Untitled episode

$19,800 that night to ensure that this wasn't going to go any further. And then they also sent me a letter that I need to pay $63,000. My bill was $33,000. And they were like, yeah, well, if you don't pay us, then we're going to put your house in foreclosure immediately. I understood right then and there that this was the ploy to pretty much get back all

the money that they'd lost in the Covid forbearance plan. In the wake of COVID 19s onset, the government wanted to get a lot of money out to a lot of people really quickly, and they were worried about people losing their homes, losing their jobs, not being able to pay their mortgages and going into foreclosure. So they created a program where borrowers could for a year or

in some cases even more, forgo paying their mortgage. But they also said you would have to work out an arrangement with your lender after the fact to pay those arrears that you owed over time. That program allowed people to put their mortgage payments on pause. And mortgage servicers were mandated to comply. As the COVID forbearance program wound down, people were applying for loan modifications, and the

modification itself required a lot of paperwork. People were reporting that they were dealing with glitches and errors and what they felt sometimes a systematic problems. These sorts of paperwork delays that we encountered were happening to borrowers all across the country. In our reporting, we ended up focusing on borrowers who were military veterans because historically, the federal government has put in a lot of work, a lot

of time, a lot of money to get military veterans into homes and keep them there. Across the U.S., about 4,000 veterans whose mortgages were in the forbearance program lost their homes as of mid-October 2023, around 6000 more are in foreclosure and 34,000 others are marked delinquent. But these figures don't include thousands of borrowers who paid a lump sum. Sometimes under duress. My name is Makeda Taye

Young, and I am a major in the North Carolina National Guard. I am a chemical officer. Being a chemical officer consists of chemical, nuclear, biological and radiological warfare. So basically, I teach soldiers and anybody that's in that area how to defend themselves against chemical weaponry its something I knew I was going to do since I was 13 years old. So as I tell everybody, Go Guard.

I purchased my home in Charlotte, North Carolina in 2018, and I would have to say it was such a momentous occasion because I had just got clear from cancer and it was something I wanted to do for myself. I am cancer free, you guys! and it's a beautiful house that sits right in front of Lendle Lake and I knew as soon as I saw it online,

I was going to get it. And I got it at a great price, I mean, there's $162,000. You know,now I can sell it for a lot more but then that was a big deal and a great price to really start off for my first home. I qualified for the COVID forbearance program because I had actually left active duty to attend school. I did not seek out

this program. I was personally asked. You're eligible, why wouldn't we do this for our veterans? So I signed up for the program. My mortgage was through USAA Nation Star, and then my mortgage was actually sold to another company. They did a DBA or Do Business As under Mr. Cooper. After the 12 months came, they said, let's start the modification process. I was like, Thank God, I

owed about $9,000. This will be an easy thing to pay back over six months. After the third month of me applying, I started asking questions, Where's my application? They're like, Oh, well, your documents have expired or we can't find this. Can you resubmit? So I'm uploading it to a portal and then they keep asking me for the same documents over and over again to the point

where it was almost like an automated response and not someone actually looking at my application, I started to notice that something was going really wrong. Around month six, when I received my first denial letter for not having provided the appropriate documentation. And slowly but surely, every 30 days it would kick back with the same message as if it was automated. That's when I knew I had

to be in a lot of trouble because the person that was calling me almost every week to keep me updated kept spinning things like, I don't know what's going on. It's just different because you have renters. I know I needed a lawyer, and then once I started reaching out to people to seek representation that's when I started learning that I wasn't the only one. My name

is Rosie Bennett. I live in Coeur dAlene, Idaho, and I'm fighting to keep my house. My husband is name is James Bennett, and he was a medic in the Navy. Then he was in the Army. These are when he got the award, he saved the Army $750,000. For saving the money they gave him $750. My husband and I, we were living here for 28 years in

this home. We loved the neighborhood anyway. And when you come over the bridge and you see the lake, it was just like the European Alps. I said right there and it was really, really pretty. So that's why we got stuck here and we loved it here. After, since my husband passed away, I'm just on a fixed income. My mortgage was with Federal Savings Bank and Donovan

Mitchell Mortgage Bank. My mortgage should have taken 30 days. It's been going on ever since, for almost three years. Well over three years. They were trying to send me the form to fill out. So they sent me this envelope. I opened the envelope and there was just another envelope in there with nothing else. So I didn't know what I was supposed to mean. So I called

the company and they said they were going to send me another one and they never did. They wanted the deed of the house. I send them the deed and then they said, that's unacceptable. I had to get them to deed with my name only. Well, that couldn't happen because he was on there when we bought the house. So I went to the title company and they

gave me an affidavit which I sent in. When I called and asked them if they received it, they said, yes, we did. A few days later, I get a letter where they said they didn't receive it. So what they did then, they just put a foreclosure on my house. A lot of the veterans we spoke to who were going through these problems had other troubles they

