Refinance House With Bad Credit

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WASHINGTON - The Obama administration, battling a foreclosure crisis that shows no signs of relenting, will step up pressure on mortgage companies to do more to help people remain in their homes, officials said Saturday.

The administration will announce its expanded program on Monday, Treasury spokeswoman Meg Reilly said.

"We are taking additional steps to enhance servicer transparency and accountability," Reilly said. She said the goal was to increase the rate that troubled home loans were converted into new loans with lower monthly payments.

Industry officials said the new effort would include increased pressure on mortgage companies to accelerate loan modifications by highlighting firms that are lagging in that area.

The Treasury is also expected to announce that it will wait until the loan modifications are permanent before paying cash incentives to mortgage companies that lower loan payments.

Under the $75 billion Treasury program, companies that agree to lower payments for troubled borrowers collect $1,000 initially from the government for each loan, followed by $1,000 annually for up to three years.

The government support, which is provided from the $700 billion financial bailout program, is aimed at providing cash incentives for mortgage providers to accept smaller mortgage payments rather than foreclosing on homes.

The program has come under heavy criticism for failing to do enough to attack a tidal wave of foreclosures. Analysts said the foreclosure crisis is likely to persist well into next year as high unemployment pushes more people out of their homes.

Rising foreclosures depress home prices and threaten the sustainability of the fledgling economic recovery.

A report last week from the Mortgage Bankers Association found that 14 percent of homeowners with mortgages were either behind on payments or in foreclosure at the end of September, a record level for the ninth straight quarter.

The Congressional Oversight Panel, a committee that monitors spending under Treasury's bailout program, concluded in a report last month that foreclosures are now threatening families who took out conventional, fixed-rate mortgages and put down payments of 10 to 20 percent on homes that would have been within their means in a normal market.

Treasury's program, known as the Home Affordable Modification Program, "is targeted at the housing crisis as it existed six months ago, rather than as it exists right now," the report said.

Scott Talbott, senior vice president of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable, said the industry supported many of the changes Treasury was proposing.

But he said the foreclosure problem, which began with heavy defaults on subprime mortgages, was expanding to more traditional types of mortgages because of unemployment which has now hit a 26-year high of 10.2 percent.
"The subprime problem has regrettably morphed into an unemployment problem," Talbott said. He said there was no government program to help the unemployed who are in danger of losing their homes but "many private lenders are modifying loans for the unemployed on their own."

Treasury's Reilly said the expanded program would, among other steps, make more aid available to struggling borrowers and expand the number of organizations providing help.

By MARTIN CRUTSINGER, AP Economics Writer

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On May 20th, 2009, President Obama signed the Helping Families Save Their Homes Act:

"The Helping Families Save Their Homes Act advances the goals of our existing housing plan by providing assistance to responsible homeowners and preventing avoidable foreclosures." This bill is about, "getting folks into sustainable and affordable mortgages, and more importantly, keeping them in their homes. And it expands the reach of our existing housing plan for homeowners."

- President Barack Obama

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/Protecting-Homeowners-Protecting-the-Economy

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A year after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac teetered, industry executives and Washington policy makers are worrying that another government mortgage giant could be the next housing domino.

Problems at the Federal Housing Administration, which guarantees mortgages with low down payments, are becoming so acute that some experts warn the agency might need a federal bailout.

Running questions about the F.H.A.'s future - underscored by interviews with policy makers, analysts and home buyers - came to the fore on Thursday on Capitol Hill. In testimony before a House subcommittee, the F.H.A. commissioner, David H. Stevens, assured lawmakers that his agency would not need a bailout and that it was managing its risks.

But he acknowledged that some 20 percent of F.H.A. loans insured last year - and as many as 24 percent of those from 2007 - faced serious problems including foreclosure, offering a preview of a forthcoming audit of the agency’s finances.

"Let me simply state at the outset that based on current projections, absent any catastrophic home price decline, F.H.A. will not need to ask Congress and the American taxpayer for extraordinary assistance - we will not need a bailout," Mr. Stevens said in his testimony.

