keeping house

[ferfermom]

Ive been reading & learning on here for awhile now. It seems most everyone has a no asset case, and gives up their homes. We love our home and have never been late on a house payment, and would be devastated to lose it. I had always assumed that with CH 7 you had to surrender home, but our attorney says we can keep. I am not exactly understanding how though.

We are $80,000 in CC debt, I stopped paying cards mid May, and retained Attorney. We plan to file end of July maybe August, trying to save up attorney fee. We are slightly over the median income for family of 3, and haven't completed the means test yet. I am scared of creditors coming after us, and I'm am stressed out to the max! This forum has been a saving grace to me, thank you for all the help.

My question is, since we want dearly to keep our home, why wouldn't we want to reaffirm, since we are on time with payments? If we dont reaffirm cant they take home?

[keepmine]

You wouldn't want to reaffirm if, you have a signficant amount of negative equity or, the mortgage payments are a stretch to meet every month. Your morgage payment is much over 30% of your takehome and you are looking for trouble.
If you don't reaffirm, the lender has the right to take the home. Some will allow a ridethrough and others won't. Just a cointoss.

Look at bk is strictly a business decision. You want to come out in better shape than you entered. Don't jeopardize a fresh start by dragging something through bk that, you can't comfortably afford.

[thereshope]

Hi Ferfermom,
I kept my home, although I am up side down on my loans and I didn't reaffirm. My attorney didn't recommend that I reaffirm. My bank has allowed me to ride thru without any issues so far. I should also mention the cost for me to reaffirm would have been about $1K.

[RuthCB]

Ive been reading & learning on here for awhile now. It seems most everyone has a no asset case, and gives up their homes. We love our home and have never been late on a house payment, and would be devastated to lose it. I had always assumed that with CH 7 you had to surrender home, but our attorney says we can keep. I am not exactly understanding how though.

We are $80,000 in CC debt, I stopped paying cards mid May, and retained Attorney. We plan to file end of July maybe August, trying to save up attorney fee. We are slightly over the median income for family of 3, and haven't completed the means test yet. I am scared of creditors coming after us, and I'm am stressed out to the max! This forum has been a saving grace to me, thank you for all the help.

My question is, since we want dearly to keep our home, why wouldn't we want to reaffirm, since we are on time with payments? If we dont reaffirm cant they take home?

We are reaffirming our home. The house payments are low enough to manage, and we are not upside down. If anything devastating happened after the bankruptcy, then we could sell at a profit. So, as a business decision, we are reaffirming.

[MakinMeCrazy]

Hi......
Our mortgage is with Bank of America........we are in Ohio..I hope this will help you.

We are filing in August, so I too was worried about losing our home of 22 years. I called BofA and talk to a nice lady in the Bankruptcy department, this is how it went : I asked about reaffirming, her reply BofA does not reaffirm,,,,,,,,,,
The I asked what would happen,,,,,,,HER WORDS EXACTLY "YOU PAY< YOU STAY" as long as those payments are on time, you do not need to reaffirm. I called my lawyer to be sure, he said , we will NOT be reaffirming and we can keep the house.
Again that was Bank of America, I don't know how other banks deal with this.

[BobMango]

I'm with GMAC and did not reaffirm. No issues with keeping the house as we pay each month on time.

It seems unlikely that a bank would want to add more real estate to their portfolio, especially by foreclosing on a performing loan. Maybe in 10 years if you have tons of equity they might want to come after it, but you can always refinance before that.

I think I've only read of one story here about someone that did not reaffirm, remained current and still had the bank taking their home. I believe it was in
Michigan.

[ferfermom]

Thank you everyone, I always have alot of good advice from this forum. Our mortgage is through Chase, so it sounds like I need to call them directly. Our attorney didn't tell us to do that, so I may ask his advice first.

We have 3 years to go on our original mortgage, and we also have a home equity line of credit we've never been late on.

I know we will get through this, but it is very stressful at times