Texas Foreclosure Defense ™ is a branch of the Cashman Law Firm, PLLC. We focus on protecting Texas homeowners from creditors, banks, and lenders who wish to streamline the judicial process and remove them from their home. One of the benefits of living in Texas is that the Texas foreclosure laws are written to protect the homeowner from unscrupulous lenders and banks. With so many rights, many of which are written into the Texas Constitution, there are many activities that banks, creditors, and lenders may take part in that could prevent them from foreclosing on a home. Many homeowners are unaware of these rights, and so they do not respond to foreclosure notices and letters from the bank. Instead, they lie down and wait to be escorted from their homes. Do not be one of these people.
2017 UPDATE: The Texas Foreclosure Defense project is no longer active. This is a legacy page that was created in 2010, however, we kept the page up because the content was helpful to many Texas homeowners facing foreclosure over the years. We also had a blog which contained useful information to the Texas homeowner facing foreclosure. The blog can be found at https://foreclosuretexas.wordpress.com/.
Our Cashman Law Firm, PLLC is no longer taking clients for foreclosure matters. However, should you need a referral or have an issue we can help resolve, please e-mail us.
YOU AND YOUR HOME ARE NOT ALONE
“If you’re reading this, chances are that you might already be in trouble. You may be behind payments on your mortgage or car loan, debt may be stacking up, and you might feel as if there is nowhere to turn except to file bankruptcy. Allow me to share with you that bankruptcy is not your first line of defense — it is your last option.” – Rob Cashman, Texas Foreclosure Defense Attorney
To schedule a FREE, NO OBLIGATION appointment with a TEXAS FORECLOSURE DEFENSE ™ attorney to get started right away and have us begin working on protecting your home from foreclosure, click the “booknow” button below.
WHY WE CAN HELP YOU
A lender may succeed in properly foreclosing on a home, but too often, the party trying to foreclose on the mortgage document simply does not have the right to foreclose. Lenders have treated mortgages as commodities for many years now, packaging them and trading them on the market. With or without a homeowner’s knowledge, their mortgage may have been purchased, packaged, or traded several times over. It turns out that the party to whom one makes his payments or the party who is attempting to foreclose on a home might not be the proper party who has the right to collect or foreclose on the mortgage. Without knowing which questions to ask, a Texas homeowner is often helpless in mounting a defense against the foreclosure of his home.
WHY CAN YOU FIGHT BACK AND WIN?
It would be improper to suggest or advocate that a homeowner stop paying his mortgage, and anyone suggesting this should be avoided or approached with caution. However, as a Texas consumer, a homeowner does have the right to know whether the bank or company who has confronted him to foreclose on his home actually has the right to do so. The reason for this is that when the homeowner makes payments to his lender, or when he attempts to defend himself against a party trying to foreclose against his property, it would be prudent for him to seek a court order and check the documents of the party enforcing their claim against the homeowner’s property. The goal here is to make sure that the homeowner will not subject to a future law suit for dealing with the wrong entity.
With a Texas Foreclosure Defense ™ attorney on the homeowner’s side, he will have an ally who can respond to their requests at every step, and who can significantly help make sure that if the lending institutions intend to steamroll the homeowner’s rights in the declaration of default, in the acceleration of the mortgage debt and in the foreclosure sale of the property, an attorney can make sure the party asserting their rights against the homeowner is the proper party who has the right to enforce the foreclosure provisions of the homeowner’s mortgage.
In addition, a Texas Foreclosure Defense ™ attorney can be very helpful in determining whether the mortgage holder has not violated any statutes or taken any steps which violate a Texas statute. In certain cases, violation of the statute can render even the mortgage document itself invalid and unenforceable. More likely than not, an attorney can buy the homeowner time to get their affairs in order by making sure the party holding the mortgage adheres to the Texas statutes and that they have all of their documents in order. If a homeowner is behind on his mortgage or he has have creditors, tax collectors, or lenders harassing him and threatening the foreclosure of his home, an attorney can fight back on his behalf.
How Else can a Texas Foreclosure Defense ™ attorney help me during the foreclosure process?
The foreclosure statutes, as laid out by the various Texas statutes and constitutional provisions are quite complex and unlike some areas of law which are cut and dry, there is quite a bit of case law governing the rules of foreclosure. To complicate the issues, the holdings of the cases appear in some cases to be contradictory, and are fact-driven based on the homeowner’s circumstances.
Even assuming that your situation does not fall within one of the cases which benefit you or your situation, there are a number of steps that must be taken before you are deprived of your property. The lender must first properly declare that you have defaulted according to the terms of your mortgage. They must properly accelerate the debt, and must properly give you notice of your default. There is a waiting period to which the lenders must adhere so that the homeowner can make amends, cure, or negotiate an alternative arrangements as to the payment terms, or the terms of the loan. Once the mortgage debt has been accelerated, there are procedures that must be adhered to with regard to who to appoint as a trustee to sell the property at a foreclosure sale, and there are timing considerations as to when, where, and how the property must be sold in order for the sale to be valid. At the sale, there are acts of the trustee which may take place which might void the sale of the property. A prudent homeowner should have an attorney make sure there are not acts which would constitute what is known as “chilling.” A Texas Foreclosure Defense ™ attorney will also know to look for fraudulent acts in the purchase bidding process. Lastly, if the Texas lender or other party purchases property the lender is selling for less than what is owed on the mortgage, the lender has the right to seek a deficiency payment from the homeowner for the difference between what was owed and what was received at the foreclosure sale. If the homeowner is not careful, he will accept the purchase price to be the fair market value of the home and he will owe the deficiency payment which can amount to tens of thousands of dollars. Unable to pay the deficiency, he may be forced into bankruptcy. However, if the homeowner is careful, he will have hired an attorney to supervise every step of the foreclosure process, and if appropriate, his attorney will file suit to determine and argue the actual fair market value of the property to either avoid the sale or to avoid having a deficiency judgment filed against him.
