Allow me to introduce you to Margaret. She hasn't had an easy life, but she's a survivor.
I hope she survives what Bank of America has done to her.
Margaret survived falling out of a tree as a child, which left her with a permanent speech impediment making her sound like she's from the deep south.
She survived being repeatedly beaten by the father of her 3 children, and severely mistreated by most of the men in her life.
Margaret lives a simple life. She's only got a 5th grade education, and she can't read too well. Never owned a computer, never owned a debit card. She's got a rattletrap old car to get around. But nobody bakes bread the way this woman can, and her potato salad is da bomb. So she cooks for other people. Well into her 70's, Margaret still holds a part time job taking care of other senior citizens to supplement her social security. And she needs it, living pretty much month to month.
She lives in a dilapidated old house in Coos Bay, Oregon that her father left her, but she had to take out a small mortgage on the homestead a few years ago to pay for some badly needed repairs.
Last year, somebody stole Margaret's identity. We don't know how it happened. But what we do know is that after someone drained Margaret's checking account, that while Bank of America had been notified of the fraud, it dropped the ball after only partially investigating the fraud. Not only was Margaret's life savings not returned, not only was her credit rating destroyed, Bank of America stole her home as well, foreclosing on it when she missed one payment after the fraudsters stole everything and Bank of America failed to put it back.
OK, I'm exaggerating a little bit.
It would be utterly and completely ridiculous if Bank of America were to foreclose on someone's home for just one missed payment, right? Well, the rest of the story is just as ridiculous, but here it is:
Margaret kept paying her payments every month, but was still a month behind. She was living month to month now, under a great deal of stress after having everything stolen from her. Eventually, that fall, it wore her out. She came down with double pneumonia in October. She thought she had the swine flu, and stayed home. When she started to turn blue, her brother found her and got someone to take her to the hospital, where she was immediately induced into a coma and put on life support. She stayed there for 2 weeks. They thought she was going to die. But she didn't. She's a fighter. Instead, she was put into a nursing home for awhile. She lost 20 pounds and her dentures didn't fit. She couldn't walk. Couldn't talk. But she lived.
When she was finally sent home, she still couldn't really walk, and she was frail and sickly for another several months. But finally, in May, she went back to work after 6 months on the injured/reserved list. And now, 6 months more down the road, she's back to her old feisty self.
Except for one thing. While she was in the hospital, Bank of America began foreclosing on her home. I gotta say, while it's heartless and cruel to steal someone's home while they're on life support, it's not necessarily illegal. It's just not nice. I understand that. But it is illegal for Bank of America to foreclose on someone's home when that homeowner purchased disability insurance that is supposed to make any missed payments during a time of disability due to illness. And that is exactly what happened. And I am just having a heck of a time getting Bank of America to agree with me.
You'd think that once Bank of America was notified that Margaret had disability insurance on her mortgage, that someone at the bank would have worked overtime to immediately rectify the situation. But no. That's not how it's gone down. It's been 4 months today since I made that first phone call to Bank of America, and she still doesn't have her house back.
When Margaret was finally able to walk and talk again, and take the armload of threatening foreclosure documents Bank of America had erroneously sent to the house next door while she was in the hospital down to her local banking center, she discovered the banking center had shuttered its doors. They were gone.
She started calling the 800 numbers on the paperwork. She was told by some nameless faceless call center employee that her only recourse was to get a loan modification. What about the disability insurance? The people who were telling her she needed to get a loan modification didn't know nuthin' bout no disability insurance. They just had a specific job, which was to either modify Margaret's loan, or foreclose on her home. Did anybody transfer her to the right department at Bank of America so she could get the disability insurance policy to pay? Nope. Why would they do that when they were so close to taking her home? I'm going to just throw out an idea here....I think Bank of America never bothered to look at her mortgage documents. Just a thought. They just saw her payments hadn't been made, and signed the foreclosure papers. Maybe when she told the bank reps that she had disability insurance, they couldn't understand her. And then again, maybe one department doesn't speak to the other, and they have no idea how to help her.
When I found out about Margaret's situation several months later, I was told by some very unpleasant employees at the North Bend, Oregon branch of Bank of America that Margaret had no such disability insurance. But Margaret swore she did. So I didn't give up. I called the national Bank of America mortgage number. I was told by a very sweet woman from Texas that she didn't see any evidence of any disability insurance either. Finally, as the first eviction sticker was being smacked onto Margaret's front door, I walked into my own Bank of America in California, and asked how in the heck I might get a copy of a mortgage disability insurance policy. And the next day, I had a copy of it in my inbox. Proof.
At that point, I thought it was going be so easy to unravel this improper, illegal foreclosure. But I was wrong.
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