Five Scares, Part 1: The First Sale Date

I've made more than 200 mortgage payments on my home. I want to start there, because everything else in this story gets read differently once you know that.

I was a real estate agent. In 2008, that income disappeared with the rest of the market. What followed wasn't one bad year — it was eighteen years, four separate foreclosure fights, one loan modification that should have ended it, two bankruptcies, and a lawsuit I'm now litigating myself, without a lawyer paid to do it for me. This isn't a story about someone who stopped paying. It's a story about what happens to a mortgage file over eighteen years when nobody outside the industry is checking the paperwork.

This is the first of five parts. Each one is a different moment I had to fight to keep this house — and each one turned on the same question: did the people trying to take it actually have the paperwork to back up the claim?

Scare 1: 2008 — The First Sale Date

The first Notice of Trustee's Sale landed the same year my income did. I went looking for who actually held my loan, the way anyone would when a stranger says they're about to sell your house. What I found in the county record was an assignment — the document that's supposed to transfer a loan from one company to another — made out to a lender that, by the time the assignment was recorded, had already shut its doors. Not "was struggling." Closed. The paperwork moved my loan to a company that no longer existed to receive it.

That was the first time I understood something most homeowners never have to think about: the company sending you letters isn't automatically the company with the legal right to foreclose. There's a paper trail behind that right, and it can be checked.

I didn't know yet how much worse it would get. Next week: what happened when a second company, with no relationship to me at all, tried to foreclose anyway.

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