Protect Your Home With A Tennessee Foreclosure Defense Attorney

At the law firm of Richard Banks & Associates, P.C., we have been fighting foreclosure and providing debt relief services to people throughout Tennessee and North Georgia since 1974. We cannot overstate the importance of working with a reliable Tennessee foreclosure defense attorney when it comes to saving your home. Your foreclosure defense lawyer will explain the legal process, help you understand your options and stand up for your rights.

Preventing Foreclosure Up Until The Very Last Hour

You get your first foreclosure notice and you ignore it, thinking you have time to catch up. The notices keep coming and you ignore them, doing the best you can to pay your bills, knowing that your best may not be good enough. You fall further behind on home payments.

The threat of foreclosure soon becomes more than a threat. You see the foreclosure announced in the newspaper. If you think that it is too late to do something, you are wrong. We can assist in stopping foreclosure up until an hour before the home is sold on the courthouse steps. If the foreclosure sale is set for tomorrow at 11 a.m., be at our law office by 10 a.m., and our Tennessee foreclosure defense attorney can help you keep your home.

What Is The Tennessee Foreclosure Process?

If you have not made a mortgage payment within 30 days of its due date, your loan enters into default. This is called the pre-foreclosure stage. After at least 120 days of missing a mortgage payment, your mortgage lender or their mortgage servicer will refer your loan for foreclosure. You will receive a notice of foreclosure in the mail. As soon as you receive this, it is critical to do everything you can do get up-to-date on your loan or to renegotiate payment terms. However, the lender may soon begin acceleration procedures which trigger the repossession of your home. There are two methods for foreclosure:

Judicial foreclosure: A judge determines whether the lender can foreclose on your house and sell it at auction.
Sheriff sale (nonjudicial foreclosure): The lender places an advertisement for the foreclosure sale in the newspaper for at least three weeks.

Finally, the foreclosure auction occurs. This is when bidders make their best offer for the home. Before this point, you need to work with a foreclosure defense attorney to explore all options for keeping your house – including bankruptcy.

Does Filing Bankruptcy Avoid Foreclosure?

Many people facing foreclosure wonder if bankruptcy can provide them with protection. There is no single, black-and-white answer to the above question. Instead, it depends on several factors, including how much equity you have in your home and which type of personal bankruptcy filing you choose to pursue.

Chapter 13 is often more effective for stopping foreclosure. It allows you to create a repayment plan to catch up on missed payments over a 3- to 5-year period while keeping your home. If you adhere to the repayment plan, you can avoid foreclosure.

Chapter 7: This type can temporarily halt foreclosure through an automatic stay, which stops all collection activities, including foreclosure. However, this is usually a short-term solution, as it doesn’t provide a way to catch up on missed mortgage payments.

Ultimately, whether you can anticipate losing your home comes down to how much equity you have in it and how that equity compares against the exemption amount the states of Tennessee and Georgia allow. This exemption enables homeowners to protect a certain amount of equity in their primary residence from creditors during the bankruptcy process.

No two bankruptcy cases are the same, so keep in mind that what holds true for, say, a friend or neighbor who files for bankruptcy may not do the same for you. It’s a good idea to check the latest figures and consult with a bankruptcy attorney for detailed information.

Contact A Cleveland Foreclosure Defense Lawyer Immediately

While we are happy to provide fast action in order to help you save your home from foreclosure, we encourage you to act as soon as possible. Waiting until the last minute does little more than increase your stress level. We encourage you to contact our lawyers as soon as possible so we have plenty of time to review all of your options, which may include home loan modification to help you prevent foreclosure.

Our law firm provides foreclosure defense through Chapter 7 bankruptcy and Chapter 13 bankruptcy, as well as other methods based on your situation.