Save-a-Home can do more than that. We can save a Life. The life you once knew.
The life when you were in control of your finances.

Remember when your home was your American Dream?
You scrimped for it. Saved for it. Overextend and overcommited in order to make a home for your family. It is the cornerstone of American Economy. It is where you live. Where you love. Where you laugh.

Laugh? It may have been a while since you have done that.

Financial problems and the threat of losing your home can drain the laugher from your life and replace it with fear and uncertainty. This is not the home you once remember. Right now your home represents a business deal gone bad. I am writing you because the commitment you made to make monthly payments is something you cannot fulfill. I don't need to tell you that bad things can happen to good people. Sometimes health problems, job loss, overextended credit and even divorce can cause homes to go into foreclosure and that dream home becomes a nightmare.

I have spent a large part of my professional life involved in real estate. As a real estate agent I have worked with people to find the dream and helped them visualize it as their home. As a mortgage lender I have creatively and aggressively structured financing to pay for that dream. As investor I have purchased homes from banks when the dust has cleared from the disaster of foreclosure.

I have seen it all.
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly of real estate. You are now facing the ugly of real estate. Foreclosure. I want to try and help you make the best of a bad situation.

If you are like most people, when you can't make the payments on their home, you shut down. Hoping for a miracle. Divine intervention right now would be good, but not a very realistic alternative. Unfortunately at this point, we have now entered the most complicated, confusing, frustrating and complex real estate scenario. The foreclosure.

There are not any shortages of people with a desire to try to help you. There is a sever shortage of those with the ability, resources and commitment to really do it. There are far too few capable of providing a solution that can meet you needs within the time frame that you need it and have it be the best alternative that protects your equity, your asset and your dream. The reason for that has to do with the five options that someone has when they have entered foreclosure and the people, some say vultures, which wait on the sideline waiting for the drama to play out.

First there is the lender who wants their money. And they want it now. You are a loan number, a non-performing asset in their loan portfolio. They don't want your home. But it is either or.

And the clock is ticking...
Then there is the mortgage lender who is looking to take you out of the frying pan into the fire. Someone who is willing to replace the existing loan with a larger, more expensive financial obligation with larger payments but the promise of a second chance. To the mortgage lender, the solution is to finance your way out of the problem.

The real estate agent, of course, has their solution that interestingly enough involves selling the home in a quick distress sale. Not enough equity to pay the commission. No problem, a short sale can be used to have the lender pay for the costs of sale. This is great for the agents but where does that leave you.

Then there are the real estate investors, the opportunist that use your misfortune to fatten the profit margins between their costs and the real value of the property. These aren't bad people, just shrewd investors who realize that your loss is their gain.

Then the bankruptcy attorneys are ready willing and able to use the law to buy time to stop the process and protect you from the creditors. You may stop the process but that will be just long enough to turn control of your future, your money and your life to a bankruptcy judge. At that point the primary concern for the judge is not the interest of you, but how to satisfy the needs of the creditors. It may be he only solution, but should only be last card played.

These are the players, your knights in shinning armor. Your current lender, a mortgage broker, a real estate agent and investor and a bankruptcy attorney all offering advise and solutions based upon their ability to make money and the services they provide. It's not hard to imagine whey the real estate agents want you to sell. Guess why the mortgage broker wants you to refinance out of the problem? Do the math and you'll know why the real estate investor wants you to walk away. The bankruptcy attorney wants you to file BK because, well, that is what he does. Why? Because that advise happens to correspond with the services they wish to provide.

These are not bad people; this is just what they do. Because they know that within 121 days of the filing of foreclosure, something is going to happen to that home.

Bill and Mary came within 16 hours of losing their home.
The spent months and thousands of dollars trying to straighten things out and only ended at one dead end after the other. There is no question it is hard. No question that most people don't know who to turn to whom to trust. Who to believe and what to do.

Do you know what most people do when the lender forecloses? Most people do nothing, or in most instances, the wrong thing.

That is why 70% of the 25,000 notice of trustee sale in the state of California resulted in the lender taking back the property or it being sold on the courthouse steps. For Bill and Sue they beat the odds and are still in their home because Save-a-Home did just that. Saved their home.

Sue and John didn't know whom to turn to and it almost cost him their home of 27 years. At 76, they could not imagine being thrown out of their home, but a series of financial problems and wrong decision almost left them on the street. A little creativity, a lot of problem solving and the money that no one else would give them made the difference that saved the life they once knew. Save-a-Home delivered where everyone else just promised. Unfortunately, they came within 10 days of losing it all because they went through a series of unfulfilled promises, delays, setback and a dozen of "professionals" who lead them down path that proved to be one dead end after another.

Unlike the time you bought your home or finance your loan, right now you don't need to be sold anything. You need a problem solved. This is not a job for a salesman, but the job of consultant. Sometimes the right solutions involves, a sale, a refinance, possibly even bankruptcy. But which one when…and how!

Save-a-Home is the solution to the problem of foreclosure.
A team of mortgage lenders, real estate agents, investors and attorneys work together to come up with a plan a solution to the problem you are presently facing. Hopefully, this is the first time you have had to deal with such a problem. It is something that we work with everyday. Your solution may involve a refinance, forbearance or restructuring of the existing loan, a refinance, a bankruptcy or even a sale to an investor with the right to stay in the property and repurchase at a later date. Or they can explore a combination of several of these alternatives.

At this point nothing is really easy.

When dealing with a foreclosure it is easy to think that everyone is out to get you and nobody cares. Thanks to the public notices required by lender, foreclosure is not a private matter. It is a matter of public record.

