Fairfax VA – No one likes to have a debt hanging over their heads. Many Fairfax VA homeowners in this situation worry, “Is there a possibility I could go to jail for this? What will my friends think if they find out? What if the bank sues me and takes everything I own? Will they garnish my wages? Will the levy my bank account?”
I know a woman who didn’t have the money to pay off her debt and so she just stopped paying completely. In fact, she stopped paying on several debts. We’ll call her Jill.
Nearly three years ago, Jill completed a Fairfax short sale on her home. She took out her original loan with Countrywide, which is now owned by Bank of America. The loan’s owner was a “sliced and diced trust.”
There’s a reason I’ve called these kind of people “zombie debt owners” – because they typically don’t come looking for you after a short sale. The owner of Jill’s loan ended up losing about $85,000. She hasn’t paid a single dime. Sure, she got letters and phone calls from the bank for several months but after that – the calls stopped.
She hasn’t heard from Bank of America since. Jill is fairly confident she won’t hear anything from them ever again. That’s what is so great about the “sliced and diced” loans: there is no single owner. There are probably 10,000 owners of her loan scattered all over the world. None of them have time to track down Jill specifically and make her pay off her debt. And Bank of America? They’re too busy with all of their other books to do anything about it either.
Not only did Jill stop paying on her short sale debt, she stopped paying on five different credit cards with more than $15,000 owed. She’d lost her job and just simply didn’t have the means to pay back her debt.
Those credit card companies still call her today. Sure, she could make them stop calling by sending them a letter but they don’t bother her enough to do that. To date, only one of those creditors has filed a lawsuit. But even in that case, the creditor hasn’t even done anything with the lawsuit since it was filed. The haven’t filed anything else for the last 18 months. The case is still in limbo. The most likely outcome for the lawsuit is that it will be dismissed due to lack of activity.
And even if the creditor does get a judgment? They still have to collect on it! The truth of the matter is, only 15 percent of all judgments are ever paid. From the looks of it, that creditor will probably never see a judgment given their inactivity on the case.
Jill walked away from more than $100,000 in debt and hasn’t had to pay back a single penny yet! In the future, Jill might decide she wants to settle with the credit card companies – but it will be on her own accord, not because any creditor is forcing her t.
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Thanks for reading this,
Thierry is a Real Estate Agent at RE/MAX Premier, and Host of Talk Radio’s, ‘Inside Real Estate’.
Phone: (703) 322-0600.
Thierry Roche specializes in loan modifications and short sales in Fairfax Virginia. Fairfax Loan Modification Help. Fairfax Short Sales. Fairfax Short Sale Realtor. Fairfax County Short Sale Realtor. Fairfax VA Short Sales. Fairfax Realtor.
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