It seems that once again the large real estate ventures are getting into trouble and are facing the foreclosure gavel. The Twin Lakes Mall in Wichita Kansas is in dire straits and is in the process of being foreclosed on by the bank. However it looks like it should remain business as usual for the tenants of the mall and the stores should remain open and unaffected by the change. It seems that the owners are in arrears to the tune of $8.6 million dollars in back payments and interests and other fees. What seems odd is that for the most part the rough spots looked like they were over and there appears to be little in the way of explanation as to why the foreclosure happened.

Not that this will come as a surprise and not that it is something that you want to hear, but this article, which is very well written I might add, tells us about a very long and tedious recovery from the current crisis that we are in. The combination of the loss in financial wealth to the people in the country and the meteoric rise in unemployment to levels unprecedented in modern times or recorded history for both the United States of America and Great Britain are going to make the ultimate recovery slow and quite painful for both countries. The story is written from a Jamaican point of view and offers some rather interesting views from that of an outsider looking in.

With the holidays nearly upon us, much of the country is concentrating on having a festive Thanksgiving and readying for the coming celebration of Christmas. But people often forget to think that at this time of year, especially in the crisis situation that we are in, there are many families that won’t have any holiday. While most of the country suffers and you might even be one of those suffering this year. There are still plenty of people in worse shape than even you are. This story goes into some more details about how people are doing what they can to help donate food and other items this year for the people that are in dire financial straits. Many families can’t afford the basic food needs this year much less the extras that are typically associated with a holiday season. If you read this story and are untouched by the content, perhaps you should check your pulse and make sure that you are still alive.

This item comes from the Wisconsin Law Journal. It is about an attorney who has noticed a sharp decline in cases. As one might expect, if there are less cases then there is less revenue coming into the lawyers business so cash flow changes fairly substantially. What this attorney has done is to modify his practice form handling primarily civil suits to those that are more in line with the current state of the world and dealing with foreclosures and landlord – tenant issues. It is merely a case of having to adapt to make the business fit the needs of the recession and to stay viable in the mix of things. The story tells how he and other attorneys who are sole partners in their practices have had to go into areas outside of their traditional comfort zones in order to generate income to stay solvent.

This article is one that most of us need to read. It asks questions about repossession of a second home and just how safe is the money that you might have in the bank after a foreclosure. There are a lot of variables to take into account but there is some very good food for thought in this article. It certainly is a situation that a lot of people are in having to let a rental property fall into foreclosure to save the main residence they are living in but the questions that it raises are some that are of universal importance to every homeowner who is either in foreclosure or in a situation where they could fall into foreclosure. It is a must read and it will give peace of mid to some and reason to think of new avenues for other. But it is something you should see.

This story is a little ray of sunshine this week from the city of Chicago. It shows the positive aspects behind the restructuring loans program offered by president Obama. One person who is discussed in the story say his mortgage payment go from $1,800 down to $800 a month under the “Making Homes Affordable” loan Modification Plan. The article goes over several options ranging from the mortgage restructuring to foreclosure and then renting in lieu of actual home ownership and the pros and cons of both of those scenarios. The article also lists ways to help you spot a possible fraud trying to help you in these trying times.

The folks at PR web tell us about thee unveiling a new website that is going to offer folks free help, information and advice on the subject of foreclosures. This information will be available to people whom are web surfing at no charge so you can go there and become enlightened about the issues and get information that could make it easier to salvage a foreclosed property and not have to shell out your hard earned cash for that information. A lot of what is there is fairly basic but it is going to consolidate all of the needed things into one easy to locate area on the web so you aren’t running all around trying to find scattered data. It will give detailed instructions on any of the guidelines that are out there so you can review all of the options at a glance and then dig into the semantics of the offer without going anywhere else, which will be a time saver and as a result, will be a help of its own.

Scammers are beginning to get some of what is coming to them. This article from the Pennsylvania area of the country where one scammer got convicted of theft by deception for promising to work with a persons’ mortgage company to resolve the issues that were going to cause foreclosure. The woman then took the money and ran and did nothing other than a few preliminary phone calls to the other parties lending institution. As a result of the investigation from the complaint that was field the woman got arrested and convicted of Theft by Deception. What makes it worse is that she had been convicted twice before on similar charges several years ago.

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Freddie Mac has been in trouble for a long time. For the last three months since Ed Halderman joined the board of trustees he has been working to steady the stability of the struggling company. He is a mere 70 years of age and is the executive director of the board of trustees at Freddie Mac. His main objective here is to boost President Obamas’ image and to make as many home restructurings happen as he can in order to lower the foreclosure rate in our country. His primary focus since arriving there in August has been to get as many of the employees there behind this objective and working towards that end.

Speaking of President Obama. On Friday last week he signed into law a new bill giving a total of $24 million in the form of an economic stimulus bill that is ear marked for prospective homebuyers and the people who have been unemployed for the long haul. The bill also included some tax cuts aimed at stabilizing some businesses out there that are having a rough time. He says that there is more coming and he will not – and I paraphrase him here –going to stop until everyone that wants to be working a job is working a job. The long term unemployed rate is at the largest number that it has been since 1948 and this bill is going to add between 14 and 20 more weeks of benefits to people that have already seen those benefits expire or were due to have them end by years end.

