Facing foreclosure?

The thought of losing your home can be one of the most stressful situations you can go through.

If you find yourself in one of these situations you could be facing foreclosure:

• You are about to miss a mortgage payment because you don’t have the funds to pay
• You have missed one or two mortgage payments
• You have received a notice or demand letter from your mortgage lender
• Or you have been serviced a Petition for foreclosure

If any of this applies to you, this is a serious situation and you may be on your way to foreclosure.

The easiest thing to do is ignore any phone calls from your lender or the demand letter that they may have sent to you but doing so is really the worst thing you can do and here are some of the consequences of ignoring the situation.

• You won’t have any say in the court proceedings and they will go on without you
• If the home is sold you will get little if any notice that you have to vacate the property
• You may have less time to stay in your home than if you had appeared in court

Here’s a brief look at the foreclosure process in British Columbia.

The Statement of Claim

If you fall behind on your mortgage by more than 90 days, the lender has the legal right to bring your financial status into question.

When the Statement of Claim is served to you, you have a period of 15 days to file a statement of defence in rebuttal to the claim statement. If you do not file the rebuttal in time, you are likely to have a default judgment entered against you.

Request for Sale

The lender will then go to court and request the right to sell your home. If the judge grants the request, a certain period of time is set to permit redemption of the home. You have this time to find the funds to pay out the current mortgage plus the court costs and legal fees. This period generally lasts 90-180 days.

Sale of the home

If you have been unable to redeem your home it will then be subject to a court ordered sale and you still have a certain period of time to redeem your home. The lender must appraise the home to determine the fair market value and will then list it for sale.

If you can’t come up with the money to redeem the house by the time the period ends, you will lose the house to a foreclosure sale.

You may have some options to solve this problem but speaking early to a mortgage broker is really your best course of action if you are unable redeem your mortgage by bringing your payments up-to-date along with any legal costs incurred by your lender.

Here are some ways that a mortgage broker can advice you:

• Perhaps you can refinance to lower your monthly payments to keep you within your budget.
• We can see if we can obtain a new mortgage with another lender and pay off your current lender
• We can take a look and see if there is enough equity in your home to make selling it yourself worthwhile
• Or if we can’t solve your problem then going to court may be the best option

If you fall behind on your mortgage the interest and costs can accumulate very quickly and it is critical to seek assistance early before things get out of your control so please give me a call.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.