11/19/2009 10:00:00 PM Homeowners wading through options turn to specialists
Jason Soifer/ The Daily Courier Anthony Paiano, housing counselor/foreclosure specialist with Take Charge America, a non-profit credit counseling company, spoke to homeowners about their lending options Wednesday night at the Prescott Valley Public Library.
Anthony Paiano is working in the murky trenches of what is the foreclosure wave sweeping the nation.
It's the intersection where Paiano comes face to face with people who are dealing with bad home loans, adjustable rate mortgages, income loss and unemployment and that's what he was doing at the Prescott Valley Public Library Wednesday night.
A housing counselor/ foreclosure specialist with Take Charge America, Paiano took part in Arizona Foreclosure Prevention Task Force's first webinar offered to county residents.
"The longer you (distressed homeowners) wait, the options become more limited," he said. "I try to make sure people understand what their options are."
The task force, Take Charge America, Don't Borrow Trouble Arizona and Attorney General Terry Goddard took part in the roughly hour-long online seminar.
Patricia Garcia Duarte, chairperson of the prevention taskforce, said the goal is to educate struggling homeowners in a county that ranks fourth in the number of foreclosures statewide.
Duarte said part of the presentation is data from RealtyTrac showing that as of the middle of this year, the county had more than 2,500 properties with foreclosure filings, representing nearly 2.5 percent of the housing units.
"It's just important for us to help people better understand what are the options, what to do, too many people still don't pick up the phone to call the lender to tell the lender what their situation is," she said. "The sooner people ask for help, the better chances that something will be resolved.
"But if people wait to the eleventh hour when they have a trustee notice on hand, it's just more painful for all and more difficult."
And that's where people like Sherry, who didn't want to give her last name, factor in.
Sherry recently took a 5 percent pay cut from her employers and her husband, who works in the telecommunications field, might find himself without a job in the coming weeks.
Sherry is trying to refinance her home and she's already taken steps to cut her expenses including suspending her cell phone plan for three months and cut her cable television.
Dealing with a roughly $1,500 monthly mortgage, Sherry said she even applied for 10 part-time positions about a month ago and got zero responses.
"If they would just reduce that (mortgage), we could skate by," she said. "Things are tight everywhere, I'm just lucky that we're not looking at losing our home at this time."
It's left Sherry in a place where she's considering more drastic steps because she doesn't qualify for the Home Affordability & Stability Program and her lender isn't participating in the Home Affordable Refinance Program.
"We've considered bankruptcy if we can't get them to refinance. That's our last option," she said.
Duarte said Wednesday afternoon that only about 40 county residents took part in the webinar that featured tips from Goddard to watch out for scams, explanations on the HAMP and HARP programs and a
run through the workbook.
"We would have liked more, but we're testing the waters," she said. "We can't save everyone, every single case is unique.
"This is what makes this problem more difficult to solve because there's no one simple solution for all."
Al Sengstock, community services manager for Prescott Valley, said he's working on making the webinar available on public access channels 13 and 15 in the coming days.
The low turnout didn't bother Sengstock.
"If we can save one person's home, that's worth it," he said.