The Michigan website mLive.com brings us the story here that says that today with the economy that more landlords are unlawfully discriminating against families than at any time in history. One woman in Grand Rapids went to rent an apartment for her and her three children and was told that the security deposit would be twice what was originally quoted due to the children and the potential for destruction of the premises. Complaints on this type of problem in the state of Michigan alone are up nearly twice as much already this year over what they were for all of last year. The article goes on and shows blatant examples of discrimination that has actually been placed in ads posted by potential landlords.

The Los Angeles Times Business section brings us this story about the tax credit. There are a lot of people out there that have bought homes in this market and a good portion of them have done so due to the $8,000 tax credit that has been offered to them on that purchase by the Federal Government. This article spells out quite concisely the terms that conditions that you have to meet in order to cash in on this first time homebuyers credit. Especially since it has been modified to include not just the first time buyers. There are a lot of new rules, timelines and a whole new category. The income requirements were changed and there is a lot in the mix not that can and will affect your ability to get that credit or not.

Just when you thought that things couldn’t get worse, ABC News reports to us that even though we all feel bad about the recession and the problems that it has on humans. It is also putting the major cities in the country a risk of being over run by rodents. Rats to be a little more precise. The top two cities in the country when in comes to the invasion of the furry critters is not surprisingly New York City and the number two city, oddly enough is the City of Atlanta. The city as it turns out has a very high poverty rate of over 20 percent and a foreclosure rate that is five times that of the national average. This is a very well written and though provocative article that people should read, even if you happen to not be in one of the top cities.

Many people actually are buried so far into the houses that are the family dwellings that they often are unable to pay both the first and the second mortgages. So what does happen in this situation where you are upside down to the point that if you didn’t pay the second mortgage? Well, while it is still an option for a second mortgage holder to initiate a foreclosure on the property it is unlikely that they would do so because all the profits would go to pay the first mortgage leaving them out in the cold. However, it is going to have a long reaching effect on your credit score and so it would be wise to not follow that route if it can be avoided.

Fannie Mae has announced a new plan that they hope will be successful in many ways. It is known as a deed for lease program. This article walks you through the ins and outs of it all but in a nutshell it allows you to avoid foreclosure by signing a lease that allows you to actually stay in the home rather than to be foreclosed on. It is a case of desperate measures being designed to fit these desperate times that we are living through in this country today. In order for the homeowner to qualify it must be the primary residence and they must not be able to qualify to get the loan restructured. The new lease is good for 12 months and then may be done monthly there after and can not exceed more than 31 percent of the persons income. While it is not the best option, it beats being booted out of your home.

This story is all about the Home Loan Modification program. You can go here and get some quick information about the people interested in it. The interesting tidbit that jumped out at me is the one that pointed out that every time a home is foreclosed, the rest of the homes in that immediate neighborhood lose an average of 9% of the value that they had.

Finally the folks in Mouseland in Florida, fondly known as the Orlando area, are currently ranked as the ninth highest in foreclosures in the United States of America. While the rest of the Sunshine state has seen a nice decline in the rates, the area around Orlando continues to skyrocket in the numbers.

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There is a very interesting story posted on the Business Week website this week. It asks a rather simple question that I think a lot people would be interested in knowing the answer and general consensus to. Should Wall Street Give Their Bonuses to the Homeless? Most people directly blame Wall Street for the problems that the country is in so it seems like a fair thought that they should be forced to give the bonus money that they receive to the people that they made homeless. It is morally the right thing for them to do but whether it is actually the right thing to do is another question. Since the people that work on Wall Street are actually expected to get some good bonus checks this season, the article raises some valid questions and some of the responses might amaze you. This is actually worth the time to read.

Everyone is feeling the crunch as the crisis continues to spread and widen rather than slow down and quell. In the Tampa Bay and St. Petersburg area in the state of Florida, as in all of the country, the stress of the many homeless families is putting a lot of strain on the already overtaxed homeless shelters. Once these were primarily a place for the indigent and bums today entire familes, many of middle-income brackets until recently, are now calling these shelters home. Where before only one person was there fathers, mothers and two and more children are seeking refuge from the storm that has befallen the country. People started living with relatives and then pay by the week motels and then finally resorting to the homeless shelters. Many of these folks are simply running out of options.

Not that this is going to come as a shock to people who are living this thing first hand, but the news media has come to the conclusion that President Obama and his plan to help the nation recover from the foreclosure crisis are stating that the economy has a long way to go in this recovery. According to a recent statement by the president, which I shall paraphrase here, the economy is up and growing but it is not enough. He went over numbers and some of the reasons behind the numbers and what might need to be done to get those to reverse.

For anyone that is a follower of Rock and Roll and specifically Southern Rock and Roll, this is a sad addendum to the foreclosure news. It seems that the home of many Southern Rocks early entries into music, the building that held Capricorn Records in Macon, Georgia – has fallen as a victim to the crisis and is scheduled to go up for auction and to be sold to the highest bidder. The studio housed such rock luminaries as the group Wet Willie, the legendary Allman Brothers Band, the Marshall Tucker Band. In addition several Rhythm and Blues performers recorded albums and miscellaneous tracks at the famous studio. Plans had been underway to turn it into a studio and museum fell through and is being blamed on the economic crisis that is facing the country as a whole and the Macon area of Georgia in particular.

