Chapter 13: The Power to Protect Your Home
We have covered who is this a good solution for. Number one, you’re behind on your mortgage. Number two, you’ve tried to work with your mortgage holder, your mortgage company, and the bank. They won’t work with you. Number three, you’ve got enough money to catch it up, meaning you can pay the regular mortgage payment and you can pay at least $1.60 per month of what you’re behind.
So we talked about five years is the maximum length of a Chapter 13 plan and if we put it out to 60 months if you owed $60,000 that’d be an additional $1,000 a month, $2,000 a month. If you only are behind $30,000, it’s only $500 a month, so $1,500 minimum. If $15,000, then you’re down to $250, $1,250 a month, and so forth.
So today we’re going to talk about, well, when can I do this? At what point in the foreclosure or what point in them coming after me for the house? Well, the good news is the government through this Chapter 13 gives us the power to stop a foreclosure, i.e. the taking of your house, all the way up until the last possible moment.
So typically if you get behind, your mortgage company is going to send you a bunch of letters. You may get three to six months of warnings and then at some point in the state court, for example, Tulsa County or Oklahoma County, they’re going to sue you for what’s called foreclosure, which means they’re saying, we want to foreclose our mortgage. We are going to make you give us the house and then we’re also going to auction the house and then seek a judgment against you for any balance remaining.
So let’s say you owe $500,000. They foreclose the mortgage, meaning takes the home back, and auction it for $250,000. Well, then they still have a judgment against you for $250,000.
So the timing. So we can file a 13 before you go into foreclosure. We can file a 13 after you go into foreclosure. We can actually file a 13 after you have been foreclosed against and the judgment has been rendered.
So a foreclosure, generally you’re going to have, again, three to six months probably of court hearings, depending on whether you participate or not, at which point they will order a sheriff’s sale. Then once that sheriff’s sale is held, that sale, assuming there is a buyer, has to be confirmed by the judge in the foreclosure case and that’s actually the end.
So we can stop the foreclosure even after the sheriff’s sale, right up until the moment that the sheriff’s sale is confirmed. So you’ve got till the last second. So if you can catch it before it’s all said and done, we can back it up and do everything we said before.
So stay tuned. Going to have another video in this series, How Can I Save My Home With a Chapter 13 Bankruptcy?
You can always reach me, a chapter 13 lawyer in Oklahoma City, at oklahomacitybankruptcyattorney.pro or call me at (405) 563-7888.