Are All Foreclosure Counseling Services Questionable?
Yes there are many options to saving your home from a foreclosure and most of them will of course start with you and all of the others will involve someone else. And that is where you will have to be cautious because not all of these wonderful opportunities to save your home from foreclosure are legit, the best way, or even the first option to consider.
There are some legitimate service providers out there and they are regulated and should be your next course of action after contacting the lender. However any offers outside of those could well be someone on the hunt for their next big financial break at the expense of desperate homeowners and their family.
It seems for every homeowner that is possibly facing foreclosure, there are three times as many predators devising up an unscrupulous plan to tempt homeowners into the wrong direction. So it is very important to put on some protective working gear and try to do everything that your lender or free foreclosure counselor is suggesting unless their first suggestion is to sale. And of course, that should be a last resort.
Some of the most common scams/bad ideas that are being offered right now to desperate homeowners are the leaseback option where someone requires the worried homeowner to deed over the home to them for either no or little money in exchange for the homeowner being able to continue living in the home and then repurchase the home in a year or so.
Of course this may sound like a brilliant idea but miss just one payment and the property becomes the asset of the person who made the offer and your family gets evicted unless you have other options in place which if you are in this spot you probably do not.
Another common mistake or bad idea made is allowing a third party to have complete and total control of their financial affairs. For example, never doing follow up, never checking behind the third party, never attempting to save their home solo first.
