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Improving your Financial
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Here you'll find articles and suggestions on
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This Week's Article:
Home Loans and Mortgages – Beware of Deed Theft Scam The average home
in the United States has a value of $206,000, a record amount. Real
estate prices have been rising throughout the country during the last
five years, and homeowners have seen the value of their property
skyrocket. In California alone, the equity in private homes has
increased by more than one trillion dollars in the last five years
alone. Many homeowners do not even realize that their home may be worth
hundreds of thousands of dollars more than they know. Unfortunately for
them, a new breed of thieves is well aware of the value of home equity,
and a scam known as “deed theft” has allowed them to steal homes from
thousands of people.
Deed theft is simple in principle. The
perpetrators of deed theft post flyers around town offering “foreclosure
help.” They seek homeowners with mortgages who may be experiencing some
temporary financial setback that threatens them with foreclosure. It’s
not uncommon for people who have been living in their homes for years to
have a sudden financial emergency that prevents them from making their
house payments. Perhaps a job loss or illness is to blame. The economic
downturn of the last five years has left a lot of people struggling to
pay their bills, and these are the people that the deed thieves seek.
Their flyers promise to help those in danger of having their homes taken
through foreclosure. The thieves meet with the homeowners and ask to
have the title to the home transferred to them. In exchange, the
“rescuer” will promise to pay the delinquent bills and rent the home to
the victim for a year or so at a fair price. During this time, they say,
the homeowner can save their money or pay off other bills. At the end of
that year, the victim can buy the house back from the “rescuer.”
This seems like a friendly gesture, except that the “rescuer”
has no intention of selling the home back to the victim. Once the title
is signed over to them, they legally own the home. They may evict the
victim, sell the home, or borrow against it, and there is little
recourse for the victim, who is now nothing more than a squatter. Many
of these victims fail to realize that they may have had hundreds of
thousands of dollars in equity in their home or that their mortgage
company may have been willing to either refinance their home or assist
them in some other way with making their payments, perhaps by assisting
them with to debt
consolidation.
This scam is currently popular across the
country and homeowners could easily avoid being victimized by simply
calling their mortgage company at the first sign of financial struggle.
Mortgage companies aren’t really interested in foreclosure; they’d much
rather get paid if at all possible. Before accepting the “help” of
strangers who post signs on streetcorners, homeowners should start by
asking help from those with whom they are already doing business. Doing
so could not only save the homeowner money, it could save the
homeowner’s house.
©Copyright 2005 by Retro Marketing. Charles
Essmeier is the owner of Retro Marketing, a firm devoted to
informational Websites, including End-Your-Debt.com, a Website devoted
to debt consolidation
information and HomeEquityHelp.net, a site devoted to information on home equity loans.
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