IndyMacGuide
map-marker Austin, Texas

Indymac Bank - Indy Mac modification navigation help

First and foremost, I am here to help you navigate Indymac Bank for a modification. Please don't bash me, you can bash my company all you want, but not me. I am here to help. I am an employee of Indymac, I am a part of Loss Mitigation. I am here to help because I am tired of some of the idiots I work with and was once in your shoes. I wish there was someone on the inside helping me answering questions and explaining things. I do this in my off time and when I can( I also have a family to take care of) and understand that is the goal of most of you. My email is indymacguide@***.com, if they will let me post it here. If it isn't I will be happy to answer your questions here or in other threads. When asking a question, Please DO NOT use your name, account number and any other personal info asking to obtain info or help you navigate your account. I am here to point you in the right direction, not actually take care of it myself, I too need the job and have a mortgage to pay for. If they found out I was doing this, it might actually cost me my job. I am going to list a few scenarios below and my feelings on them, if you have any comments or questions please ask. One of my biggest (and yours) is the customer service at Indymac. Just like any other job, you have hard working dedicated people, and then you have the loafing idiots. It is a *** when you call customer service, some are trained well, some are not, it is all dependent on the supervisor and how well they disseminate info and policy. During the modification boom, we were forced to staff quickly, in turn a lot of people got jobs who are not qualified. But we need people since the demand was so high. When you call you may get someone who doesn't know what they are talking about or you may get someone who is over qualified and can solve your issues in about 3 min. If you happen to get the latter, ask for a direct phone number and never lose it! If you happen to get someone that can't help you, ask to be transferred to someone in loss mitigation and save that number! I got lucky and have a supervisor who is really picky on qualifications and standards. If you get lucky enough to get one of us, you will see how easy this process is. We are the ones that can answer all of your questions and speed your process along dramatically. If you ever get someone from loss mit asking for documents and give you their personal number, save that as well. Why do we lose documents? Well, customer service has one general fax number, so that machine is printing 24/7, it is easy to lose documents. To better ensure yours aren't loss, put your account number on every page so that the imaging department can save it to the correct file. If you get someone from LM, they have their own fax number, so documents hardly ever get lost since they can instantly save them to you file. If you would like to be considered for this HAMP modification, ask for it, show your need for it in a hardship letter. Please be sure to include everything that is affecting your life so that we can document need and income verification. You do not have to be behind, you just have to show that in the immediate future, default is a probability. If you qualify for this, get all of the necessary documents back to us ASAP, sign everything that is printed if there is a line for it. I can't tell you how many times I am hunting for tax returns since they were not signed. I know you e-file, like I do, but they have to be authenticated. Also, sign it as it your name is stated, if you have a middle initial or name, sign it as such, or we will be forced to send it back to you for the correct signature. These loans are for hundreds of thousands of dollars, so we make sure that every document signed is yours! Also, please make sure you live thereโ€ฆif it is not owner occupied please tell us so that we can modify your loan correctlyโ€ฆdon't cheat us, it is fraud and we don't want it to get ugly down the road. If you don't knowโ€ฆthe HAMP modification is based upon income. It is generally 31% of gross VERIFIED income. Which means, 31% before take home, 401k, medical and etcโ€ฆ It is the standard put forth by President Obama, not our policy. The 31% also includes property taxes and insurance, which by mandate, we handle for you. Don't try to argue, it is part of the guidelines. The design is that so if we have to stretch out your mortgage to 40 or 45 years, it can meet your current financial situation. The interest rates are great, starting as low as 2% percent generally and sometimes there is deferred principal which is not interest bearing. Now some people complain that their mortgage has gone from $1100 to $2,000 and it does not help you. These guidelines are the same for everyone, it is income based. Most increases in mortgage payments are due to the fact that some of you have had interest only loans, where you were paying only interest for the first 5 or 10 years. Now after the modification you are making interest AND principal payments. Other than that, I hardly ever see an increase in mortgage payments, it is designed to REDUCE your mortgage payment to avoid foreclosure and keep you in your home much longer. I have seen mortgages go from $3600 to about $800, every situation is unique. There are only several reasons for denial. 1. You don't live there, if you don't have supporting documentation, we are forced to deny you per the guidelines. So have bank statements, utility bills, tax returns, pay stubs and w-2's with the property address on them to make it easier and faster for us. If you have a P.O. Box or the utility is in a roommates name, you better change it. We have to be able to prove without a doubt that it is owner-occupied. 2. You don't make enough income, even if the loan was stretched out to 40 years at a 2% interest rate, you would not pay off it in time. It is like if you make 30K a year and want to qualify for a Ferrari. It is not going to happen. 3. You don't have a legitimate hardship. For instance if spend all your money on a succubus or going out every night. But pretty much, those are the main reasons for denial. When people come here and state that we denied you because we want to foreclosure, that is simply a lie. The foreclosure process is a very costly process and we do everything we can to avoid that. What are we going to do with your overvalued home? We don't gain a dime, but lose a substantially amount of money. We want you in your home so you can pay us back. We make $1,000 per modification we do from uncle sam, that does not even cover the cost of manpower it takes to doing a modification or the cost of resources we need to get this done, from payroll, to shipping costs and etcโ€ฆ Principal reduction. Don't ask for it, it is never gonna happen. If it did, it would still cost you dearly, the amount of principal reduced is taxed by uncle sam in capital gains. If you get a principal reduction that is 100K(average) you have to pay 34K the next year, if you cant make a 2K mortgage payment, where you gonna get 34k? and guess what, uncle sam's interest rate is higher than ours, not to mention penalties and you can never get rid of it. It sounds good, but will put you in quicker debt. Besides it is an absurd notion anyways, you borrowed the money, now pay it back, why should we bail you out since you made a bad investment. If the property went back up in value, does we get to add it back on to your loan? If you borrowed 100 buck and invested in dell, and now it is worth 50 bucks, do you tell your buddy , hey forgive the 50 bucks and I will pay you back the other 50 bucks? I made a bad investment for you.??? I have one pet peeve that I must voice my opinion on. These people who you pay your hard earned money to help you with your modifications are crooks. They charge you anywhere from $500 to 3K, when you can easily do this yourself. All they do is listen to us and fetch the documents we need to approve your modification. If you just provide us with your phone number, we can cut the middle man out and save you some money. Also, most of these people are hard to deal with and only drag the process out so long, that we are forced to foreclose. Now, lawyers I understand, if you need to stop a foreclosure or to handle the short sales side of this thing, okโ€ฆbut for modifications, just pick up your phone when we call. I know I have not covered all of it, but those are the basics, if you have other questions please email or use the forum. I am here to help you. I hope I can help some of you keep your homes and dreams.
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26 comments
IndyMacGuide