This story from the United Press International shows just how bad things are getting with people simply walking away from the homes they were buying, The U.S. foreclosure rates are increasing and they are running into more issues than just banks that are unwilling to budge on the issues. As homeowners also choose to abandon their mortgages, economists said. With the prices of the family homes hitting all time lows, many family members have found their homes underwater financially speaking, what that means is that they owe a larger amount on the mortgages than they would be able to sell the home for. Under those conditions, the futility of making payments, especially if a breadwinner has lost a job, cause many to walk away and let the bank take the home. CitiMortgage, part of Citigroup, said 20 percent of their defaults are the result of homeowners strategically giving up on their loans and simply choosing to walk away from the home, and hope for the best. While it is not the best option available, when these families run out of options, it is sometimes the only one they are left with that they can do.

This weeks Celebrity foreclosure is Nicholas Cage. He made a reported $40 million dollars in the year between June 2008 and June 2009 and he is now officially broke and in debt to the IRS to the tune of Nearly $7 million dollars. His home in New Orleans has fallen into foreclosure and will be auctioned off next week. According to the story Cage has either sold o0r had foreclosed upon ad least seven homes so far. This according to the story is entirely due to his financial manager making risky investments that caused him to crash and burn. In short he appears to have ended up in the same boat as many of the rest of us. He spent too much money, bought things he couldn’t afford, fell behind in his bills, didn’t pay his taxes.

If you are one of the lucky few people buying and not losing a home to foreclosure in this market then you know that you have a significant deadline in store for you as far as taxes.  There has been a race as property buyers try to move real estate purchases forward so that they can make the deadline for government’s $8,000 tax credit for first time buyers which expires at the end of the month of November. Meanwhile, the foreclosure crisis is moving into small towns and suburbs, which have previously been untouched by the economic downturn, according to new research. In a lot of states the foreclosure monster seems to have reached the smaller cities that had been fairly much unscathed. These include such areas as Chico, which is in the heart of the Sacramento Valley in California. Here there has been an astronomical increase of 98% in the  foreclosure numbers when compared with the results from only third quarter of the year 2008.

Believe it or not many experts say the recession is over. But according to this story from Birmingham along with most areas of the country continued to rise through the month of September making it hard for most people to see how that could be the result of the end of the recession. Despite the rise, the local foreclosure rate in and around the Birmingham area remains below the national rate recorded in September, which was 2.93 percent.

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The foreclosure crisis for a lot of people actually started when they, as borrowers, were willing to take a risk on sub-prime loans. Today that crisis, as outlined in this story is reaching farther down the line to people who quite simply can’t find work. People who were at one time living well within their means making $60,000 dollars a year or more and living in homes valued at around $250,000. There is nothing out of the ordinary there. However when that worker loses his or her income by virtue of being laid off it doesn’t take long for the bills to far outweigh the available cash and with no income coming into the family economy it is only a matter of time before the cash reserves, if there actually were any, have been used up and another family is then on the risk of certain foreclosure.

One might wonder, with all the recent foreclosures and financial issues, what condition are the lending institutions in. We all recall earlier when several large banks like Wachovia experienced issues. Well according to this article the number is currently sitting at 106 bank closures this year and a staggeringly large number of others are teetering on the brink as we write this. According to sources dozens if not hundreds more are in similar shape. The regulators are not rushing to take them over for fear of triggering a chain reaction that could have devastating effects on the lending arena for decades to come. When a bank fails, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. swoops in, usually on a Friday afternoon. It tries to sell off the bank’s assets to buyers and cover its liabilities, primarily customer deposits. It then will tap into the insurance fund to cover the rest.

One of the largest real estate deals in the history of the United States now sits ready to fall to pieces. According to the Associate Press, at the height of the real estate bubble in 2006, an investment group led by New York City real estate firm Tishman Speyer Properties and Black Rock Realty Advisors paid $5.4 billion for a pair of gigantic Manhattan apartment complexes known as Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. While the price was outrageous it had a winning strategy: It would aggressively convert thousands of rent-regulated apartments occupied by middle-class families into luxury units that would fetch top dollar. Now three years later, to the glee of many New York renters, the tactic has been a bust. The tenants fought back, conversions happened much slower than expected and a state court ruled Thursday that about $200 million in the company’s new rent increases were improper.

What if you gave an auction and nobody came? That is almost exactly what happened at an auction in Wayne County, which houses Detroit. The city is being called an Urban Wasteland and this past weekend less than one-fifth of 9,000 properties sold this weekend at Wayne County’s annual tax foreclosure auction, according to Reuters, despite a minimum bid of only $500. As the experts predicted, the auction was dominated by speculators — may from California and New York — who routinely outbid would-be residents for the few properties deemed habitable. "Why am I competing against a bank?" Ross Wallace, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, asked Reuters. "It would be common sense to have a separate process for people who want to move back to the city or it’s going to stay empty."

These people are taking the call to fight back a little too seriously. Foreclosed on couple, Daniel Weston and Mary Ann Parmelee, charged with torturing loan modifiers. The couple and three other people allegedly sought loan modification assistance from the victims but believed that nothing was being done and wanted their money back," a statement from the district attorney’s office said. The couple, according to investigators, believed they had been swindled. Weston and another man, who previously served time for assault, are accused of carrying out the beatings in front of their three co-defendants, who prosecutors say had prior business ties with the two victims by having funneled loan-modification referrals to them.

