We are underwater on our home-not to the extreme that some are (ie: we know know someone who lives in FL who bought a home for $700K that is now barely worth $300K), just by ten to fifteen thousand by my estimation-the current balance on our mortgage is something like $240K and Zillow pegs the value at $225-230K. I know that Zillow is not exactly accurate, but there are a lot of homes for sale in our neighborhood, two foreclosures on our street, and similar homes to ours that have sold for anywhere from $190K-200K in the last six months. We only purchased about four years ago so it's not like we'd have much equity anyway. Of course being underwater works in our favor since it allows us to use the homestead exemption to protect our vehicles, etc... Anyway, even though we have no plans at all to move (nice area, good schools, plenty of room to add on to the house eventually) we don't want to reaffirm after going through CH7 because we want the option to walk away should something catastrophic happen, the housing market just continues to slide, etc... Here is the issue:
Our mortgage (plain vanilla 30 year fixed) was originated by a broker and sold to bank we had never heard of immediately after closing. About a year later, it was sold again, oddly enough, to a local bank where my wife has had her accounts for years. It's a small bank (4 or 5 branches)-how will this affect not reaffirming? We plan to pull her money out of there before we file anyway since we don't know how they'll react once they find out. Other than that though, is there any way to predict how they'll react about our decision not to reaffirm? Will they refuse to process the payment, or find other ways to give us a hard time, etc...?
Our mortgage (plain vanilla 30 year fixed) was originated by a broker and sold to bank we had never heard of immediately after closing. About a year later, it was sold again, oddly enough, to a local bank where my wife has had her accounts for years. It's a small bank (4 or 5 branches)-how will this affect not reaffirming? We plan to pull her money out of there before we file anyway since we don't know how they'll react once they find out. Other than that though, is there any way to predict how they'll react about our decision not to reaffirm? Will they refuse to process the payment, or find other ways to give us a hard time, etc...?
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