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Mr. Potter epitomized the stingy lender |
The mortgage industry is greedy, stingy, and clueless
I found the Dec. 9 article titled "Mortgage relief plan yielding frustration" to be frustrating in itself.
The House Financial Services Committee slammed the mortgage industry on Dec. 8, and rightfully so.
It seems to me that the mortgage industry is taking the defensive and making excuses about why billions of taxpayer dollars haven't made it to the consumer level.
I disagree with Rep. Jeb Hensarling's comment that "Taxpayer-funded foreclosure mitigation programs have been an abject failure."
He did not mention that the number of foreclosures have decreased over the last four months.
Rep. Hensarling is clueless about what is going on in the trenches and across the counseling tables. We work with people,
His other comment--"Throwing more money at programs that do not work is absolutely insane"--deserves to be clarified.
I ask this of our elected officials who approved the billions of dollars in bailout money: How many taxpayer dollars have been "thrown" at the mortgage industry?
The industry has used only a fraction to help homeowners in trouble. No, the problem does not stem from mitigation, prevention, and counseling, or from borrowers not sending in trial-period payments and required paperwork.
For months, we (counselors and homeowners) are told, "We do not have the trained staff," or "we do not participate," or "we do not have the current guidelines," or "we did not receive the fax/e-mail/phone call/certi fied mail/overnight mail, etc."
The consumer must keep the mortgage servicer up to date with current pay stubs and financial data only to wait many months for a decision to be rendered. Then the decision usually comes down to a one-liner, denying the request for modification.
Counselors do their jobs and exhaust all means to keep consumers in their homes. I understand completely why the programs are not working, and this is precisely the reason the U.S. Treasury is putting compliance representatives with the lenders and servicers to make sure they process the requests from the homeowners.
Counselors work with hard-sought-after grant funding to run our loss mitigation-foreclosure prevention programs only to see the mortgage industry try to pass their ineffective program execution on to others.
Thank you, U.S. Treasury, for putting oversight on the true problems at hand. The counseling agencies are here and are continuing to help borrowers in crisis.
Don W. Willis
Spotsylvania
The writer is a housing and foreclosure prevention counselor with the Central Virginia Housing Coalition.
