say, I cannot sleep because I'm so worried about losing our home. We are now 2 months behind with the July payment due as well. While I was waiting to hear from someone at Citimortgage (Luke Hermann was very helpful, but could only do so much) I started surfing the web for help. I called HOPE NOW, who emailed Citimortgage on my behalf. I found so much negative information out there about Citimortgage, that I became totally convinced that they wouldn't help me. Somehow I found this forum this week (on Monday). I read through all of the postings and somehow stumbled across a posting with email address for people at Citi that could be contacted. I sent an email to Hala, Sharon and Vikram on Tuesday, asking for help. On Wednesday morning I received an email from the Executive Offices ensuring me that someone would be contacting me soon. At 2:30pm yesterday afternoon, I received a call from Pat with the Homeowners Preservation program at Citi who encouraged me, had me fax some paperwork and promised that someone would be calling me shortly. She let me know that she would do everything she could to help me. Today, I received a call from Soloman who reviewed all of my information, filled out the Loan Modification application and is requesting more information internally and will submit my application possibly early next week. He let me know that the whole process will take about 8 weeks. He said that he can't make any promises and while it is not 100% guaranteed that we will be approved, things look good. All I need to do at this point is to make 2 payments within the next 8 weeks. I turned to God for help and he led me to this forum. You guys are a blessing and I believe that we would have lost our home if not for you! There is still the possibility that this modification will not happen, but I feel pretty confident that it may go through.:) For all of those out there struggling, you can get help and don't give up! I will keep you posted.