For the people whose business involves working with people in foreclosure, the public record filings are the smoke that signals fire, and for them it is the rainbow that they hope leads to their pot of gold. At the first sight of blood, the sharks begin to circle the waters. You have most likely already noticed that. It is easy to take the ostrich approach and stick your head in the sand. Or like the three monkeys that cover their ears, mouth and eyes. They hear no evil, speak no evil. If you are not careful, you'll not only have no fun…. you'll have no house.

Look, listen and learn
Then speak out. You have options. You have opportunities. They might not all be perfect. Many are not even very good. But, they will certainly be better than where you are now and may find yourself 30, 60 or 90 days from now. So lets go through some of the options you have and some of the solutions that could save your house, your equity and in some cases, your sanity. It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting a different result. So this is a period of change. A time for action. A time to suspend your embarrassment, your frustration, your disappointment, your fear and your feeling of helplessness. Chances are there is something you can do. You have options and here they are.

Forbearance
You have the right; right up to the day your home is sold on the courthouse steps to reinstate your loan. By paying the back payments, attorneys fees and foreclosure costs your existing loan can be brought back to life, no harm, no foul, except of course to your credit, but the lender will honor their commitment to accept the current interest and payment rate. It is also possible to negotiate a forbearance agreement to pay a portion up front and the rest in monthly installments over 12 months. The problem here is obvious. If the payments can't be made now, where does one get extra cash to pay a lump sum and then make normal payments plus an additional loan to pay back interest and fees. That is where we come in. And that is where we met June and Harry.

June and Harry were looking to pay there lender off and went through one lender to the next and every new loan option took their 7% loan to 11% or more. Talk about going out of the frying pan into the fire, if it was not possible to make a payment at 7% what chances do you have at 11%. By paying the back payments and reinstating their old home loan, June and Harry had a new lease on life.

For Harry and June they were able to hold onto their home. Sometimes that is not an option but what is required is time to get things in order and sell the property to preserve the equity required to make a fresh start. That is what mark and sue did. It wasn't their first choice, but given their situation…. it was the best option and it worked. Instead of losing $50,000 in equity, they walked away with money that gave them a chance another day. Sometimes our life situation change so dramatically that the home we live it can no longer fit in that plan. Too many people make the stand and turn their home into their personal Alamo. There is honor in retreat if we preserve assets to enable us to regroup for the future

Refinancing
Refinancing sometimes can take you out of the frying pan into the fire, but it will give you a second chance. But structuring the right loan at the right loan terms is the key to making it through the rebuilding process. Since home loans are priced based upon risk and once someone has a foreclosure on their record they are deemed a high credit risk, these refinancing options are expensive in costs, fees, interest and monthly payment. So when we restructure a loan, we also put together a plan to rebuild your credit and create the opportunity to get a new and better home loan in a few years. .

The sad thing about foreclosure is that once you are there it limits your option. The further behind in payments you get, and certainly once a notice of default is filed the window of opportunity to refinance out of the problem is shut. In truth it is open a crack and to get through you need a tremendous amount of equity and be willing to pay dearly for this limited option. By negotiating a forbearance and reinstatement of the loan, it clears the way to more and better refinancing opportunities. That is how shelly and Hugh restructured their financing to hold onto their home.

With the forced sale of their home just days away, Shelly and Hugh had been turned down for one loan after the next. Rules being what they are, certain loans are not available for people in foreclosure. All sorts of loan allow you get money with a foreclosure on your credit just not now. What was needed was bridge, a band-aid to take them out of foreclosure in order to refinance.

Sale
Certain problems can just not be fixed in time and sometimes the home itself is part of the financial problem and it needs to be sold. Sad, but true. If you can avoid a foreclosure sale from appearing on your credit, you will have more home buying opportunities in the future. If there is equity, it needs to be sold for the highest prices and not have it appear as a distress sale. If there is no equity it is possible to work with the lender to get them to accept less than the amount owing on your loan. This is called a short sale. Your lender won't be excited about taking less, but they would lose a lot more if the home were to go to foreclosure sale. This option could have some tax benefits for you and limit the amount of loss.

You may even consider a sale to an investor that gives you the opportunity to stay in the home as a renter and even give you the option to repurchase the home at a later date. There may be a loss of equity, but at least your family is not uprooted and there is hope for another day when your financial situation improves.

A friendly acquisition can be much less destructive to you family than a hostile takeover.

Because your situation is unique, your goals are different than other and your resources will vary, these solutions could vary. They could include a combination of forbearance, loan reinstatement with a refinance. It could be a sale-leaseback with an option to purchase. It could be a loan reinstatement with a refinancing to enable a sale at the highest price. There are really so many options and variations. But what are they and who will do them.

The foreclosure work out is a 10 on the scale of real estate transactions in its complexity, difficulty and uncertainty. The stakes are high for both the borrower and the lender. There is a tremendous amount of emotions and confusion. This is not a process for the inexperienced professional who lack the resources and support to solve your problem.

It is your future. Your money. Your life.
You deserve and require the best help you can to help fix this problem. Save-a-Home is comprised of a team of experienced and knowledgeable professionals who are understand not only what you are facing, but also how to fix it. Our confidence is built on our success of the past. Of the futures available to our clients because we Saved-a-Home, giving them a chance to rebuild a life.

We want to save a home. We want o save your home and help put your life back on track. We cannot promise that you are going to like the solution. Because this is not a perfect world and we are a long way from a perfect situation, but you can a few steps closer to that with just one call.

Save a home. Rebuild a Life.

Mortgage At|vantage is a full service financing company. If you have any Save-A-HomeHome-related questions or needs, our consulting staff will be happy to help you.

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