Eugene weekly., March 15, 2012, Page 14, Image 14

FORECLOSURES
FLAILING
Big banks run into legal trouble
C
BY SHANN O N F INNELL
indy Littrell is in homeowner limbo. The proud grandmother and insurance franchise owner is stuck
in a years-long process of applications, phone calls and negotiations, waiting to fi nd out if her house
will be foreclosed on.
Littrell fi lled out an application to refi nance her west Eugene home in 2010, thinking it was a
smart move. And by all standards of reason, it was. Interest rates had shrunk since fi rst purchasing
her home in 2006, and Littrell also wanted the added security of lower payments after her husband’s
death in 2007.
Bank of America told her that to proceed with the refi nancing, she’d need to open an escrow account.
The process got muddled as she and the bank simultaneously paid property taxes and homeowner’s
insurance, and Littrell became frustrated. The refi nancing process seemed to go nowhere.
Littrell asked the bank to cancel the escrow account and added about $300 to her monthly payments, thinking
she was doing exactly what was needed to move forward. She repeatedly phoned Bank of America to cancel the
escrow. “From one department to another,” Littrell says, “I don’t know how many times I got passed around, they
said, ‘Oh, they’re working on it.’”
By August 2011, she thought she was in the clear, and dropped her payments from $1,500 to a little more than
$1,400. Bank of America returned the check, telling her it couldn’t accept partial payment.
“So needless to say, I called them and I said, ‘Hey, what’s this?’” Littrell recalls. She reiterated that she’d long
ago asked that the escrow account be canceled. She says that Bank of America told her they would fi x the problem,
but she was instructed, “don’t send any more payments until they get that taken care of. So I didn’t. And four months
later they sent me a foreclosure notice.”
14 MARCH 15, 2012
EUGENE WEEKLY
Oregon’s Own
Foreclosure Crisis
Angela Martin, executive director of Economic Fairness
Oregon, says that situations like Littrell’s are all too
common. One in fi ve Oregon homeowners owes more than
the home is worth, and one in 12 is behind on the mortgage
or in foreclosure.
Despite reports of the economy’s glacially paced
improvement, foreclosures in Lane County continued to
rack up in the fi rst months of 2012. A total of 218 notices of
default (the fi rst formal step in the foreclosure process) were
fi led in Lane County between Jan. 1 and March 8.
What led to this?
Martin has a thousand examples, and she tells the stories
of the homeowners she’s met, ticking off names, cities and
fi nancial institutions more and more quickly, recounting
their frustrations as she speaks.
“Many individuals got into this because they followed
the advice of their fi nancial institution,” Martin says. “Their
banks tell them, ‘stop paying, that’s what’s going to prove
to us that you’re really in fi nancial distress.’ So they stop
paying.”
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