Foreclosure > About Foreclosure

About Foreclosure

The state of California currently has the third highest foreclosure rate in the nation. If you have been issued a foreclosure notice, or your lender has been threatening foreclosure, you are not alone, but may need to act quickly to save your home.

What is foreclosure?
Foreclosure is the process that lenders take to shut out a homeowner’s rights and take back property secured by a defaulted mortgage or deed of trust. Most often in California lenders follow a non-judicial foreclosure process, where they auction your property at a public sale and it is either purchased by a third party, or retained by the lender thereafter.

Details about the process:
Lenders generally begin threatening foreclosure after you have missed a few months of mortgage payments. If you do not, or cannot, bring yourself current on your mortgage, they may file a Notice of Default. The Notice of Default is a certified letter (often received multiple times) indicating that you are in default on your mortgage by a certain amount of money, and must bring yourself current to avoid foreclosure proceedings.

Three months after your Notice of Default is issued, if you have not brought yourself current, a lender sends you a Notice of Sale with a sale date, time, and location explicitly stated on it. In most cases, you have until 5 days before the stated sale date to cure the default on your home, or the property will be up for auction on that date.

Once the sale occurs, your remedies will be limited, so it is important for you to address the issue as soon as you are notified of the foreclosure proceedings. In MOST cases, even if you are willing to walk away from the property, foreclosure is NOT the best way to do it.

For more questions regarding foreclosure, and your options when you are notified about a foreclosure on your property, please contact the Stone Haven Law Group today.