Legal Question in Real Estate Law in Wisconsin

I am seeing way too many potential clients in my law practice who fall prey to loan modification scams these days. These companies are often taking money up front and telling the borrower to pay them rather than the lender; but the modifiers end up simply pocketing the money. The clients finally come to me when they are served with foreclosure paperwork and learn too late that their money has simply been stolen by the modification scammers. For this reason, I would never recommend paying your monthly mortgage payments to anyone other than directly to the lender, at the payment address specified in your mortgage or to such other addresses as your lender may have given you in writing. If a foreclosure has been filed, payments to the trust account of the lender's WI licensed attorney or to your own WI licensed attorney are also safe. Unlike shady loan modification companies, attorneys are closely regulated by the WI Supreme Court and quickly lose their license to practice law if they engage in any dishonesty. The "loan modifiers," on the other hand, are totally unregulated, unless they are eventually prosecuted for crimes, years after they have stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars from gullible borrowers. From your question, I cannot really tell whether you are dealing directly with your lender or with one of these scammers. If you are paying to your lender, however, you scarcely have anything to lose by making the additional payments requested, since they should end up returning any money to you which is not applied to your loan at the end of the foreclosure process. On the positive side, you might even succeed in catching up and getting the foreclosure dismissed. On the �down side,� such partial catch up funds are often held by the lender in a so called "suspense account," hoping that you will eventually catch up, but such funds are eventually returned to you if you do not catch up. The banks use the suspense account because they are afraid to apply your partial catch up payments to your loan because that might end up causing them to legally waive their right to foreclose you. If you do fully catch up and pay all of the bank�s foreclosure attorney fees and costs (and the bank finally applies your suspense account to the loan), the foreclosure case should be dismissed. It is rare that banks will commit themselves to a "catch up" plan in your situation since the future is so uncertain and they are loath to give up any rights to foreclose you until you have fully caught up. This may be why they will not give you a �straight answer� or pin themselves down to any particular plan which you may propose. However, if they are giving you the opportunity to catch up, you have little to lose by attempting it. In the current economic climate, banks would rather have your money than your home, since they will nearly always lose money reselling the property in a depressed market after they conclude the foreclosure process. They therefore rarely foreclose if you are making a sincere effort which shows real progress in catching up the late payments and staying current on future payments. If your efforts seem hopeless, a chapter 13 bankruptcy forces the bank to accept your payments again and gives you five years to catch up on any payment on which you are behind, eventually reinstating your loan if you perform on the promises which you make in your chapter 13 plan. You therefore owe it to yourself to at least have a free initial consultation with an experienced bankruptcy attorney. My comments in this public web forum is intended for public educational purposes only and are not intended to create an attorney client relationship between us (although you are more than welcome to contact me directly and discuss possible arrangements to retain me).