But to its critics, the F.H.A. looks like another Fannie Mae. The hearings on Thursday came on the same day that the federal agency charged with overseeing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac provided a somber assessment of those giants' health. In the year since the government stepped in to rescue them, the companies have taken $96 billion from the Treasury, and may need more.

Since the bottom fell out of the mortgage market, the F.H.A. has assumed a crucial role in the nation's housing market. Created in 1934 to help lower-income and first-time buyers purchase homes, the agency now insures roughly 5.4 million single-family home mortgages, with a combined value of $675 billion.

In addition, these loans are bundled into mortgage-backed securities and guaranteed through the Government National Mortgage Association, known as Ginnie Mae. That means the taxpayer is responsible for paying investors who own Ginnie Mae bonds when F.H.A.-backed mortgages hit trouble.

"It appears destined for a taxpayer bailout in the next 24 to 36 months," Edward Pinto, a former Fannie Mae executive, said in testimony prepared for the hearing. Mr. Pinto, who was the chief credit officer from 1987 to 1989 for Fannie Mae, went further than most housing analysts and predicted that F.H.A. losses would more than wipe out the agency’s $30 billion of cash reserves.

The issue has polarized Congress. Republicans, who led efforts to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before those companies ran into trouble, are now seeking to bridle the F.H.A. Many Democrats insist the F.H.A. is playing a vital role in the housing market, which is only just starting to stabilize.

"F.H.A. has stepped into the void left by the private market," Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat from California, said at the hearing. "Let's be clear; without F.H.A., there would be no mortgage market right now."

That was the case for Bernadine Shimon. Like many Americans, Ms. Shimon has recently been through some rough times. She lost a house to foreclosure, declared bankruptcy, got divorced and is now a single mother, teaching high school English in a Denver suburb.

She wanted a house but no lender would touch her. The Federal Housing Administration was more obliging. With the F.H.A. insuring her mortgage, Ms. Shimon was able to buy a $134,000 fixer-upper in August.

"The government gave me another chance," she said.

The government is giving as many people as it possibly can the chance to buy a house or, if they are in financial difficulty, refinance it. The F.H.A. is insuring about 6,000 loans a day, four times the amount in 2006. Its portfolio is growing so fast that even F.H.A. backers express amazement.

For decades it was an article of faith that helping people of limited means like Ms. Shimon get a house was good for the new owner, good for the neighborhood and good for American capitalism. Then came the housing bust, which demonstrated that when lenders allowed people to buy houses they ultimately could not afford, it hurt the parties - while putting the economy itself in a tailspin.

In the aftermath of the crash, there is wide divergence on how easy, or how hard, it should be to become a homeowner. Skittish lenders are asking for 20 percent down, which few prospective borrowers have to spare. As a result, private lending has dwindled.

The government has stepped into the breach, facilitating loans with down payments as low as 3.5 percent and offering other incentives to stabilize the market. Real estate agents in some hard-hit areas say every single one of their clients is using the F.H.A.

"They're counting their pennies, scraping up that 3.5 percent," Bonni Malone of Prudential Americana in Las Vegas said. "Mostly they're buying foreclosed homes from banks, although I had one client who bought from a guy that was dying. It's turning around the market."

While the government's actions have helped avert full-scale economic disaster, there is growing concern that it might have doled out its favors with too generous a hand.

Many of the loans the F.H.A. insured in 2007 and last year are now turning delinquent, agency officials acknowledge. The loans made in those two years are performing "far worse" than newer loans, dragging down the whole portfolio, Mr. Stevens of the F.H.A. said in an interview.

The number of F.H.A. mortgage holders in default is 410,916, up 76 percent from a year ago, when 232,864 were in default, according to agency data.

Despite the agency's attempt to outrun its fate by insuring ever-larger amounts of new loans to such borrowers as Ms. Shimon - the current rate is over a billion dollars a day - 7.77 percent of the portfolio is in default, up from 5.6 percent a year ago.

Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said in an interview that the defaults were, in essence, worth it.

