How long did you stay in the house before finding a rental?

[goblue]

We made our last mortgage payment in August 2009 and are filing chapter 7 in January. We originally planned to keep the house, but now we've decided it's not worth it so we are going to surrender.

We've received a letter from our 1st mortgage stating that a law firm has been retained in the foreclosure proceedings.

Because we have 2 school aged kids and 3 dogs, I'm worried that it may be difficult to find a rental house that meets our needs willing to accept the whole situation.

So while I realize it's best to stay in the house as long as possible rent free - building up a savings/emergency fund - but at the same time, it freaks me out to wait and then worry that we won't find a rental.

Am I crazy?! LOL

How long will do/did you stay in your home rent free before you moved out? Did you find it difficult to find a rental? How long did it take to find your rental?

[JustFileSuit]

You are going to have predictably enormous problems finding a rental property that will allow you to have three dogs (or even one dog). If your pets are important to you, time to re-think this plan.

Another 14 million foreclosures are predicted over the next two years (so far, there have been about 3 million in the current crisis). With all those families getting kicked out, the owners of rental properties will be predictably choosy, and tend to go with renters with less potential damage. Therefore, no dogs. You can expect that millions of dogs will flood the shelters, be abandoned, or be killed (there is no nice word for this). This will be a catastrophe of Biblical proportions. Fault Congress for allowing speculators to buy up Notes at a deep discount with private-equity pools for the purpose of foreclosing and selling to speculators (yep, this is the next big wave of private-equity securitization now going in).

[goblue]

So, if we find one *now* that will allow our 3 dogs we should jump on it? On one hand, I'd love to stay in our current house as long as possible to live rent free, but on the other hand, I'd love to find a new place now and start over sooner than later.

[ItsJustMe]

Boy, JustFile is all full of rainbows and sunshine lol.

But yes, if you find someone who will allow THREE dogs, I would jump on it. I imagine you won't find that type of arrangement often. I've noticed *lost* of no-dog or may consider one small dog stipulations in the rental ads around here.

[JustFileSuit]

[QUOTE=ItsJustMe;359866]Boy, JustFile is all full of rainbows and sunshine lol.

Unfortunately, there is no way to sugar-coat the pain that is coming from the financial melt-down.

[JustFileSuit]

You have to think in terms of what is important to you. If your dogs are family pets and you consider them part of your family, then having a strategy that would protect you and them is the first requirement. If you are convinced that you will lose your home shortly, then moving into a place that allows you to keep all your pets is simply prudent. You could place the existing property into the rental market to offset your own rental costs for the short term.

Just because you have received a Letter stating that the "lender" is intending to file foreclosure suit, that does not mean that they will prevail -or at least, prevail any time soon. We have one property here that has been in foreclosure since 1993 and the owner is still sitting on it. Another locally has been in foreclosure since 2001 and the owner is still in it. The underlying reason is that the ownership of the Note has been placed in question. You may be in the same situation.

If the "lender" is not the party you originally signed with, and the loan has been sold (probably the case, and probably has been sold many times), then at this point the party claiming to be the "lender" is probably not able to prove that they are the "Holder" of the Note. "Holder" has a distinct legal meaning: the Holder has to both have physical possession of the Note AND have the authority to enforce the Note. See: Black's Law Dictionary (available at any law library). The "Holder" [who claims to be your current lender] is more likely than not probably a trustee for a securitized mortgage pool, known generically as a "CDO" or "CMO" and would carry the name of something akin to "Promac Real Estate Asset Trust, Series 2003, Class A", with say "Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., Indenture trustee." Except if you start digging then it will turnout that Wells Fargo is indeed not the Trustee, they have simply rented out their name for a fee of $300 a month to some other outfit, and "they" (undetermined, whoever they are) are the actual party doing the collecting and the litigating.

