Home Purchase: Oct. 16/ 2006. $409,000.
Oct. 16, 2006, I purchased a home on Bell Rock Road in Sedona, AZ., where my wife Susan and I have lived about 1/2 of our 30 years together. We first lived here in 1983, returned in 1995, and planned to retire in our home in the place we love when we bought this home.
This was not a charity loan. I got the home, originally listed at $479K, for $409,000 putting $45,000 from our savings down, and the lender who I was told was MortgageIT, was to carry back a 1st loan of $324,000, and a second of $40,000.
The night we closed escrow I was told not to send my payments to Mortgage IT, but to send them to Indymac Mortgage Services, who would be servicing the loan. At the time it didn't seem suspicious.
In February of 2007, I was approached by a telemarketer for Indymac advising me that they had done a drive-by appraisal of my home and that it was actually worth $476-$485K. They kept calling back offering a 2nd of an additional $28,000 which I finally accepted and used $18,000 of it replacing the chainlink fence with a redwood fence and replacing the rock backyard with field turf. I thought, as we all did back then, that this would increase the value of the home. Everything went fine until late 2008 and early 2009 when we discovered that our $400+K house was now worth about $232K according to Zillow.
President Obama urged Americans to ask for a loan modification, so next step is Loan Modification -- I thought.
LOAN MODIFICATION ATTEMPTS
This was not a charity loan. I got the home, originally listed at $479K, for $409,000 putting $45,000 from our savings down, and the lender who I was told was MortgageIT, was to carry back a 1st loan of $324,000, and a second of $40,000.
The night we closed escrow I was told not to send my payments to Mortgage IT, but to send them to Indymac Mortgage Services, who would be servicing the loan. At the time it didn't seem suspicious.
In February of 2007, I was approached by a telemarketer for Indymac advising me that they had done a drive-by appraisal of my home and that it was actually worth $476-$485K. They kept calling back offering a 2nd of an additional $28,000 which I finally accepted and used $18,000 of it replacing the chainlink fence with a redwood fence and replacing the rock backyard with field turf. I thought, as we all did back then, that this would increase the value of the home. Everything went fine until late 2008 and early 2009 when we discovered that our $400+K house was now worth about $232K according to Zillow.
President Obama urged Americans to ask for a loan modification, so next step is Loan Modification -- I thought.
LOAN MODIFICATION ATTEMPTS