"I don't think it's a bad thing that the bad loans occurred," he said. "It was an effort to keep prices from falling too fast. That's a policy."

The troubled loans are nevertheless weighing on the agency's capital reserve fund, which has fallen to below its Congressionally mandated minimum of 2 percent, from over 6 percent two years ago.

The optimism expressed by Mr. Stevens, the F.H.A. commissioner, places him at odds not only with some outside experts but with Kenneth Donohue, the inspector general of the Housing and Urban Development Department, who is also F.H.A.'s watchdog. Mr. Donohue said the drop in reserves was "a flashing red light" that the agency was not taking seriously enough.

"It might be we'll get ourselves out of this and that everything will be fine, but I don't paint that rosy a picture," Mr. Donohue said. "They're banking on the fact that the economy will continue to improve, that the housing market will begin to sustain itself."

He noted that if private lenders had raised their down payment requirements in the last two years, it raised the question, "what does the F.H.A. think it is doing by asking only 3.5 percent?"

Any more than that and Ms. Shimon, 45, would still be a renter. As it was, she cashed in her retirement savings account to come up with the necessary funds. She did not have enough to spare for closing costs, so her mortgage broker arranged a deal where the charges were wrapped into the loan at the cost of a higher interest rate. She cried when the deal was done.

The house was empty and trashed. Slowly, she is trying to bring it back to life. She spent the first few weeks picking up garbage in the backyard.

Is Ms. Shimon a good bet? Even she has no easy answer. Her mortgage payment, $1,100, is half of what she takes home every month. It is not easy to make ends meet. Teachers can get laid off like everyone else.

"The government," she said, "is doing what it needed to do - taking a risk on people."

Chaz Fullenkamp, an automotive technician in Columbus, Ohio, got an F.H.A. loan even though he was living on the financial edge. "If I got unemployed, I'd be wiped out in a month or two," he says. Thanks to the F.H.A., however, he is better off than he used to be.

Mr. Fullenkamp used F.H.A. insurance to buy a house this spring for $179,000. The eager seller paid the closing costs and also gave Mr. Fullenkamp $2,500 in cash. He immediately applied for the $8,000 tax rebate. Even taking his down payment into account, he came out ahead.

"I knew in my heart I could not really afford the house, but they gave it to me anyway," said Mr. Fullenkamp, 22. "I thought, 'Wow, I'm surprised I pulled that off.'"

As the number of loans has soared, random quality control checks have decreased sharply, F.H.A. staff members say. Mr. Donohue, the inspector general, cited numerous examples of organized fraud in testimony to Congress earlier this year.

"They need to stop taking bad loans in the door," he said in an interview. "They're taking on all this volume, they have to have very active underwriting standards."

by David Streitfeld and Louise Story, The New York Times, Jack Healy contributed reporting from New York.

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WASHINGTON - The Obama administration said Thursday that 500,000 homeowners have had their loans modified under its mortgage relief plan, reaching a goal set over the summer.

The $50 billion program, launched in March, is designed to reduce foreclosures by lowering borrowers' monthly payments to more affordable levels. The program was slow to get going, but officials still believe the program is on track to help between 3 million to 4 million borrowers within three years.

The government has also launched a new effort to streamline the application process and simplified income and documentation requirements. And top administration officials were meeting Thursday with executives at large mortgage servicing companies to discuss their progress under the program.

"We've put significant pressure on servicers to ramp up their efforts," said Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan. "We're holding them to higher performance standards."

However, many housing advocates have been disappointed with the plan's progress and say that getting a loan modification is still a battle. Most lenders, they say, are still unwilling to reduce the borrowers' principal balance, a key concern in areas like California where prices have dropped dramatically.

"It's not working fast enough and it's not working broadly enough,' said Kevin Stein, associate director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, based in San Francisco. "There are no obvious consequences to the servicers for not doing what they're supposed to be doing."

By ALAN ZIBEL, AP Real Estate Writer

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WASHINGTON - Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Friday a government program intended to spark lending to consumers and businesses is still necessary even with other emergency lending programs winding down as the economy recovers.

