Back to Panama City Real Estate News
Bank of America To Help Homeowners
By Art Thompson | October 6, 2008
For those of you who didn’t know, Countrywide Financial Corporation was acquired by Bank of America back in June. At the same time the lending giant was being “bought out,” a lawsuit was being filed by Illinois and California stating the bank had used deceptive mortgage practices, which lead to an enormous amount of failing loans.
Today, Bank of America has agreed to settle the suit by modifying thousands of loans to assist around 400,000 people from losing their homes. The way they intend to do this is by either reducing interest rates, cutting out the principal amount of the loan or assist homeowners in moving into new homes.
The Illinois Attorney General, Lisa Madigan, said, “This is going to provide a tremendous amount of relief.” How much relief you ask? About $8.7 billion. The settlement will only apply to homeowners who received their loan through Countrywide. In addition, Bank of America will not charge mortgagees any loan modification fees, prepayment penalties, and will make sure that the payments don’t exceed 34% of their income.
At the moment, eleven states have joined the settlement and they include Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Washington.
Bank of America intends on starting the program in December of this year.
[source]
Category: Mortgage / Interest Rates |
October 21st, 2008 at 3:25 pm
[...] of three. Those that didn’t meet the industry standard were GMAC Mortgage, Chase and Countrywide Home Loans. SunTrust was able to gather the most pleased customers and ranked at 790 points on the [...]
December 11th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
[...] are banks that are required to modify loans to assist homeowners. One of those is Bank of America. Bank of America recently settled a lawsuit by agreeing to modify 400,000 loans after the state of Illinoi and California sued for deceptive [...]