According to the Associated Press, Sales of new homes dropped unexpectedly last month as the effects of a soon-to-expire tax credit for first-time owners started to wane. The Commerce Department says sales fell 3.6 percent to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 402,000 from a downwardly revised 417,000 in August. Economists surveyed by Thomson Reuters had expected a pace of 440,000. It was the first decline since March. Sales in September were down 7.8 percent from a year ago. The median sales price of $204,800 was off 9.1 percent from $225,200 a year earlier, but up 2.5 percent from August’s level of $199,900. First-time buyers are taking advantage of low mortgage rates, discounted prices and a tax credit of up to $8,000 if the deal is completed by the end of November. That’s provided a big lift to the market, with home re-sales climbing more than 9 percent in September, the largest amount in more than 26 years.

We all know that there is potentially nothing scarier than the foreclosure. But if you step back a moment and look at the impact that the foreclosure is having on the neighborhoods. I think you can see that the sum of the parts is far worse than just the individual issues. As I walk my neighborhood this Halloween. Abandoned homes are the undead of the mortgage crisis, and they’re haunting peoples neighborhoods more than ever. It used to be that when a homeowner defaulted, the lender foreclosed and sold the home. Selling these homes has become a difficult task, though, and so some lenders don’t want the homes. Once a lender takes possession, it is responsible for taxes and fees, such as homeowner’s association dues. Real estate experts expect these vacant homes will eventually be gobbled up by investors – some of the same ones that got us into this mess. But the price has to be pretty low to make it worthwhile for an investor to improve the homes and sell them again. But in the mean time there are literally thousands of homes in almost every city across the country sitting vacant and though they look bad on the outside, the inside is often far worse. These homes will most likely all end up being sold although some of the ones in the worst condition might be better of to be bulldozed and sold as vacant land. People just don’t care. Once they are foreclosed upon, the houses often get trashed before they leave.

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Out of the mouths of babes. In the first story this week is a fourth grader who asked president elect Obama “Why do people hate you?” President Obama was making his first Presidential visit to New Orleans this week and while there he attended a town hall meeting. During Thursday’s meeting, the 44th President answered some tough questions but the toughest question of all came from the 9-year-old fourth grader. The story fills in some of the gaps as to what the president is thinking and gives us an insight as to how his thought process goes.

If you, like millions of other Americans and investors in this country are considering the purchase of a foreclosure either to personally live in it or to try and hold it to make money, then you definitely will want to review this story. It walks you through what it considers to be the seven steps you need to take when purchasing a foreclosure to make sure that you don’t end up on the proverbial short end of the stick. The guidelines are just that, guidelines but if you follow the outlined steps they claim that you can easily save 50 percent off the homes actual value and in many cases end up with property at as much as twenty percent below what property in any given area is actually selling for at the moment. Twenty percent lower than fifty percent is an astonishing deal.

Ok, we all know that the country, in fact the entire world is in a crisis when it comes to homes and mortgages. That is no secret. But how bad do the powers that be expect it to be once the numbers are all totaled up at the end of the day? If you believe what is written here in this article, those numbers are going to be absolutely staggering. According to the story 25 million is about where it could and should end up at the current rate and following the foreclosure forecasts. In fact at the current rate of files, a new foreclosure is filed about every ten seconds ion this country alone. Even though things have slowed a small bit, we’re not out of the woods. Six states account for 62% of the nation’s foreclosure activity: California, Florida, Arizona, Nevada, Illinois and Michigan.

In a story from the Grand Rapids Michigan press we find that over half of the nearly 14,000 homeless people in western Michigan are homeless for the first time in their lives. The story tells of the hard side of life in the Great Lakes state and how what once was the stereotypical homeless person to be a derelict drug addict wandering the streets in search of food and a fix. But today you are more likely to find a family that was not long ago a middle-income group living in a comfortable home before a job loss caused them to slip into the statistics of the current crisis.

CBS news brings us a side of things that we don’t often think about. Again we are coming to you with thins out of the state of Michigan. It seems that the officials there are concerned that the more than 40,000 newly foreclosed and emptied homes in the Detroit area are going to become targets, especially with Halloween approaching, by would be arsonists that are just looking for some kicks. It seems that there have been a rash of fires that have been called arson lately and they expect that the numbers are going to go higher as people just do things they never would have ordinarily done. In fact some even suspect that the folks that were evicted might decide to ignite the old home figuring if they can ‘t have it, no one will.

It seems that the previously affluent area around Fishers, Indiana near Indianapolis has been extremely hard hit with the present crisis in the foreclosure market. A proposed water theme park that was to be built in the area has been hit for yet another time with financial issues that have left the future of the entire project in doubt and jeopardy. The developer of the proposed $80 million project is facing foreclosure on the property at the same time adjoining land critical to the project’s development has been scheduled for liquidation by a lender. The project was to be known as Paradise Bay was to have been constructed on the former Britton Golf Course site at State Road 37 and East 131st Street, but is roughly two years behind schedule leaving speculation to the fact that it may never see the light of day.

You might think that there would be ways that foreclosures could be stopped. And the reality is that there are recent reports that show that some people who could stop foreclosure on mortgage loans are not doing so because the lenders are finding a financial advantage in avoiding modification programs. The report, which was produced by the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), noted that mortgage service providers may find it more cost effective to encourage people to go into foreclosure rather than start them on a home loan modification program to find debt help. That is disturbing to most people that find out about it because these are the people that are supposedly put in the position to make things better for the consumer and instead are not doing it but are instead attempting to lead people to foreclosure rather than away from it.

