HomeQ going up again in Oct....I want to sleep again

[Joel Fraser]

First off, the blame for our bad credit lays solely at our feet. We mismanaged our money and FICO is a cruel mistress. So...We bought our home in Feb '06 serviced by Fremont Investment & Loan and quickly sold to HomeQ. Our rate was 7.25 percent. Pretty high payment for a $170k house, but we could afford it. December of that year, our home burned down. It took awhile to rebuild and once we moved back in we were faced with two setbacks (as if the fire weren't enough!) almost immediately. 1) no one would insure our home 2) our rate adjusted to 9.25% HomeQ took out insurance on the property to the tune of $400 a month so our payment was $2100, which we could NOT afford. We got behind in our payments, enough for them to threaten foreclosure which they rescinded when we got somewhat caught up. For two months we paid within the grace period but HomeQ neglected to tell us they were applying it toward some phantom lawyer fees and equally mysterious escrow fees that had paid thousands toward and were told we had caught up on. So, we got a letter at the end of May telling us our payments had been refused because our home was in foreclosure. (!) We spend hours battling Loss Mitigation. We finally managed to get homeowner's insurance, but they screwed that up too and still showed our payment at $2100 instead of $1485. With that, they claimed they couldn't work out a payment plan to get our loan reinstated. We were yelled at, urged to get rid of our pets while giving them our budget information, made fun of, even told our home would be sold and there was nothing we could do. Meanwhile, we had 3 months of mortgage payments sitting in the bank!!!Finally, against our better judgement we paid them almost $10000 our of my husband's 401k to reinstate our loan. 3 grand in "attorney's fees" they wouldn't budge on and several others they could not or would not explain. Our home is safe for now but we feel so terrible about this company and know our best interests are far down on the list with them. Now, we have another rate reset coming in October and no one will refinance. I have read the treasure trove of advice on this site and wonder-due to our history with HomeQ what is the best angle to take when requesting a rate freeze or other modification? If our payment goes up one more time, we're back in the same dilemma as before.If you read all of this, you deserve a medal. :)