Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Maryland

Re: Mortgage

The conditions that allow your lender to accelerate your mortgage are set forth in your promissory note and/or in your deed of trust (mortgage). If you have a standard FNMA/FMLC note and trust, acceleration would be triggered by your missing payments and therefore being in default on your mortgage. Usually an institutional lender will send warning letters if you are in default and will give you a "catch-up" plan to allow you to keep the mortgage in place. If you are current on your payments, there is no way your loan would be accelerated.

Perhaps you have a balloon-payment note that calls for the entire principal to be paid off after a certain number of years, even though you were paying on a longer amortization schedule. For instance, you were paying as if it were a 30 year note, but it "ballooned" in 10 years. This isn't technically acceleration, but it would have the same effect. If that is your situation, you need to refinance in order to pay off the current note.

The third possibility is that you transferred the property to someone other than your spouse, and the lender found out about it. Your mortgage has a "due on sale" clause that allows the lender to call the loan under these circumstances, but usually they ignore this as long as the payments remain current.

Re: Mortgage

The answer to this depends upon the terms of the note. Most times the note will give the right to the holder of the note to accellerate payment under certain conditions of default. Check your note. It is a matter of contract.