Considering Mod - needs some help

[Joel Fraser]

First I want to let you know how much I like this forum - I'm so glad I found it. Thanks so much for making so much information available! Just Awesome. Here is my question. First we are in need of a mortgage modification, but here is our situation. I'm pretty sure we were involved in a predatory lending scam, looking over our paperwork we were listed at making 160k a year, this was based on bank statements only. My husband is self employeed so his income is hard to document. I'm sure we did put that kind of money through our accounts however my husband has expenses associated with this business. He does Carpentary - so there are a lot of materials and sub cost that comes out of the our money. Also, I think the home appraisal was inflated too, I'm not positive on its current value, but their value was 327,000 town assessment is 273,000 - I know we could get 327,000 for it, our loans is for 308,000, no second mortgage. Anyway, its been apparent since we got the loan that we're struggling to make the 2666.00 payment a month. The mortgage was adjustable, but Vanderbilt automatically converted it to a fixed at 9.95 a few months back, which is good, but we still have a prepayment penalty for another 1 1/2yr. It would be like 15,000 dollars. Now with the economy my husband is making even less money. I want to call vanderbilt and see what they will do. I haven't seen much on line about this company, nothing good anyway. And the odd thing is they actually specialize in Manafactured homes, ours is stick built, I know this because we built it. So I don't know why they have it, Select Portfolio sold it to them. So if I call Vanderbilt and by some mircle they are willing to look at our situation I'm not sure how to handle the income thing - will they still use our bank statements and not our income tax returns? If they use our returns they just laugh and see you can afford that house no matter what we did, but if they use our bank statements how do we explain that not all the money is ours to use - his expenses come out of there too. I was also considering trying the FHA thing, but again, we don't have well documented income - I work and get a W2, but that wouldn't support the mortgage. Also, because business is gotten so slow for my husband he is going to go BK, we stopped paying his bills awhile ago, but that still isn't helping us much. Anyone know if that helps or hinders negotiations? Would FHA not even consider us if hubby is going BK?? Not sure how to proceed here - any help or suggestions would be greating appreciated. Thanks.