This week we’re going to end on a happier note than usual. This is a story about a lender, Bank of America who chose not to foreclose on an elderly couple that has been in the home for over forty years. The wife is terminally ill and they were about to be evicted when the Bank of America stepped in and employed an unusual tactic that is being used on occasion to help some debt-strapped seniors locked into exotic mortgages known as option ARMs from losing their homes. The loan modification has made it possible for the elderly couple to remain in their home almost payment free. They set him up in a reverse mortgage the bank paid the proceeds to its self. A reverse mortgage is a form of equity loan available to older homeowners that generally doesn’t need to be repaid until after the homeowner dies. That means he can remain in his home without having to make mortgage payments. When he dies, the house reverts to the Bank of America, and his heirs can choose to buy it back for the $85,000 plus interest and fees. Or, if the heirs choose to walk away, the bank can sell the house, and any proceeds above the loan amount would go to Mr. Garcia’s family.

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The first story this week is brought to you from the News Giant CNBC. It seems that the numbers are just as high as ever when you are looking into the foreclosure crisis and the mortgage lenders who had called a moratorium on foreclosures have once again decided to kick folks out of the homes and as a result the numbers are again climbing into the high and uncharted territory. People are left with the unfortunate decision of continuing to pay for a house that is so far underwater that they will never in the foreseeable future have any equity in it or just handing the bank back the keys and walking away. A great many people are deciding to do the latter rather than the former and this article faces on those people.

We all read the numbers and see the headlines week after week on how many homes have been foreclosed and how many workers lost their jobs. It doesn’t have a huge impact on you when you look at the short-term numbers. But if you look at the totals it is down right scary. This article focuses on the plight of those people and the numbers, which are growing as we speak. The people that are written about here took it up themselves to form a tent city near Pittsburgh to draw attention to the problem during the recent G-20 Summit on the economy.

Did you realize that on the average there is a home entering foreclosure in the United States every 13 seconds? Do the math – there are 24 hours in a day, which breaks down to 86,400 seconds. If you divide 13 into that number that is over 6646 per day. If that number isn’t enough to scare you then you need a serious reality check. That is well over 2 million homes per year in this country. You need to take a minute and check out the statistics here:

Another scary thing about the current problem in the real estate market is that a good portion of the politicians that are responsible for the laws that foreclose or stop foreclosure are actually siding with the financial institutions. That means that there are a good portion of them that are actually agreeing with the way homes are being foreclosed and as a result these law makers are not fighting to help keep you and I in our homes.

The New York Daily News, one of the most watched and respected papers in the United States if not the world, has run an article stating that there is no fix for the foreclosure threat in this country. Coming from a paper with the clout that the Times has, that is a story that is generating a lot of interest. A law intended to help financially troubled New Yorkers keep their homes has been a big bust so far, according to a report obtained by the Daily News. In the face of a rising tide of foreclosures, state lawmakers a year ago approved the Foreclosure Prevention and Responsible Lending Act, requiring that borrowers with sub prime loans at risk of losing their homes get an opportunity to meet with their lenders to negotiate possible solutions. Both sides are supposed to come ready to make a deal. And yet so far only a tiny minority of the negotiating sessions has resulted in settlements, according to a new study conducted by the Center for New York City Neighborhoods.

This article proposes to help you go through the steps of restructuring your loan to avoid foreclosure and gives you the information on how and what to modify to get you to that end. The article really gives some fairly basic information, the same as most of what can be found almost anywhere on the web with a couple of links to various external sources where you can pre-qualify and find more information on the programs offered by the government. It looks like a legitimate article until you dig a little deeper and see that a loan modification company sponsors it and the rest of the page is written in some foreign language. Worth looking at so you know what not to look for in an article.

When the crisis began it was mostly the overburdened middle and lower class of homeowners that were forced into the foreclosure arena. Today as the crisis has gone on for such a long time it is starting to affect even those folks that you wouldn’t consider to be at risk for problems. In fact, the upper tier of homes now make up almost twice as much of the market as they did only three short years ago when things started getting shaky in the real estate market. At the height of the real estate bubble, homes in the bottom one-third of home values made up almost 55 percent of all foreclosures. Homes in the middle tier made up almost 29 percent of foreclosures and homes in the top tier represented only 16 percent. In July of 2009, the bottom tier level made up 35 percent of foreclosures, while the middle tier accounted for 35 percent, and the top tier for only 30 percent of foreclosed property.

The latest celebrity to have a house fall to foreclosure is singer Toni Braxton who was recently served with a foreclosure notice on her Century City, California home and the mortgage holder, City National Bank who claim that she owes more than $44,000 in interest alone on the home.

The Associated Press gives us this story of mismanagement and errors from the banking industry, which is marring the recovery and the mortgage relief efforts of the Federal Government. According to the AP Story these are in some instances very minute errors that cause devastating results. In one instance a single mom who lives with her 10-year old daughter was losing her  house in suburban Maryland after her mortgage lender  threw her out of a government loan modification program. The problem, she says she was notified, was a 7-cent error. In this instance an error of seven cents could have actually caused her to lose her home by getting her removed from a program that the government designed to help people like her. The Associate Press inquired a little deeper with the lender and was told that the problem was actually that she was below the income level for that program, but that they were stopping the foreclosure and putting it on hold for now. The story is one that every homeowner in this country needs to read and take to heart because as it shows it is not always only your errors that can cause you to loose a home.

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This is an interesting tidbit of information from the New York Daily News. It seems that in the investigation of people who have gotten help in restructuring their loan terms, end up missing another payment. It seems that over half of the loans that were checked that had gotten some form of adjustment during the first half of the year have already missed or fallen behind on at least one more payment. In a time when people and lenders are all supposed to be doing what they can to make things work this news comes as a bit of a shock. Although for those that had significant payment adjustments the numbers were not nearly so high.

