By Drew Harwell, Times |
“Two years after he died of cancer, Dorothy Jackson’s late husband received a letter from the bank.
“Dear David A. Jackson Deceased,” the letter said. It was from a Wells Fargo “home preservation specialist,” offering advice if Mr. Jackson had a “change in circumstances.”
The bank said it was open to helping Jackson’s late husband of five decades, a retired Tampa police sergeant whose death kept Dorothy, 72, from making her monthly payments of more than $2,000.
But the bank refused to talk to her. Jackson was told her attempts to shrink payments to half that size, closer to what she could afford, would go nowhere.
The reason: Nearly a decade earlier, though both she and her husband were named on the home’s title, only David signed the loan.
What might look like a small paperwork oversight became for Jackson and other widows a seemingly insurmountable snare.
The bank would not let her take over the loan unless its payments were up to date. But to afford that, Jackson needed different loan terms — which the bank would not provide unless she took over the loan.
Stymied by the Catch-22 and pestered by debt collectors six times a day, Jackson walked to her bookcase and relayed the bank’s offer to her husband’s urn.
“Honey, if you want to resurrect yourself to come out and refinance our home,” she said, “you go for it.”
Lawyers and legal-aid counselors call it a sad reality of the housing crisis: Widows refused loan help and forced into foreclosure in the years after their spouses’ death.
For distressed homeowners, the bureaucratic obstacle course of refinancing in an age of tight credit is hard enough to navigate on its own. But for grieving widows with finances already in disarray, the loan maze and its accompanying fears of losing a family home have proven a demoralizing shock.
“It’s a clash of circumstances that couldn’t be any more devastating,” said Kathleen Mullin, the executive director of St. Petersburg-based Gulfcoast Legal Services.
“This problem and the web of paperwork causes so much stress that it can impact (widows’) health, impact their well-being, to the point where they don’t even know what to do. They’re just frozen.”
Widows caught in this runaround, counselors said, never realized the damage it could cause if only their husband signed the mortgage note. They did not expect it would prevent them from a loan modification that could allow them to keep paying and stay in their homes.
There’s no public data on how many widows have faced this frustration. But attorneys and counselors say it is a growing problem for surviving spouses – predominately women – barely seen before the foreclosure crisis began.”