After Your Foreclosure Or Short Sale: What Are Deficiency Judgments?
You probably already know what a deficiency judgment is. Generally, it’s a lawsuit to collect unpaid debts, and in our business, it’s a lawsuit to collect the balance due on a mortgage after a foreclosure. Not all states allow lenders to do this, but many of them do.
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Deficiency judgments are often only avoided through negotiation with the bank before the foreclosure. In the process of getting a short sale approved, the homeowner or his agent can sometimes ask the bank waive their right to further collection efforts if the house is sold. Considering the cost of keeping an REO property and the fact that the homeowner is usually broke at that point, the bank will sometimes agree to this.
If negotiations fail with the bank about the status of the unpaid debt, the homeowner will be ordered by the court to pay it back. Only bankruptcy or paying it off will cancel the debt at that point.
Let’s say that the foreclosure went through. In most states, a judge will look at both the highest bid at the foreclosure auction and the appraised value of the house. The greater dollar amount of the two is subtracted from the balance due on the mortgage, and that is the amount of the deficiency judgment against the borrower. In the case of a short sale, the judge subtracts the sale proceeds from the balance due.
In either case, the homeowner is ordered by the court to pay back the leftover debt. It is entirely possible to have more than one deficiency judgment if there was more than one mortgage on that home.
The very first thing that a deficiency judgment does is to earn interest. The bank may add its REO expenses, which gives them even more money on which to charge interest. Florida allows banks to charge an interest rate of 11 percent per year for deficiency judgments. What does your state allow?
Next, the lender usually sells these types of debt to collection companies for 5 to 10 percent of the amount due. Since they know their chances of collecting the debt from a financially drained homeowner are slim to none, lenders would rather get the debt off their books and get what they can out of it.
Payment or no payment, the former homeowner now also has a huge ding on their credit report, as if having a foreclosure on record wasn’t bad enough. That judgment will stay on a credit report for at least seven to ten years, depending on certain circumstances, and it will send a FICO score down. That lower FICO score means that the former homeowner could be turned down for loans, jobs, or even housing because of it.
With the number of foreclosures increasing faster than ever, the number of deficiency judgments are increasing right along with them. As the government re-evaluates how foreclosures are done in various scenarios, they may also reconsider how deficiency judgments are handled as well. On the other hand, they may not.
Meanwhile, your job is to talk with the lender and see what it would take for them to agree to report your debt as “paid in full as agreed” to the credit reporting agencies. When you can negotiate that deficiency judgment away, you can save yourself years of financial headaches.
Need to learn more about how deficiency judgments can affect your life? Visit the Strategic Real Estate Coach website. You’ll gain access to weekly updates on the latest developments in the mortgage industry and more!
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