Homecomings Financial Making sure we foreclose! Ignored 6 reasonable offers! Dallas Texas

We ended up with Homecomings Financial through a "re-fi" of our home loan. We purchased a 'money pit' back in 2003 when there was very little inventory available and we really wanted to move from our current neighborhood. It was also the first time we ever went from one home we owned to another so we were a little GREEN about the process.

We found our house in what seemed to be a nice older neighborhood. The price was reasonable for the small amount of inventory on the market but I always felt we were paying too much for a house that needed EVERYTHING! We were constantly having to put money into the property.

That is really all beside the point I guess. We re-fi'd to again put more money into the home. We needed to update a bathroom and some things in the kitchen and also needed new windows and sliding doors. We got a loan with full documentation, it was a 30 yr fixed at 6.75%. The loan terms were reasonable but in my heart of hearts I knew that if anything changed in our status, we were not going to be able to make the HUGE mortgage payment.

Low and behold, a year and a half later, my husbands overtime disappeared. we lost more than half of our take home pay when that happened and we had to come to terms with our situation. We were paying through the nose for a house we could not afford and still needed more work. Another bathroom and new roof were next. We were not living extravagently. We sold our timeshare and even a vehicle and it was not making a dent in anything.

The first month I knew we were not going to make our payment was December 2007. We had never even been late (on anything) up to that point. I called Homecomings and cried during that whole conversation because I was so embarressed. I spoke to what seemed to be a caring employee and he gave me a time table of sorts. He said the first thing we were going to have to do was list our house for sale and try to sell it for 90 days. He said a short sale would be the way to go because the houses in our area were not worth what was owed.

We cleaned, painted, staged the house and the decided we would look for a rental that we could actually afford and move because we felt we would have a shot at selling if we weren't it the house. We were right. Within the first two months, we had 6 offers. About half of them were actually VERY reasonable and within fair market value.

Our Homecomings Rep was horrible at returning phone calls. She would leave messages and not give us any real way to contact her. It was always the general customer service number where we would always get a different person and none of them were ANY HELP. I finally called my Congressman's office for assistance. We were trying to do the right thing and follow their own directions and it was getting us no where. Once my Congressman's office called Homecomings "Voice of the Customer" number, my realtor finally started hearing from our Homecomings Rep.

What it boiled down to is this. They refused to do a short sale and blamed the PMI Company. Homecomings claimed that the PMI company was demanding that we sign a Promisary Note of more than $77,000 or bring $10,000 or $20,000 into closing and then sign a promisary note for somewhere in the $40,000 range. We have yet to ever see anything in writing regarding this situation with PMI and there is NO WAY we would agree to pay it anyway. Homecomings then called and told my realtor that they do not think we put ANY money into fixing up our home and demanded some kind of proof. We put together an itemized list of everything we had done and also referred them to their own appraisal pictures. All to no avail.

We are now in August. No payments on the house since December and we moved out last February to sell it. We do not receive mail or phone calls from Homecomings at all. We have however received notices from Public Health about bees that have invaded our house (we just paid $225 to have that cleaned up) and just got a letter from City Code Enforcement about our lawn being dead and how we may be prosecuted by the city attorney.

We are at our wits end. We even kept the water on at the house for two additional months until we found that city demanded that we also pay for sewer and trash that we weren't using. We have tried to do everything honestly and follow their directions and its doing nothing but coming back to bite us. We could have lived in the house all this time and NOT PAID A DIME and we would be better off.

I can't believe they can do this to people.

Shannon
Upland, California
U.S.A.

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