Even though the number of foreclosures seems to be turning slowly in the other direction, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the damage has been done not just for the next few years but perhaps even the next generation or two of Americans. The Akron Ohio News gives us a story where they look in depth at the effects that the foreclosure crisis is going to have on the children of parents who are facing foreclosure today. The story gives us food for thought as to why the Canadian mortgage system is in a lot better shape than our own.

This next story is not going to do a lot toward fostering good feelings about mortgage attorneys. But it is a story that every homeowner needs to take a moment to read. It tells about how the specialized attorneys are popping up all over trying to make money by saying that they are going to help the mortgage holder lower the payments and modify the loans. They take the money and that is as far as it goes. Most people feel like if they are dealing with a lawyer that they should be in good hands and not have to worry about being taken.

If you are one of the many people in the country that wonder how good a foreclosure can actually be if you purchase it. This story is one that you should take a moment and look over. The people that own this home bought it in foreclosure for $118,000 and by the time they get it all spruced up and all the low carbon footprint upgrades done they figure the circa 1901 brick should have about $300,000 into it. They used a lot of recycled components in it and the article gives people some ideas that perhaps they might enjoy trying out when doing a remodel in their own house whether it is the own they own now or a foreclosure that they buy.

Some people have decided it is time to fight back against the foreclosure, the job loss and the loss of health insurance benefits. The city of Chicago was the recent sight of a rally attended by Unions and Activists that said it is time for the voices of the people to be heard and that we need to take a stand as a people to stop the money being funneled into the banks and not the social services systems in the country. While it is a bit on the extreme side, it is an article that bears a quick reading so you can keep your finger on the pulse of the malcontent in the Americas.

What do people who have been purchasing homes for the bulk of their lives do when faced with foreclosure? The only option they are left with is to rent.  With about 1 million homes in foreclosure at the close of the second quarter, according to a Treasury Department report released last week, the American dream is going backwards at bewildering speed for homeowners across the country. Many are finding themselves in the position of having to find a place to rent for the first time in their lives. While nearly all of the people who have been interviewed for this particular article are there for various reasons they almost all say that they will again own a home someday. Parts of this article are uplifting and parts are depressing but it is still worth the time to read.

Florida has some bad news and some good news on the list this month. The bad news is that the foreclosure rate is still one of the highest in the nation with a jump of 25 percent in the third quarter of the year. The good news is that the trend, while still high is slowing by a bit so there is cause for a cautious breath among people that live in the troubled state. While this article is not going to be particularly interesting to anyone other than the folks that live in Florida, it certainly gives us cause to think that maybe the worst is over and things will slow down and ultimately reverse in the somewhat near future.

This one is going to strike a raw nerve in most Americans whether they have been personally touched by the foreclosure crisis or not. It seems that during the Bush administration Federal regulators blocked attempts by state governments to prevent the exact same predatory lending practices that ultimately gave rise to the current lending and mortgage crisis that we are experiencing in the United States today. It seems that a rather obscure agency called the Office of the Currency Comptroller, which has been burdened with making sure that the banks in the country were fiscally sound, invoked an old law from 1863 law to give itself the power to override state laws against predatory lending. The OCC told states that they could not enforce predatory-lending laws, and all banks would be subject only to less-strict federal laws.

This story is good reading if you are a lower income family and looking to pursue the American dream of homeownership. It outlines what plans and strategies are out there for lower income folks who still want to own rather than rent. Good reading though not a lot of new information.

We know that things are bad but exactly how intense is the foreclosure crisis still facing the country today? Well, according to this article it is pretty bad. It seems that by the figures they present that every 13 seconds there is a foreclosure filing in the United States – that is over 4 per minute. That means that if you are an average reader, in the time it has taken you to read just this paragraph to this point two more foreclosures have been filed. That is not only bad it is downright scary for most of us. You can take a moment and go over the depressing news here:

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Even in today’s market where foreclosure property can be great buys there are still some rules that you need to abide by and some things that you need to know. We’ll call them home buying tips. This article goes over the six biggest mistakes that homebuyers make from getting pre approved for the mortgage before shopping to people who focus in more on getting a great deal while overlooking a lot of other important aspects of the whole buying a house experience. These tips work great for people buying foreclosures but they are also good tips and points to remember after the market rebounds and you are out looking to just get a home.

Long Island’s Newsday paper brings us this story on how after four solid months of increased sales in the housing market as a whole across the nation has dropped back 2.7 percent over last month. This is not a huge setback and one that was almost expected and they feel that the sales will again head upwards but that the pricing structure is not going to be so quick to follow suit and that the market is finally predicted to hit bottom, at least according to this particular article writers opinion, some time early next year before the prices begin to also slowly rise. It is not going to be a fast recovery but the outlook according to Newsday is looking up.

Sticking with the State of New York here, the New York Times has a bittersweet story on a drive by residents to try and raise money to help save the animals that have been left behind due to foreclosures which forced families out onto the streets and into situations that did not allow them to take the family pets with them. It is called the Brooklyn Bridge Pup Crawl and it is a sad part of the foreclosure story that we as humans sometimes tend to over look our four legged friends while we focus on the plight of the people and the issues that they are having. The bright side is that by calling attention to it and getting the larger corporate sponsors that have signed on board to help out financially, it should help save a lot of animals lives that would have otherwise been cut short by this tragedy.

