The Benefit Of Working With An Experienced Attorney

Hiring An Experienced Bankruptcy Attorney

Filing bankruptcy on your own is not in your best interest. What’s more, the odds are slim that an attorney without bankruptcy experience won’t make mistakes.

This is why most bankruptcies are filed by bankruptcy attorneys – because the complications and nuances of these cases are inherent in the work that we do. Still, a lot of debt relief attorneys will not provide you with all the options available to save your home. At Citizens Law Group, we make it a point to provide you with all your options so that you can be confident that you’re making the right choice.

A distressed property adds more complication and nuances – even for an attorney who deals with a lot of bankruptcies. It’s similar to playing a card game. If you don’t know the rules, your odds of winning are pretty low. We at Citizens Law Group know the rules of the game. Thus, with us, you have the best possible chance of being approved. We know how to properly classify your income and expenses. While others guess, we know the range of information that lenders want to see.

What Our Firm Does Best

We know how to best present the information in your loan modification application. We can make suggestions regarding whether it might be a good idea to look at getting family support, cutting out expenses, or getting extra hours at work.

Sometimes you need to show hardship to get a modification, and if you don’t explain the hardship well enough, (or you explain it incorrectly), you may not get it. Additionally, if you have presented information incorrectly in a previous application, it can affect your reapplication.

These are just a few of the reasons to hire an experienced bankruptcy attorney who processes loan modification applications. We strongly suggest going through a bankruptcy attorney who has prepared at least 200 or more loan modification applications because, more than likely, they’re the ones who are going to know what they’re doing.

Keeping The Loan Officer Accountable

Another factor to consider with both loan modification and short sales is the loan officer who will be working on your paperwork. You want an energetic and competent person, one who is willing to work through the loan and who is intelligent enough to understand what you are attempting to communicate with them.

For instance, many people are in foreclosure because they’ve gotten divorced. Then all these issues that come up in a divorce case may need to be explained to the lender and shown in supporting documents. A lot of times the lender doesn’t understand how your divorce and supporting documents connect to the foreclosure.

Consequently, you want an attorney who is a good communicator. One who can explain your situation to the bank in a way they understand. If your loan application or short sale is assigned to someone less energetic, one who is not working on your file, we know how to escalate the file at the bank to get someone to respond. If that doesn’t work, we know how to make complaints to governmental agencies so that they’re required to respond and fix the problem.

In our experience, a lot of cases would never have been reviewed and decided on if we were not filing complaints to the government — simply because the lender was not actively working on the file. If you are unfortunate to not be assigned an energetic, experienced loan officer, you need someone who knows how to navigate the system to force them to review your request and give you a decision.

First Steps Homeowners Should Take To Sell Their Distressed Property In Illinois

Before selling your distressed property, you should meet with an experienced attorney. Make sure that they’ve done a lot of distressed property sale transactions. Since there are few distressed properties at the moment, not a lot of attorneys have the necessary experience. After 2008, many attorneys had to deal with distressed properties, but a lot has changed since then.

A knowledgeable, experienced attorney will learn who your lender is, what type of loan you have, and what the guidelines governing that loan are, among other constraints. Sometimes, certain lenders will have hard and fast rules that say if you’re X days behind, you’re not eligible for a loan modification at all. Sometimes you can get around that, but it takes sitting down and understanding the information on which to base your decisions and then crafting a game plan. In short, you need an attorney who has the experience, who knows what they are doing, and who is going to have a constant follow-up with the lenders.

Our suggestion is to also hire a realtor who does a lot of distressed property sales. When you have energetic, intelligent people with a lot of experience, they are going to work in your best interest. Attorneys, realtors, and loan officers with limited experience can jeopardize whether you get approval.

For more information on Hiring The Citizens Law Group LTD. In Illinois, an initial consultation is your next best step. Get the information and legal answers you are seeking by calling (312) 313-1033 today.