If your bank won’t help you save your home maybe the President will.
That, at least, seems to be the hope of Angela Agrippa, a widow and mother of a six-year-old daughter who’s now facing foreclosure on her Tampa-bay area home, according to Tampa Bay Online. Agrippa put a large sign on her roof that reads “Obama Save My Home” in hopes of getting the president's attention when he visited the city -- located in one of the states hardest hit by foreclosure -- last week.
Agrippa’s story is all too familiar in a nation that’s seen millions of foreclosures since the housing bust. Due to medical costs incurred by her husband’s ultimately fatal heart problems and her own rheumatoid arthritis, Agrippa was unable to keep up with her mortgage payments. Agrippa says she's also been unsuccessful in negotiating a modification with her lender JPMorgan Chase, though she claims she's provided the bank with the necessary documents.
“I want to ask President Obama why aren’t I being granted for HAMP modification? I qualify, I meet all the criteria,” she said according to Fox News.
Indeed, other critics have derided the program Agrippa is referring to -- the Home Affordable Modification Program or HAMP -- for being an ineffective means of helping homeowners avoid foreclosure, despite an expansion of the program last January. A recent study found that about 800,000 foreclosures might have been prevented if mortgage servicers had done a better job of managing modification requests by homeowners, The Chicago Tribune reports. That’s on top of another report that found more than 1 million temporary and permanent modifications had failed.
The plight of troubled homeowners isn’t a very optimistic one despite a recent $25 billion settlement with five major U.S. lenders, much of which has struggled to reach those in need. As of August, between 7 million to 8.7 million homeowners were at significant risk of defaulting on their mortgage loans.
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