The news has been full of scary stories in the last couple days about IndyMac Bank, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac. If you are a homeowner with a late mortgage, or worse, a defaulted loan, what impact does all this have on you? Maybe none, but maybe it will make the situation that much worse.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are directly involved with about half of all mortgages in the United States, usually conventional, prime mortgages. Long before private funds started buying large blocks of mortgage loans, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in the business of buying loans from banks on the secondary market, and thereby creating liquidity for those banks to make more mortgage loans. Unfortunately, as has been widely reported in the last few days, these insitutions were a little bit out of control for many years now, bloated and arrogant, and making far too much money for far too many people who were not really all that concerned with their borrowers.
If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not able to raise capital, either through stock sales or borrowing money themselves, mortgage loans will definitely become more difficult to obtain. If you are in the process of trying to refinance to avoid a foreclosure, this could have a serious impact. Moreover, the much-vaunted housing legislation that has been winding its way through Congress depends on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to refinance troubled loans. Hard to say at this point what effect all this turmoil might have on their ability to perform that role.
The failure of IndyMac Bank at the same time seems to have created a great deal of fear, almost panic. Most depositors will be insured by FDIC, and so their accounts will be covered. But if you are a borrower of a loan held by IndyMac, its demise might make it much more difficult to obtain any assistance with your loan or to reach some accomodation with them. Worse yet, if you have a claim against IndyMac for predatory lending or other consumer rights violations, those claims could potentially be cut off by the government takeover.
In Seattle, mortgage foreclosures have only recently started to pick up, and relatively few homeowners have sought bankruptcy protection or assistance from their lender. If you are facing foreclosure, bankruptcy may be an option. There are other possibilities as well, such as refinancing your loan, going through a loss mitigation program with your lender, or investigating whether you have consumer rights claims that could mitigate your losses.
In light of all the bad news over the last few days, it does not seem that the problems of homeowners in distress are likely to go away any time soon.

Labels: bankruptcy, consumer, mortgages