The influential Boston Globe newspaper posted this interesting diversion on people that are taking action in a rather odd way to try and get the banks to do the right thing and get people into houses rather than throwing them out of them. It is a very thought and emotion stirring bit of writing that should be looked over by anyone that has an opinion on banks, mortgages and foreclosures. In other words, it is a bit of writing that each and every person reading this ought to take the time to read through. You will come out with stronger feelings than when you started and there is a good chance that some parts of it might even make you question what you actually thought that you believed on the issue before you started reading. Now that is what a well-crafted piece is supposed to do.

Everyone knows that a great motivator to get you off the couch and looking into purchasing a home is that tax credit offered by the government. I mean who would not like a credit of $8,000 towards out already too high taxes? The problem is that people tend to see the finish line of $8,000 and in the process of racing to get that carrot at the end of the race, they miss some of the other things along the way that could potentially cost them more. In other words they might pay too much for the house to get that credit in time or they may just settle on a higher mortgage rate than they should to get the deal closed by the 30th of November. This article is a must read for anyone that is out there thinking about that credit and looking to shuffle into something before the time runs out.

A little uplifting news is always welcome though not always easy to find when you are discussing foreclosure news. This one comes form the website of the Dallas News and it is about a, who runs a yard of rock, borrowed against her dump truck to purchase a house that was going one auction block and then she  returned it to the woman who had just been standing there crying because that home was being sold in foreclosure out from under her. The new owner arranged some do-able terms on a note for the auction value, which was about $50,000 less than what had originally been owed on the property.

According to a story in the USA Today newspaper, is you are looking to but a foreclosure and want to get a great deal then Daytona Beach in Florida is the place to take your money and run. It seems that sales there are up by about twenty percent while the average price is down by nineteen percent. Do the math and it’s pretty easy to see why this area of the country is an enticing area to shop if you are seriously looking to buy in this market. The story is here:

The recent rains and flooding in Atlanta have added some new concerns to the foreclosure problems there. The empty and foreclosed property there as a result of the flooding ahs gotten to the point that they are more than just eye sores and are now becoming health problems and causing the people in those neighborhoods to have more than just a little concern about safety and well being. The article on Fox News is located here:

The final story this week is a sad one from the city of Phoenix in Arizona. A man there opened the door to two people who had just purchased his house at auction and were there to arrange the moving of him out so they could take it over. The man shut the door and returned with a beer in one hand and a gun in the other and as the men ran away he fired at them. They were not hurt but police and SWAT team members returned to end the situation which came to a conclusion when the man fired at the officers and they returned shots hitting him and killing him. The depressing details of the altercation are located here:

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It seems that after how many months of actual crisis levels in the real estate and mortgage markets that the state of West Virginia lawmakers are finally willing to go on record as saying that they might have a problem on their hands in the eastern panhandle of the state. This article is interesting reading for you no matter whether you are from that state or not because it illustrates how a keeping your head in the sand attitude can really make people, even at the governmental level, blind to what is sitting right there in front of their eyes and has been there for a very long time.

If you have done any research online looking for information on foreclosures and data dealing with that issue there is a good chance that you have seen how bad things are in places like California, Florida and Nevada to name just the top three. You most likely also know that businesses all over are taking a huge hit during these trying times. There have been loads of stories that link the crisis we are in today to some bills that were signed by a Bill, Bill Clinton to be precise. There is a lot in this particular article that bear taking the time to read. If for no other reason than just to get the knowledge. There is a lot of very informative information that covers everything from gambling on up and on down in relation to the economic problems today.

Everyone has heard of the Habitat for Humanity and they know what they do. This story won’t shed any new light on that but it does show how one area has taken the foreclosures and merged the product and the need of the community with an organization that can do something with both. The Habitat for Humanity is taking the foreclosed homes here and flipping them by redoing them and it will employ some folks that get the job done and then the final result will be sold to lower income people that need the homes. It forms a winning combination of need and delivery in and around Austin.

At this point in time, the debt that people have rung up on credit cards is staggering. In order to keep their heads above water many people are living on credit cards so that they can afford to funnel the existing cash into the mortgage payment. The problem here is that the credit cards quickly become a nightmare with much higher interest. This story gives you four options that are the best ones for most people to help you take control of this monster and manage your payments before it becomes a contributing factor to losing your home. They cover things like, Home Equity Loans, Unsecured Loans, a Credit Card Balance Transfer and as a last resort, Debt Consolidation Companies and goes over the pros and the cons of each.

Ever wonder if is cheaper to build a new home or redo an existing dwelling? That is a valid question. In some parts of the country the cost of the material for a new structure and the labor to build it have gotten pretty low. However it is still hands down a better buy for your investment dollar to buy a used one and fix it up. Especially at the prices that home are at today. You can get a decent place for under $50,000 in most areas – that is at least half of what that place cost the original owner in most places. And even if you stick $25,000 in it you are going to have a fantastic place at a lower price and one that is positioned to make you a lot of money when the market rebounds in the next few years.

The state of Georgia has been hit hard because there were way too many houses being built at the height of the boom and now with so many in foreclosure there is a lot of good homes sitting empty and barren.  The recent visit by the new AFL-CIO president focused on the issue of the economy and the loss of family housing here and how everywhere in the country we need to concentrate on security for the average worker and not just the company CEO and the execs that work for the top part of these companies. Not a lot of new news here but it’s worth reading so that you can see that other people that may be in a position to help are actually feeling the same way as the majority of Americans.

