If you’re a homeowner facing the threat of bankruptcy in the near or even distant future, the single most important thing you can do to protect your assets is to stop foreclosure. The loss of a job, cuts in hours or overtime, retirement, the death or illness of a family member, and several other factors can threaten your assets as a homeowner, but taking careful and deliberate steps in dealing with your creditor can potentially stop the home foreclosure process and get out of debt altogether.

As simple as it sounds, many people facing imminent or even distant foreclosure proceeding fail to do the simplest thing possible to avoid the process; contacting your mortgage lender as soon as financial problems arise which would prevent you from paying all or a portion of your mortgage on time. Surprisingly, this happens more often than not. Most of us would feel embarrassed faced with such circumstance and don’t even thing to let the bank know about whatever situation may have befallen us for fear that they will attempt to expedite the collection process and take as much as possible as quickly as possible; leaving us impossibly in debt and facing no other option than to declare bankruptcy. In fact, this assumption could not be further from the truth, and is the first mistake most make faced with this situation. Far from wanting to harm their customers, creditors and banks very much want to assist their customers in regaining financial control over their life. It is, after all, in their best interest to be receiving payments from you in some regular variety, not possible should you decide to declare bankruptcy. If worse comes to work, the bank has the right to foreclose on your property, but this too is a last resort for the banks if for no other reason than the unwanted obligation it ties them to. When the bank forecloses on your home it must then either sell it to a private buyer or auction it off. Both processes are expensive and time consuming.  Read more...