PHILIP AND WOODLEY JENKINS
WHY YOU KNOW THEM: Facing foreclosure after they tried to get their mortgage loan modified for their eastern Henrico County home.
WHAT'S NEW: They saved their house.
The Jenkinses spent Christmas in the house they have lived in for 22 years. "I am so blessed," Woodley Jenkins said.
A year ago, it was unclear whether they could hold onto their simple rancher in Sandston.
Their house was scheduled for an auction sale last year on Christmas Eve — and that was after the couple had worked out a repayment plan with their lender.
"We have taken every single penny and put it into the house," Jenkins said. "If we weren't a team and worked together, we couldn't have done it."
The Jenkinses made their mortgage payments and are caught up on late payments.
Just this month, their monthly payment was reduced to its original amount of $820. The couple, both on disability, had been paying nearly twice that amount for more than a year to catch up on back payments.
"We just kept paying, and we finally got to where we have some relief," Philip Jenkins said.
While caught up on their mortgage payments, they are behind on other bills. They have had no money to make house repairs. The drain under the washing machine doesn't work. The kitchen floor needs to be replaced.
But they have their house.
The couple got into trouble when they contacted a Florida company that they found on the Internet to redo their loan and reduce their interest rate. They say they were told to send $1,000 and to stop making their mortgage payments or they would interfere with the loan modification.
They say they were told that their 10 percent interest rate on their $97,000 mortgage loan would be reduced to 4.5 percent. They say they were assured that the fee would be reimbursed if the loan modification didn't go through.
The $1,000 fee was gone. The loan modification never came through. But the delinquent notices arrived and so did the notices of auction sales.
Realizing they had been victims of an apparent scam, the couple contacted their mortgage company and worked out a repayment program.
According to the Better Business Bureau, the U.S. housing market is ailing, but business is booming for foreclosure rescue and loan modification scams.
The most common scam is an advance-fee scheme, where homeowners are charged fees in advance to negotiate deals with mortgage lenders, according to the BBB.
Homeowners are offered money-back guarantees. The usual outcome is that the scammers take the money, provide little or no service, refuse to refund the fee — and the houses fall into foreclosure.
Meanwhile, the Jenkinses continue to work with their original lender. They also keep trying to get a loan modification. It still hasn't come through.
Carol Hazard
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