So when this gets into foreclosure court, IF you then file a "denial" of the claims and an Affirmative Defense (sometimes called a "Special Defense") that the party Plaintiff is not the Owner and Holder of the Note and has no Standing to present the claims asserted to the Court, then you instantly have a controversy of fact, and the stage is set for a long, drawn-out, slugfest. (You also as a tactic file a "Counterclaim" asking for money damages for interference with your property rights, to prevent the supposed lender from simply withdrawing the suit and re-filing it when they get the paperwork sorted out). It gets more complicated for the lender if the recording of the transfer has problems, e.g. if the transfer is not properly signed, or if the transfer document is signed by the buyer of the Note with the comment "as Attorney in fact for the seller." Under those circumstances, typically (again a function of your particular State) the recordation has to include a Certificate demonstrating that the signer has the power of "Attorney" for the seller, Since these certificates are routinely not filed, or more likely do not even exist, there are always controversies of fact that erupt over the proper legal status of the transfer.

There are further problems if the Transfer is made for a nominal amount, or made for $10 "and other valuable consideration" (Oh? And what would that be?), or when there is no money amount recorded as the sale price. In some States, e.g. Kentucky, a Note and Mortgage cannot be foreclosed for more than the value of the last recordation; so if there is no money amount in the Document down at the Land Title Office, then the Mortgage has zero value. And if it is $10, then that is all the borrower/homeowner owes the new lender. You see the problems.

Within the State Court system, the success rate of this strategy is at best mixed. State Court judges tend not to care much about these niceties, and many have been issuing foreclosures routinely. Some have stopped doing so - such as Judge Schack in Brooklyn, NY., who has made theater of hammering Deutsche Bank. In response to the problem of establishing the bona-fides of the "lender," the mortgage industry has adopted the platform "MERS," or Mortgage Electronic Registration System. However, MERS does not qualify as the Holder of the Note - ity is merely a recordation agent - so now some Judges have been tossing cases brought in the name of MERS. Again, if your Note is recorded to MERS then you have an instant Controversy of fact as to ownership of the Note and who is the Holder, so you are into a slugfest in the court system that can go on for years. meanwhile, you live rent free. Alternatively, you collect the rents on the old house for years.

The "lender" may attempt to attach the rents, but if he cannot demonstrate that he is the Holder in the first place, then the attachment is going nowhere. However, you do run the risk that the [State] Court will, as an interim measure, Order that the rents go into Escrow to be distributed after the outcome of the trial.

All this changes rapidly within the USBC. In bankruptcy, the Court is going to protect the Debtor, and a number of recent cases have totally hammered creditors, especially were there are lender problems in establishing who the Holder of the Note is. In Cleveland, within the USDistrictC (not USBC), Judges Boyko and O'Malley have tossed out some fifty foreclosure cases due to lack of proof of Standing to foreclose - the lender (Deutsche Bank) could not prove that it owned the Note and had the rights to enforce the Note at the times they filed their foreclosure cases. Within USBC, Judge Rosenthal in Worcester, Mass., hammered Ameriquest in the docket In Re Nosek in which the lender was fined $500,000, the foreclosing law firm $100,000, and each attorney $25,000 for improper representations in the Proof of Claim. In the USBC, SDNY, Judge Drain hammered the lender by declaring the Mortgage vacated - he simply struck the mortgage from the proof of claim, so now the property has NO mortgage, and the debtor can go sell it and keep the money. That was on a $455,000 mortgage claim.

So, the bottom line is: IF there have been a sequence of supposed "owners" to your Note, and the recordings start to show that they are or might be inside a CDO or CMO, with some "Trustee," and there are recordings that state "Attorney in Fact for seller" on the transfer documents, then there is an excellent chance that the supposed "lender" that is threatening to start, or has started, foreclosure proceedings in fact dos not even own the Note, and is not the Holder, and you can defeat the suit - either in the State Court, or in the USBC. And you can (probably) even do it within a Ch.7. the Lender still has to file a Proof of Claim and you can challenge the proof of claim in an Adversary Proceeding.