The key to successfully getting a modification is to explain your income stream in detail and have proof of that income. what got us in the mess in the first place is that people overextended themselves or overstated their income.

This modification prevents that by validating your income upfront to make sure you can afford your home. what people dont understand is that you cant make too much and show that you can afford your home but have bad spending habits. you also cant make too little where if we do offer you a fixed rate of 2% you still cant afford it. Loss mitigation does have phone numbers, but we are only allowed to give them to people we deal with.

Otherwise our phones would be ringing off the hook, but the customer service team has gotten very proficient in answering questions and a lot of them have gone thru extensive training. Rest assured, we actually approve more modfications than you give us credit for.

Please understand that there are a lot of people who try to take advantage of the situation. we are just trying to *** out the people who actually need our help.

Guest

DOES THIS GUY REALLY WORK FOR ONEWEST

Guest

loss mitigation phone number. ...

Indymac Bank (877) 736-****.I made my 7ht trial payment May 1. this is taking so long. way to stressful. i called today and they told me I should have an answer by may 16.

we were in escalation dept with a supervisor, but reading many blogs.

alot of people are saying the same thing. It seems like Indymac gives the same fricken answer to everyone, liek they are just reading from a guideline book!

Guest

They keep telling me that Loss Mitigation does not take incoming calls?? How do I get that number?

Guest

everyone is crying about obama . tell gw bush he made us use affirmative action

Guest

We received a mod. about 2 years ago when I became disabled with the help of a Hud Counselor.

However it took almost a year. Three months into making our new payment we were informed that our escrow was short and our new payment would be $100 more than the payment was originally before the mod. Upon talking to the rep they told me money was missing from my escrow $1900 to be exact and we would have to replace it. We could not do so and continued to pay the mod.

amount we had agreed to. They would take money from our next months payment and apply to the previous month and charge us a late fee instead of trying to locate the missing money. After writing several letters to the President and Vice President of the bank they told me they would have to do a new mod. in order to fix the problem instead of locating the missing money.

Now after making my trial payments all over again I still have not heard anything on my mod. My escrow is a complete mess with payments being listed as made that I did not make and payment being showed as late that were made on time. Now they have placed a flood policy on my home which I do not need and I have to pay $500 to FEMA to get the letter to have it removed and in the mean time my escrow is now $3000 in the negative because of this. They do not know what they are doing and who do you turn to that will listen.

I have now contacted The Office of Thrift Supervision to see if I can get some help.

If you can help indymacguide I would apprecate. Mentallydrain@***.com

Guest

Thank you for your input Inndymac guide! We were denied a Hamp loan 2 times.

the third time we were approved with our first trial payment due Oct 2009. We are now going on our 7th trial period. we are in default with our mortgage. When we call LM,they tell us to be patient, it is still in active review.

When we called a couple of days ago they told us we should get an answer by May8.

How does this look to you. I think if I get denied , I willhave a nervous breakdown

IndyMacGuide

Blue, what paper work did you send in and where? That matters a lot, since you may not have a pending case, the paperwork will go into your file and sit there.

Do you have an open query or have you asked for a HAMP packet or a shortsale packet. What is your goal, what are you trying to achieve, so i can better point you in the right direction.

Guest

IndyMac Guide, thanks for the info here - at least there's a human at that bank. i have tried hard to work with them, unfortunately was unemployed for a year.

house went into foreclosure. i got a job 10 days before sheriff sale, they would not work with me. now i have 2 jobs! i have written to Indymac twice and called, they say either pay $100K all at once or lose my house.

again today, i sent all the financial paperwork, just trying to get somebody to review my case. do they want to really evict a family onto the street and have a house sitting empty and lowering property values in the area? i've got the money and 2 jobs and have taken care of the house for 12 years. i will not leave.

any ideas? i will not give up.

Guest

Loan Modification has not worked for me either...I have faxed over 75 pages of detailed information and have gotten no response from IndyMac / One West bank. This has been over the course of 5 months and 4 formal requests in writing.

Meantime, OWB has turned my file over to an attorney Mercer-Belanger in Indianapolis, IN and recently I received a summons from the lawrence County Sheriff office!! So I have contacted my Congressman who has launched an inquiry to the treasury dept. but meantime, no one will answer me, no one will give me an answer and I have to admit that this is the most bizarre situation I have ever seen. I have ZERO equity in my home and it is an interest only ARM...so besides the obvious credit damage, why not let them have it?!

I have even asked if I could execute a short sale....still no answer. I would gladly join in a class action law suit.

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