"An ongoing need still clearly exists" for the program, which also is aimed at making sure loans flow to the troubled commercial real estate market, Bernanke said in brief remarks to a conference here sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.

The Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility goes to the heart of efforts by the Fed and Obama administration to get credit flowing more normally again, a key ingredient to a lasting economic recovery. The Fed has extended the TALF - which has the potential to generate up to a $1 trillion in lending for households and businesses - into next year. It was originally set to expire at the end of this year.

Under the program, which got off to a slow start in March, the Fed provides loans to investors. They use the money to buy newly issued securities backed by auto and student loans, credit cards, business equipment, commercial real estate and loans guaranteed by the Small Business Administration.

In the first phase, the Fed was making $200 billion available for the loans. However, investors have requested far less than that.

Still, Bernanke said the program is responsible for indirectly financing nearly 3 million loans to households - excluding credit cards - and nearly 400,000 loans to small business.

The program has attracted 121 borrowers so far, including investors of all sizes, he said.

But analysts say it is still difficult for many consumers to secure loans, one of the forces threatening to restrain the budding economic recovery.

In fielding questions after his remarks, Bernanke said the TALF program helped drive down rates on auto loans, which have "improved considerably."

Bernanke also said he was "hopeful the situation in the auto industry is going to improve." Auto sales - and production - have gotten a lift from the now-defunct government Cash for Clunkers program, where people got a rebate of up to $4,500 to buy new cars and trade in old gas guzzlers.

The Fed chief also pledged to reach out even more to minority-owned companies to make sure they are being included and helped by various government emergency lending programs.

By JEANNINE AVERSA, AP Economics Writer

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MIAMI - It's the perfect Miami morning at Carlos Justo's penthouse - warm and bright, with luxury yachts powering through the sparkling blue Atlantic Ocean some 30 stories below.

Justo, a 53-year-old real estate agent, has been awake since 3:30 a.m. but he shows no sign of fatigue. His eyes scan back and forth, from the high rise condos, to the water, and back to the condos.

An assistant, sitting at a glass table with her back to the stunning view, is talking business. She wants to know whether he will receive any commissions or checks anytime soon.

"Right now, we don't have any money," Justo says. He continues talking. Fast. Pacing back and forth, he gazes out the window.

"There's money to be made," he says, grinning. "I'm creating the team. I'm creating the billion-dollar real estate team."

In fact, Justo is $20 million in debt. He is five months into a massive bankruptcy filing. The IRS is after him for $6 million.

And yet, he dreams.

A Cuban immigrant who came to the United States with nothing, Justo's is a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, a peculiarly American dream.

Once, he starred on the TLC network program "Million Dollar Agents." There was a time he appeared in social columns for brokering real estate deals for one-named celebrities like J-Lo, Shaq, Versace, and two-named notables like Gloria Estefan, Sylvester Stallone, Rosie O'Donnell.
Like so many of our modern titans - think Donald Trump - he inspires both admiration and contempt. Greed, he acknowledges, fueled his rise. Hubris ensured his fall.

Next time, he says, it will all be different.
___

Living among the wealthy didn't come naturally to Justo; he was born in Cuba, and as a child lived without electricity, running water or plumbing.

His family came to Miami in 1967 when Justo was 11. He got his GED at night school but by the time he was 19, Justo had learned English and bought his first home - a modest, stucco triplex - for $20,000 with money he made as a janitor.

For the man who grew up with so little, talking about homes came easily. So he got his real estate license. Early on, he targeted the top end of Miami's real estate market, the places most folks see on TV: mansions accessorized with palm trees, sugar-sand beaches and turquoise waters.

In 2000, he brokered the $19 million sale of the area's most famous home, the Ocean Drive mansion where fashion designer Gianni Versace was killed.

Justo's success was astronomical, the product of his aggressive enthusiasm, uncanny knowledge of the ultra-rich and a phenomenal real estate market.