However, the flip side of this coin is: you have to have very steady nerves, you have to know what you are doing, and you have to have the personal toughness to take these guys on head-on and slug it out. If you have no experience in dealing with the Court system, then predictably the attorneys for the lender will simply flat-out lie and the Court will accept it, and out the door you go. [Foreclosure attorneys are notorious for sloppy work; they call it "I misspoke;" I call it: "they flat-out lied."].

So there you have it. You can fight it out,and within the USBC remember that the adversary proceeding can be filed cost-free to the debtor, and maybe you will even prevail. In the State Court system, it is a more dubious proposition (mostly because state courts are more concerned with "form" and not with "substance," a sad commentary on our Courts.). But if your dogs are important to you, then get your housing secure so you don't get burned. remember: putting your pets into a kennel will probably cost you as much as $1,500 a month, so having housing where you cannot keep your dogs with you inevitably means your dogs will end up in a county shelter. And you already know where that will end up.

[ItsJustMe]

[QUOTE=JustFileSuit;360244]

Boy, JustFile is all full of rainbows and sunshine lol.

Unfortunately, there is no way to sugar-coat the pain that is coming from the financial melt-down.

Oh I know, I was just teasing. It sure looks gloomy typed out in front of you

[JustFileSuit]

Oh I now, I was just teasing. It sure looks gloomy typed out in front of you

I fully recognize that.

Unfortunately for us as a nation, the fiasco is headed for truly Old-Testament proportions (think Job). A look back at what happened in New Orleans after Katrina is instructive. The dogs that the owners were able to rescue were not allowed by the authorities onto the buses that took the survivors away to Houston, Atlanta, and other points. The dogs were forcibly abandoned and left to fend for themselves. Thousands died, victims of a callousness of government authorities.

Don't expect a different result this time either. With a sharp cutback in donations, the volunteer shelters are strained, indeed overwhelmed. Town and County shelters are not about to get expended budgets when the municipal authorities are in melt-down. Who is going to pay for all these dogs and cats? Answer: nobody. So you can anticipate that they will be slaughtered by the millions.

There is no reason to think that commercial property rentals, especially apartments, are going to allow pets. As millions are forced out of their homes, the pets will end up with no place to live. Now run the numbers: take 50% as the average pet occupancy in overall households. If you have 14 million evictions from foreclosure coming on stream, then you can anticipate perhaps 7 million abandoned pets. that foretells a lot of slaughter. There is no nice way to put it.

I think what has happened, and is about to happen, really speaks volumes about our national character. Not in a good way.

[Widdle]

So, if we find one *now* that will allow our 3 dogs we should jump on it? On one hand, I'd love to stay in our current house as long as possible to live rent free, but on the other hand, I'd love to find a new place now and start over sooner than later.

If I were you, stay and save some money. While it may seem there are no places accepting "dogs", a suggestion of deposit may help and always, always, talk to the owner.

My brother just rented one of his houses to a family with 3 pets as well. In fact all of his rentals have pets.

He just asked for additional deposit.

[Dannmcg357]

Hey goblue,
I was in the same delima (alabama) and I decided to go ahead and move out when I found a suitable house. I was out before the NOD!. I can tell you from experience that many owners/rental agents did not even continue talking to me when I brought up my pets. It was more important to me to have a place that provided for them as well than it was to save a little money.

[JustFileSuit]

Plus, after you move and have your family and your pets secure, you can rent out the "old" house to a family in deep trouble with dogs that cannot find a place to live! And if you are feeling charitable, you can do it for a modest rent - you help them out for a time (until they are evicted), and you pocket some cash to ease your own burdens. A nice thought.

[JNOMONEY]

made my last mortgage payment 4-09 still in house ad im being told that sale may not be untill march

[ItsJustMe]

NOMONEY, When did you get NOD?