There are just a few examples of many distinctions between acts taken against your property which are permitted, between acts or circumstances which are gray, and between acts which constitute an actionable violation of your rights within the statute. We at the Texas Foreclosure Defense ™ branch of the Cashman Law Firm, PLLC have taken the time to learn the distinctions and to know what to look for at every step of the foreclosure process.
WHY WE HAVE CHOSEN TO HELP YOU RATHER THAN TO SERVICE THE LENDERS.
I am Robert Z. Cashman, the principal of Texas Foreclosure Defense ™, a litigation branch of the Cashman Law Firm, PLLC. The reality is that it is much easier and straightforward for an attorney to service the lender rather than to fight on the client’s behalf. The laws are straightforward and instructions as to what needs to be done for a lender to properly foreclosure on a home are outlined in detail and are easy to follow. In many cases, there are even scripts and forms readily available that make the process of foreclosing on a property easy and effortless. Working on the side of a bank would allow for easier payments, higher fees, and turnaround business. As an example, if you have visited the doorway of the local district court any time during the past few years, seeing the hundreds of foreclosure sale notices piled one on top of another each day, it would be apparent that the banks have a much larger amount of work for the attorney than a homeowner facing foreclosure might.
But representing the banks with bigger pockets against a homeowner limited in funds, often with bad credit, and in default on his mortgage obligations does not always mean that the bank is right and the homeowner is wrong. Too often, at the time of the formation of the loan in the late 90’s, the whole mortgage loan industry was in an almost lawless free-for-all that sold home buyers mortgages they couldn’t pay for, and homeowners were all-too-happy to get 95% (or in some cases even 103%) financing on their $300,000 home often without showing any documentation of their income or their assets in order to get their mortgage approved and funded. …It was almost as if the banks were expecting the homeowners to default on their mortgage after years of paying interest only and very little principal on their loan.
Prior to the downturn in the mortgage lending industry, I used to work as a mortgage loan officer for what turned out to be one of many banks which took actions against its clients and breached its fiduciary duties to them, one client after another. Some of the things I saw before I left were unethical, fraudulent, and in some cases, plainly illegal but yet they were commonplace in the industry. Everybody paid kickbacks, but few got caught. Many mortgage brokers ran credit reports on unsuspecting potential homebuyers, a crime if it is done without their approval. A bank hid its activities behind a veil of secrecy, and even with disclosure laws on the books, the bank was able to hide material terms of a mortgage contract and was able to delay locking-in the mortgage rate so that on the date of the closing, the home buyer was forced to choose between walking away from the mortgage (which rarely happened), or was forced to accept unfavorable terms which coincidentally always seemed to manifest based on conditions “in the market” that took place the night before the closing. A bank was almost never subject to regulation that was on the books, and its activities were often governed by its managing members who frequently disregarded the law in order to maximize their profit.
Please feel free to read about my experiences as a mortgage loan officer in the mortgage banking industry.
In my opinion, both the lending institutions, Washington D.C., AND the home borrowers were at fault for the mess that resulted from the mortgage bust. Even though a homeowner might correctly come to the conclusion that he was a victim of unethical practices, chances are he was also complicit in agreeing to terms of a mortgage he could not afford. When a homeowner facing foreclosure learns that those around him — his mortgage broker, his real estate broker, and his lending institution — owed him a fiduciary duty, and that duty was broken by misinforming him about the loan that he signed and agreed to that today he is unable or unwilling to maintain, it should be logical that a Texas Foreclosure Defense ™ attorney is the proper person to sort out who owed whom a duty of care and a duty of loyalty, and who breached that duty to make money from commissions and fees that should have remained in the pockets of the home buyer.
Bottom line, I believe that while everybody bears responsibility for their actions, it might not be a homeowner’s fault that his loan is upside down, that he is unable to make his payments, and that his financial picture is collapsing from every angle. There may be a likelihood that if someone were doing their job, the home buyer would have been forced to purchase a home that was more within his means. The banks are no less free from blame in charging thousands in fees [(“points”) hidden in non-obvious places in the mortgage loan application and the mortgage document] than are the home buyers who are now homeowners facing foreclosure of that same mortgage document. Now those same lenders who defrauded their customers and in some cases, took their life savings, are now trying to take away their client’s home through the foreclosure process causing the homeowner to lose every payment he worked to make each month over the years. For this reason among many others, because neither party has clean hands, I believe every homeowner facing foreclosure at least deserves a fair chance to make sure there is an attorney fighting on their side when they are being bullied at every step of the foreclosure by the very institutions that placed them in the mortgage they are now defaulting.
Click the “booknow” button below to schedule a FREE, NO OBLIGATION appointment with a CASHMAN FORECLOSURE DEFENSE™ attorney.
2021 UPDATE: Again, this is a legacy page that was created in 2010. Our Cashman Law Firm, PLLC is no longer taking clients for foreclosure matters. This is why we did not provide any links to contact us as we did in our original article. However, should you need a referral or have an issue we can help resolve, please e-mail us.
Although mortgage laws, creditor and lender schemes, and bank foreclosure issues have likely evolved since we originally worked on them, I have chosen to keep our Foreclosure Texas Blog still up and running. This blog was a good resource, and no doubt it will still be of use to you. You can find it at https://foreclosuretexas.wordpress.com/.