In 2005, Justo was worth $20 million. He and the agents who worked for him sold $200 million in real estate in a single year. He was also the owner of 12 multimillion dollar estates in the county's most exclusive enclaves; he intended to eventually flip them and make a profit. Justo and his business partner, Irving Padron, were awarded a prestigious Sotheby's franchise and opened its offices in one of the few historic mansions in downtown Miami.

His strategy seemed like a sure thing in a city filled with speculation.

Unlike most other brokers in Miami at the time, Justo never dealt in new condominiums - he thought they were too risky. In 2005, he was quoted in the Miami Herald as saying, "I refuse to sell condos; I think it's irresponsible. They will end up falling on their asses."

Those were the days when Americans were addicted to real estate. It seemed like on every cable channel, there was a different program featuring the nation's collective obsession. Justo was in the middle of it all; a promo for "Million Dollar Agents" described him as "the biggest fish in Miami's shark-infested pool of real estate."

Crews filmed him racing maniacally around Miami, showing luxury homes by day (from a helicopter) and going to parties at night (in a chauffeured Rolls Royce). Cameras captured his unorthodox methods of doing business: using a lunar calendar to plan deals, going barefoot during meetings, meditating with his sales team.

Justo was a natural on TV, with his amber eyes, bald head and perpetual tan. His custom-made, silk suits - white or black or occasionally red - looked suspiciously like pajamas, which he wore to closings and clubs alike.

"We get paid for having fun!" Justo roared in one episode.

Justo spent $1,000 on sushi lunches, $3,000 a month on life coaching. He didn't accumulate many things - he enjoyed sparsely decorated, all-white furniture and rooms - and freely let his friends stay in the various homes he owned.

Justo says that during those years, he "wasn't operating out of integrity" - and that many of the people surrounding him weren't, either. Greed and ego were his motivation. He took advice, he says, from the wrong people and didn't pay attention to details.

He also didn't make many friends, says Kevin Tomlinson, a real estate blogger and Miami Beach agent who says Justo stole one of his clients in the late '90s.

"When I got into the business, he was the king. He was the legend that everybody looked and aspired to be," Tomlinson said. "But over the years, his reputation within the broker industry is a mixture of people being afraid or intimidated by him and his success or downright loathing."

Justo took out mortgages he couldn't afford, tapped into equity, splurged with credit cards. He didn't diversify his portfolio and didn't save a penny.

"I knew the market was going to crash," he said. "It was irresponsible what we did, what all of us did in the United States. We took out huge loans, we bought things that people had no business buying."
___

Friday, Feb. 13, 2009. A clerk at the federal court in Miami stamped "RECEIVED" on Justo's bankruptcy filing.

For three years, Justo had tried to avoid filing Chapter 7, even borrowing $15,000 from his 85-year-old mother and $75,000 from his 83-year-old aunt to pay his monthly debts. But he was underwater on too many mortgages. There were other creditors, too, including the IRS, which claimed that he should have filed his taxes in the United States, not in the U.S. Virgin Islands, which Justo says is his principal residence.

He was named in two lawsuits, one filed by a former real estate agent who worked for his team, and another by Padron, his former business partner. Both sought hundreds of thousands of dollars, alleging that Justo didn't pay commissions on various deals.

Justo had no savings, no stocks, no bonds.

His checking account hit bottom at $49.73. His financial picture was summed up in one dry sentence in the bankruptcy filing: "At the current time, the debtor has no income due to the state of the real estate market."

That week, at the urging of a friend, Justo had offered his penthouse as a crash pad to a group of traveling Buddhist monks from Tibet. As the monks chanted in an even baritone, Justo's mind reeled in turmoil.

"What happens if everything is gone?" he thought.

He wrote a $3,000 check as a donation to the Buddhist monks. It bounced.
___

Sparked by a former co-worker, Justo had studied New Age and Buddhist philosophy for years, visiting meditation retreats, spiritual centers and monasteries. But somehow, he said, the concepts of attachment and greed never really sank in until he went bankrupt.

It was the scariest thing he had ever done; scarier than meeting Fidel Castro twice in the mid 1990s, more daunting than coming out as a gay man to his parents.

