Help, I am Facing Foreclosure.
Knock, knock came the noise from the front door. I gingerly opened the door to find my postman handing me an envelope requiring my signature. It was for certified mail.
It was a Notice of Default from my servicer. It felt as if someone had physically punched me in the gut and I felt like vomiting. Intellectually, I knew this moment would arrive, but yet I cannot help the way I feel.
I couldn't even get myself to finish reading the rest of the document before I tossed it on my desk and crawled into bed and cried.
As a grown man, I cannot recall when the last time I cried. I've been conditioned to "be a man" and not to break under pressure. But despite it all, I cried. Somehow, I wish that someone would come and tell me everything is going to be OK, just like my mother did when I was a little boy. Unfortunately, nobody could. Because nobody understands what I am going through. It's hard to "keep it together" when your whole world is falling apart around you.
My name is Vince Khan. This is my story.
I made a lot of money around 2002-2004. I made enough money to retire for the rest of my life. With that money, I invested in a number of properties, partly as a way to park my money and partly as a way to make a little money investing in real estate.
In 2009 I started another business that required a lot of startup capital. Things didn't turn out as I had planned. I had invested all my money into the venture but it was not enough. I needed more money. In 2010, I made a decision to stop paying the mortgage for 4 of my investment properties to feed my new start up, in the hopes that eventually, my startup would turn around and I would then have enough money to pay back the bank.
I was wrong. My startup failed and I lost everything and was heavily in debt to boot.
So, like millions of people around the country, I was facing foreclosure.
Two months after I stopped making payments, I started looking at my options. I could either do a short sale (meaning I could sell the property for what is owed) or just hold onto the properties for as long as possible before they foreclose on me. Or I could put up a fight.
I chose to fight.
To be honest, I was just as ignorant as everyone else who was going through a default. I borrowed the money. Now, for one reason or another, I couldn't pay. So, I was lead to believe that the bank was entitled to foreclose on my houses and repossess them.
I was wrong.
It was at that time that I started learning about bank fraud. At first, I was skeptical but I kept an open mind. As I dug deeper into this issue, it became clear that there was more than meets the eye. In fact, I discovered that banks have sold mortgages onto Wall Street as what's called "mortgage backed securities" (MBS). At first, I did not know what that meant. My thoughts were, "so what?"
As I studied this issue deeper, I came to realize that banks were actually committing some very clever schemes to steal people's homes without the proper "standing" to do so.
You see, once a bank has sold a promissory note as a MBS, it no longer owns the note. And if it does not own the note, it does not have the right (or standing) to foreclose.
But they do this every single day, because they rely on our ignorance. They rely on your ignorance. They rely on the judge's ignorance and they even rely on their own lawyer's ignorance to pull this scheme off.
On one side, we have a growing population of people living in tent cities without running water, without toilets or other things you and I take for granted.
At the other end of the spectrum, we have bank executives getting multi-million dollar bonuses for how quickly they can foreclose people's homes (without having any actual legal authority to do so).
Not only that, these bank executives have received TRILLIONS of taxpayer money from TARP (the Troubled Asset Relief Program) to pretty much do as they see fit. You know, buy up smaller banks, buy executive jets, go to Bahamas for exotic retreats and other wonderful ways to spend the handouts from our government.
This got me mad.
But most frustrating of all, I discovered that as a homeowner, my choices were very limited.
Firstly, even if I took the time to learn about this fraud, so what? How does this have to do with saving my houses from foreclosure? I am not a lawyer. I am too poor to afford one, and even if I had $25,000 to retain one, there was no assurance of success.
Secondly, I don't know enough about the law to put up a viable defense. I'm just your average computer geek. I don't know anything about the law. I don't have the time or the mental energy to learn to be a lawyer to put up a defense.
Thirdly, there was very limited information available for homeowners to learn about this stuff. Even if one has the time, it would take a full time occupation to figure all this stuff out at the best of times (ie. When one is not suffering from crippling depression when one's world is falling apart).
Fourthly, very few attorneys even know about this stuff. There wasn't really anyone I could go to learn this information.
The odds were just stacked against me.
Faced with insurmountable adversity, I was faced with a decision; to give up or to go down fighting.
My father told me a story about how Japan won so many battles in Asia (they took over almost all of Asia before America dropped the bombs). He said that unlike other armies, the Japanese doctrine was "death before dishonor". The concept of surrender or retreat was the lowest of shame for a Japanese soldier. When they landed their troops into a battle, the Japanese would tell their soldiers that the only way they would go home was to either win, or return in a body bag. There was no retreat. As a result, the Japanese soldiers fought like their lives depended on it, because it literally was.
For me, this was the doctrine in which I lived my life. I either succeed in what I do or I die trying. As Master Yoda said in "The Empire Strikes Back", "do or do not, there is a try."
So, study I did.
I committed to doing whatever it takes to put up a fight and win.
I started to challenge the bank using the processes outlined in this book, and to cut a long story short, I managed to compel the bank to issue a Rescission of the Notice of Default on my property.
Essentially, this means that the bank cannot foreclose on my house and it is currently in limbo.
As of the time of writing, I am in the process of filing a civil action called a "Quiet Title Action" to remove the lien on the house. You can read more about the progress of this on my website at consumerdefenseprograms.com.
As I learned more about this subject, it occurred to me that millions of other people around the world were going through the same problems I was going through. The biggest issue faced by distressed homeowners was that there was no easy to understand, easy to follow materials available to the average homeowner to put up a fight against lender fraud.
With this in mind, I put together a blog online to help homeowners. All the sudden, my site got bombarded with so many people wanting to know more about what I've discovered. Everyone started to ask me questions; everyone wanted me to help them with their situation.
"About the title" may belong to another edition of this title.