There are figures available for everything in this crisis. You can find out what state and what town has been hit the hardest and which sector of the people have been hit the worst economically speaking. Well this one states that in the state of California, a state that has been ravaged by the crisis almost since before day one, the Asian community has been the one demographic that was hit the hardest in these trying times. This is significant because according to this article one out of every three Asian homeowners live in the state of California and this is surprising because generally speaking the Asian community has a higher income than most minorities and less debt.

So how bad is the delinquent rate on your average FHA loan these days you might be asking yourself. The answer may just surprise you even if you know the state of the mortgage industry. The most recent estimates are that around 22.9 percent of all federally funded FHA loans are now either delinquent or in a state of foreclosure. Those are not estimates or guesses. They are based on the actual numbers from the people that know. The numbers have increased and not decreased since the last set of numbers were released so that tends to make you wonder if they know what they are doing in Washington or not.

In one of the most advanced countries on the planet you wouldn’t think that a story like this would be possible. It seems that not only is the general public having major problems with mortgages and bills but in a day when the federal government is claiming to do what they can to help get things fixed it seems inconceivable that a story of how we are not getting the help to the people who have defended out freedom would not ever happen. Unfortunately this article in the Los Angeles times is just such a story about a woman who left the service and now is not getting pretty much anything that was promised to her by the government as far as education benefits or housing help or anything.

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It has gotten to the point now where we are starting to see the foreclosures actually coming in on the normal homeowners rather than just the ones that have a long history of issues, which made up the foreclosure numbers for a long time. The first people hit were the ones that lost jobs and had over priced property with two and three mortgages that were well above what they could ever afford but that were led into the over mortgage situation by easy to get no verification loans.
Today the people that are getting hit are the people that have done things the right way and have scraped and pulled together money to be able to make the payments and they for the most part even have some equity in the property but through holes in the system the houses they own are being auctioned off. One particular case in Maryland is particularly disturbing and everyone needs to take a few moments to review it so they can be forewarned.

Whenever there is trouble someone is going to try and find a way to scam people and make money off the situation. The state of Michigan is in bad shape as far as the foreclosure market goes and as one might expect, there is a very high number of available scams being offered to the people in that state to try and save their homes. As people grasp at straws and attempt to save the family homes they are more likely to fall for something that they ordinarily would not even consider, such is the case on what is happening in every state but there is a high concentration of the issues in Michigan, If you are a homeowner it would be wise of you to read this article and be prepared if you should ever be in these situations.

The state of Florida has been one of the top states in foreclosure numbers ever since the crisis began. There is a little light on the horizon today. If you are facing foreclosure in Florida there are companies available to you that can help you in not only preventing foreclosure, but prevent a foreclosure on your credit report as well. The story helps guide you through what is happening and lets you know more details and specifics on the program and what you can do to try and take advantage should you be in need of the service and live there. Click the link and go to the story here:

The United States Treasury Department has said just recently that over six million families are likely to face foreclosure over the next three years. These are some scary numbers for people that are already living life more or less in a day –by-day fashion. Jobs are unsteady and the truth is that in the world the way that it is today most anyone reading this could be the next one to get a notice from the mortgage company saying that they are being foreclosed upon.

Everyone is aware of the short-term damage that a foreclosure can do. It is going to be reflected in the financial well being of the homeowner and on the faces and the minds of the families that are forced to go through it regardless of the reasons for it. What many don’t stop and think about is the long-term damage that is done to the children that are living through the foreclosure. Not only are there going to be emotional scars from the trauma of losing a home that is most likely the only one they have eve known. It is also causing the stability of the family unit to be shaken and that can have some long reaching effects on the children as they grow up. These effects may well reach well into and past the inevitable recovery of the economy.

If you are looking for some ideas to help stop foreclosure from entering your life there may be some information here in this article that will be of some use to you. Is certainly gives you some information of refinances that you may not have considered. While the terms guarantee and such do appear from time to time within the body of the text I would recommend taking it with a grain of salt. There is certainly some useable and plausible information there that will give you some options that might help you stay off a foreclosure and there is certainly some things in there that will give you some other ideas that might help you come up with some creative options. All in all it is a well crafted story that will not be a waste of time to look over and might even be of some use down the line.

The state of California enacted a moratorium on foreclosure and prices for them back on June 15th of this year. It was enacted and set to last for ninety days meaning that it just ended and things are going back to the way they were. The people in the state of California are uncertain of what effect that is going to have but the experts agree that there will likely be a striking increase in the number of new foreclosures now that it is over.  Some people think that it is going to have prices dropping like a rock and others think that the pricing of foreclosures is going to rise. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is that it is likely to be a very unpredictable fall and winter in the state of California.

This one comes from the New York Times and gives everyone a bit of a breath of good news or at least semi good news. Part of the problem in the country today is that the price of new homes is so low that it tends to make people want to buy the new rather than the existing houses. However the price index indicates that the price of new homes is rising, this means that the existing housing market will look better and the values should rise meaning that more people will again begin to see some equity build up in the homes that they own. That really is a nice way to say that the houses people already own are hopefully going to be worth more money very soon if the trend continues and that extra build up in equity in the property could have a good effect on the overall foreclosure market. If the trend continues then people should be able to start selling houses and getting out from under the threat of foreclosure.

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