There’s no word quite as scary for homeowners as the word “foreclosure.”
It can send chills through homeowners, and if you’re facing foreclosure, you might have the temptation to ignore it and hope the problem goes away.
Don’t do that!
You have to stop foreclosure if you want to salvage your credit and keep as much money as possible.
For most people who are going through this process, this is their first foreclosure. Due to their unfamiliarity with what foreclosure entails, it’s easy to make missteps that cause more harm later.
Fortunately, there’s good news. It’s almost always possible to stop foreclosure in Dallas.
Read on to learn more about this process and the best way to halt it in its tracks!
Stop Foreclosure Dallas: What’s the Full Foreclosure Process?
If you live in Dallas, TX, and you’ve had a bank send you correspondence about foreclosure, the first thing that you should know is that you shouldn’t ignore it
You’ll need to address this problem head-on. The faster you do so, the quicker you’ll be able to put all of this behind you and move on with life.
The process is relatively quick in Texas.
Indeed, the full process can take as little as 41 days since Texas lenders can foreclose non-judicially. That means lenders won’t have to take you to court and initiate a formal lawsuit – they can foreclose with a few notices and warnings.
The first step of the process involves a missed payment. Once you miss one payment, your bank will start calling you and asking you to make up that missed payment.
At this point, most lenders cannot initiate foreclosure proceedings, although some independent lenders can initiate much faster than the big banks.
Note: Federal law requires 120 days (4 months) of missed payments before a lender can serve you with a notice of foreclosure. Therefore, you have four months to work out a payment plan or figure something else out to cure the default.
The Next Step Is a Notice of Default and Acceleration
For most mortgages in Texas, if you’re 120 days late, the lender can choose to proceed with foreclosure. By law, residents of Dallas have 20 days to cure the amount in default.
At this point, homeowners have 20 days to make up all their missed monthly payments. The entirety of the balance is not due during these 20 days.
Think of this timeframe as a “last chance warning” before something much more serious happens.
If you still don’t make the payments, your lender will send a notice of acceleration. Now, the entirety of the balance on your home (the principal, accrued interest, late fees, and trustee’s fees) are due. Unless you pay all of that, your lender can foreclose.
This notice will tell you that the trustee will sell your property on the first Tuesday of the month that occurs 21 days after the lender has filed the notice.
Once this sale date hits, your property will go up at the auction, and you’ll no longer have access to it. You’ll have to vacate willingly, or the new property owner can file an eviction notice, effectively giving you five days to leave.
Stop Foreclosure Dallas: Why Do I Not Want a Foreclosure?
Aside from the glaringly obvious reason that foreclosure means you don’t have a place to live, having a foreclosure on your record has other problematic consequences that mean you’ll want to avoid it.
- Foreclosure will reduce your credit score significantly – How much it’ll go down depends, in part, on how high of a score you had before. If you had a good score, you could see a reduction by as much as 160 points. That’s just from the foreclosure itself. All the late payments will reduce your score by another 100 points. All of a sudden, that 750 credit score you had could be 500. Foreclosures also stay on your record for seven long, agonizing years!
- Texas is a recourse state – The bank can sue you for the difference between what the home sells for and what you owe. So, if you owe $200,000 on your home and it only sells for $150,000 at auction, the bank can sue you for the difference. It’s not super common, but it is a real possibility that can strain your finances even further.
How Do I Stop This Process?
As you might have noticed from the description of the foreclosure process, there are plenty of times when you can stop foreclosure in Dallas and have a much more orderly exit than the sheriffs forcing you out.
The easiest way to stop the foreclosure process is to pay the monthly payments. But, of course, if you had the money to make the mortgage payments, you wouldn’t be receiving these notices.
Life happens. And 30 years is a long time to have nothing wrong happen that could result in a few missed payments.
Here are your options:
- File for Bankruptcy – One way that you can stop the process is to file for bankruptcy. When you file for bankruptcy protection, that halts the sales process in its tracks until a judge figures out your debt situation. A judge may work out a repayment plan for your home that has more manageable monthly amounts. The downside to this is that bankruptcy will tank your credit score even further, and the entire outcome hinges on what a judge decides.
- Sell the house – If you’re willing to let the home go, the other option is to sell it. You can always pay off the loan’s full balance, and that will stop the foreclosure process entirely. You can even pay it all off the day before the sale.
For most people, the challenge is selling your home fast enough. Traditional real estate agents often take 60 days or more to sell your home.
The problem is, if you’re facing foreclosure, you need the sale to happen in days, not months.
Cash Home Offer USA Can Help You
Cash buyers like Cash Home Offer USA can help you stop foreclosure in Dallas. We can buy your home in a matter of days, not months.
We’ve helped plenty of people get out of foreclosure, even really late into the process. We buy the home, write a check, and that can pay off your whole loan.
You walk away, there’s no foreclosure on your record, and you don’t have this significant weight on your shoulders anymore!
You also don’t have to make any repairs – we buy homes in all sorts of conditions!
If you’re facing foreclosure, please contact us. We’d love to learn more about your situation and see how we can help you stop foreclosure in Dallas!