were going through in their lives right then and there. These were all things that were destabilizing in their lives and made them more vulnerable to the sorts of paperwork delays that they were facing. My name is Monica Ines Rosario, and I'm a retired Army engineer officer. I'm originally from Fayetteville, North Carolina, and I'm a military brat. This is my article that they wrote on me about

my journey through cancer. One of my proudest moments in the military was beating cancer. I purchased a home in August of 2019, and I initially had a mortgage with Aspire Mortgage, who then later sold it to Freedom Mortgage. COVID hit, I applied for the loan modification. At the time, I was self-employed and I had a home business and I was just trying to get that up

and running all while figuring out how to make money during COVID. And it helped me out being that I started going through a divorce process during that time. The divorce really got messy. Unfortunately, it just left me in a financial hole. So the COVID forbearance was the best decision for me at the time. What was promised to me was that they would just take all the

payments that I was supposed to make during that year and forbear them until the end of the loan, which would just extend the loan out 12 payments on the back end. I made sure, at least on a phone call, that I wouldn't have to go through a income verification again, otherwise I wouldn't have taken the COVID forbearance at all. They called me. They were just requesting

some information from me they said that they needed in order to do the loan modification, which included tax paperwork for the last year or two. But it was nowhere near tax time so I hadn't done my taxes yet and I just never was able to provide it. And then at the same time going through depression. Depression and responsibility, they're like opposites. So sometimes I know for

a fact that I wasn't the most responsible adult with the situation. Anything associated with veterans or the military, our hearts want to believe that well you know, benefit the veteran 100%. However, not everything is like that. And mortgage companies, they make you feel special, getting a VA loan, but you're just another client to them. The Department of Veteran Affairs has several roles to play in this

case. So one, a VA loan is something that they back, and it is a program to make homeownership more accessible for military service members in the United States. They create their own standards for borrowing, which might be different from the mortgage market at large. So for VA loans, you don't necessarily need as much documentation or as high a salary or as a higher credit score in

order to qualify. You also don't necessarily need as large of a down payment. For VA loans, you can actually take on 103.3% debt to income ratio, which means that the amount that you borrow can be 103% of the home's value. You do have a commitment to our veterans to ensure that they're being treated fairly and that they're being treated respectfully. If they have those type of

issues, we are one of the only agencies, if not the only home loan agency out there that actually answers the phone with subject matter experts. The worst thing of their to do is not ask for help. There are a lot of avenues that we can explore, but if you're not raising your hand, you're not answering that phone that you've given up on the process, it's hard

for us to help you. My husband, he didn't want any help actually, from anybody. And we put in a request into the Veteran's Administration for help, and they denied him. I think that it is absolutely the responsibility of the VA to ensure that when they do offer programs, that there's some follow trhough, that they understand each process before they allow it to go before veterans, because

ultimately this hurts them. If you're just going to go back and take the house and take the money anyway, then it's not a benefit that serves me in any way. Through this process, I understood that they were delaying it for so long to the point where, one, they thought I was going to give up and pay or two, they thought that they could foreclose enough to

just do a mass selling of all of these homes and profit marginally. Oh my gosh. It was just horrible because I didn't have the money. And that was during the time when they raised up the rates of the house and my house went up to $800,000. They were harassing me this way so they can get the house with the foreclosure and sell it and make a

big profit. And that would have been a big profit. At the very last minute an investor reached out and I was able to strike a deal so that my house wouldn't go into foreclosure. However, I still had to sell it. The month that I moved out of my home, I weighed like 110 pounds. I'm already a very small person. Can't afford to lose that much weight.

But it was a lot all at once. You won't get anywhere without attorney's help because they will not budge and they will not listen to you. And as soon as you have an attorney, they all of a sudden everything changes. Yeah, I think I'm going to keep my home. The reason that I believe I was successful in this process was because I had the finances to

pay my debt. I think that that is the primary reason. And then the second reason that I was able to restore my credit was because I was so meticulous with documentation. One week after we published our story, the VA requested that all lenders stop foreclosing on veterans for the next six months, which would give them time to roll out a new program to help veterans facing

foreclosure. The very basis of this country is to have a home, to issue all the freedom and to live a happy and healthy life. And the one thing that they told us that they would guarantee us during our service and that was to honor us, was completely obliterated in a mass haul to take homes. And I'm not a war veteran. There are plenty of people that

have lost their legs, lost their lives, lost their sanity, and now they're losing their homes. So I feel lucky to even be able to share this story. But it's those who truly suffered after coming home. And then on top of that, to have mortgage companies take the only thing that they have away from them. And that's a place to sleep at night and to call something

their own. That's what it feels like to be actually forgotten and to know that you are forgotten. I will absolutely keep fighting to do what I need to do to make sure that the other veterans at least get the fees or maybe can get their houses back. But it's not fair to the 45, 50 year old veteran who's been in their house for 25 years, have

retired honorably to lose what they earned. Now, that is not fair. That is not something I can stand for. I only do this because those are the people that helped me get to where I'm at. So I at least owe them that. And I wish the companies honestly, I wish you felt the same way.