"Fear is not something I'm familiar with," he says.

It was scary, he said, because it forced him to confront the truth: He had failed. He had come close to bankruptcy before, always somehow pulling himself back from the brink by selling a property or getting a loan. There was no safety net this time, not in this economy.

When he first realized he was about to lose everything, Justo wondered whether it was better not to exist at all. It was the first time, he says, that he had ever considered suicide.

"Then I thought, I'm alive, I love my life. I have my health. I don't have cancer," he says. "I started to realize how little I need to really live."

As he sheds mansions (five have already been taken by the bank, and it seems like the penthouse will be gone soon, as well) and possessions (he only owns about $6,000 worth of stuff, including furniture, clothing and, some Buddhist art), Justo insists that material possessions mean nothing to him.

And if he manages to make money again, he insists he won't be foolish with it.

"I'm creating a real estate empire based on love," he says, adding that he plans to give large chunks of his cash away to charity - once he puts a million dollars each in the bank accounts of his mother and aunt.

"In the past, I created my own hell. I needed to be brought to my knees," he says. "Whatever you believe, you create. Today, I live in a world with all possibilities."

But for Justo, those possibilities still include luxury. "I've been rich and I've been poor, and I like being rich a lot better," he says.

He says that after he pays his family back, he wants a yacht. And maybe a personal chef.
Which begs the question: Has he really learned from his mistakes?
___

It's 8:30 a.m. on a bright Miami morning and Justo has assembled a dozen people in his penthouse. They sit in a circle facing the boss and drinking coffee.

Four of Justo's "Billion-Dollar Team" are in attendance. One of his lawyers is there. So is Justo's masseuse. And a banker who is foreclosing on the penthouse. There's also an interior designer, a former client who owns a $12 million estate and the architect who is designing Michael Jordan's Florida home.

Justo talks, nonstop, for nearly two hours. The message: He's back and ready to sell. If he is afraid of the future - one in which he has to borrow money to pay his bankruptcy attorney, his cell phone bill and food - he's not showing it. It seems as though Justo is actually having fun talking about his troubles.

"That Bernie Madoff guy, the day he came clean and said he stole all those millions, that's the day he was freed," Justo says.

It's Justo's acceptance of his failure that will propel him back to the top, his friends say.

"I fully expect him to land on his feet," says Jeffrey Rubenstein, one of Justo's lawyers. "He owns what has happened to him, In this day and age and particularly in Miami, that's a very unusual thing."

But his brother, Alex Justo, is worried.

"To me, I don't think my brother needs what he's trying to build again," said Alex, who thinks his brother should focus on what he's good at - selling - and not involve others in his success.

"Forget about making this billion dollar whatever. There's no other Realtor in town that does what my brother does. He's a genius."

Justo and two of his agents descend from the penthouse and hop in a Range Rover - the Rolls Royce is long gone - and they begin a daylong frenzy of appointments and meetings. First, a cup of turbocharged Cuban coffee with his mother. Then, a powwow with his bankruptcy attorney.

In the lobby, a flat-screen TV broadcasts a CNN headline: "Good Borrowers Go Bust!"

When Justo emerges from the hour-long meeting, an agent tells him that a Saudi Arabian sheik wants to know if there are any estate rentals in Miami for $20,000 a month. Justo orders the agent to follow up, immediately.

In the car, there are calls to clients, showings arranged, listings discussed. Then, a break for lunch.

There are no more three-hour lunches. Justo and a few of his agents go to South Beach to eat on lounge chairs on the sand. His sales manager - a man from Macedonia who started as his chauffeur three years ago - totes a small bottle of sake in a lunch pail for Justo. Another agent brings a plastic bag filled with plastic foam cartons of ceviche.

Justo kicks off his loafers and strips his white pajama-suit off. He's down to his black Speedo.
Finally, he's stopped talking. He runs on the sand alone, toward the turquoise ocean. Wading into the water, he dives, head first, into a wave.

By TAMARA LUSH, Associated Press Writer

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