It's Jenn #2...aka the seller!!

Hi everybody...I'm the "other" Jenn! I will be dropping by once in a while to share my experience with a Bank of America short sale---as a seller. I want to thank Jenn (#1) for letting me do this...I want to let people know what they are getting into with a short sale, and sometimes I just may need to vent!! Let me give you a little bit of history so you can see how we got to this point. We never thought that we would need to resort to a short sale! About a year and a half after my husband and I married, we decided we were ready to build a house. We went to a custom home builder where we lived, and had them design our dream home. Their original estimate on what it would cost to build the house was $184,000. After the super-slick salesman finished with us, the total of the house was $269,000. We were 22 and 23 years old, and had no conception of how much money that really was! We also weren’t thinking about things like taxes and insurance that would be added into our payment. To make matters worse, the Countrywide loan officer that worked in conjunction with the builder was as slick as the house salesman. She tried her best to talk us into one of their new “pay-option ARM” loans. These are the very type of loans that helped contribute to the housing crash. Fortunately, we opted out of the ARM loan, and decided to go with a plain-vanilla 30 year fixed loan. We found out later that loan officers get more commission when they close those types of loans. I’m so glad we didn’t do it!
The house was complete in June of 2006 and we moved in. The payments on the house started in July. Our loan payment was supposed to be $1600 per month, but once we added in taxes and insurance, plus PMI, the payment was bumped up to $1900. It was tight but we were fine…my husband and I both worked, and it took every penny to pay the bills. The crazy thing is…the Countrywide loan officer I was telling you about?? She “worked” the numbers and had our loan based on my husband’s income alone! He made $32,500 per year at the time. So Countrywide approved a $269,000 loan on an income of $32,500, and they wonder why they went bankrupt??? We were barely making it on TWO salaries, but we WERE making it. We took our obligations very seriously. Over the next several years, our payment increased to $2111, over $200 per month higher than when we started.
In July of last year, we found out we were pregnant with twins, and decided it would be best if I quit my job and stayed home. At that time, we were going to replace my income with my husband’s performance bonuses. His construction-based job pays very large bonuses based on the profitability of the jobs he works on. The bonuses he received were more than enough to replace what I made. That was all fine and good…until January of this year, when his company put a freeze on all bonuses and raises due to the economy. All of a sudden, we were faced with a problem. We contacted Bank of America many times, asking for the mortgage help that they were supposed to be offering, according to the terms of the government bailout. They were completely unwilling to help; they told us they couldn’t do anything until we were at least three months late on our payments!! We didn’t want to stop our mortgage payment….we had great credit and wanted to keep it that way. Finally, after trying again and again to get help from them, we decided that if they were so insistent that we had to miss payments in order to get help, then that’s what we would do. We put the house on the market, and stopped making payments. Gosh, its hard to even type that sentence. It goes against everything we have ever been taught. We started saving every penny from that mortgage money, and using it to pay other debt, trying to do everything we could to help my husband’s credit. The bank was still unwilling to help; they basically just kept saying they would foreclose before they would offer any loan modification.
That brings us to August. We finally received an offer on the house. The buyers knew that we were trying to do a short sale. Our asking price was $230,000 (we owed $259,000). They offered $205,000. We weren’t crazy about sending such a low offer to the bank, but that was the only offer coming in…the market in South Carolina isn’t as hopping as the Vegas market!! We sent the offer, plus every other thing they asked for on August 24th. They said it would take 10 days to get a Phase 1 negotiator assigned. When I called back, they said they still didn’t have our paperwork. Come to find out, it took from August 24th to September 9th for them to get our fax off of the machine and get it into their system. Then they said it would be 10 days from that date (Sept 9) to get the negotiator assigned. I called 9 days later, and they said to give them a few more days. When I called back several days later, they said that our loan had been transferred to the loan modification department!! No one could tell me why it had been send over there. I asked them why they were willing to modify our loan now, when we had been asking for help months before. No one could answer that question either. The lady I spoke to said that we would have to call the modification department and ask to have the file transferred back over to short sale. We did that last week, and they said that would take 3 or 4 days to get done. Here is the real kicker: once the loan finally makes it back to the short sale department, our file will go to the back of the line, and we will have to wait another 10 days for a negotiator, and we all know that it won’t happen in 10 days. I am supposed to call the bank tomorrow to see if they have the file yet. I am NOT optimistic. I will say one thing I AM impressed with is the ability that BoA employees have for bull$#!#. I think they must make all short sale employees take extensive classes on how to give people the runaround. I can’t believe I started this process thinking that maybe we would be the exception instead of the rule. I guess there is a fool born every day, huh?? I apologize for this post being so long!! I promise they won’t all be this way…I just wanted to give you a little history so you knew our story! I’ll post this afternoon or tomorrow after I call the bank!!