Do I need to have possession to quiet title to property?
No, in fact there is a process whereby we can file a Complaint for Unlawful Detainer along with the Quiet Title Action following a foreclosure sale or tax deed sale for instance. You do not need a separate eviction and you do not have to wait for the person to be out before you file to quiet title.
How long following a judgment against a mortgage company must I wait to quiet title?
Left to Right: Angie, Mary, Tracy, Christie, Barbara and Kat
Happy Kat!
Are you a slave to your private student loans? We have client after client coming to see us with huge private student loans that are not going away, despite years of throwing money at them. In fact, in most cases, the balances are larger, sometimes double what they used to be. Let us help you get these loan balances and monthly payments to something sustainable, affordable and with an end in sight.
While as an attorney it is difficult to tell your clients that perhaps their best option is not to pay, I just ran across this article titled “Top Ten Reasons You Should Stop Paying Your Private Student Loan” from the Huffington Post which agrees with taking such a strategic default. I have to say I agree with every one of their top ten reasons. Please take a moment and review the article. And we have taken this view for a while now, taking action on behalf of our clients to bring these unaffordable private student loans under control.
As HP points out, yes it will hurt your credit and that of any co-borrower. Private student loans won’t negotiate with you for the most part when you are current. They may start calling you demanding payment once you start missing payments. This is where the consumer laws come into play. Know your rights. Review our website for actions you can take now to preserve your claims. We file lawsuit for FDCPA, FCCPA and TCPA violations all the time. This can lead to substantial reduction in the amount owed on your private student loans.
Have you just learned you’re being sued by one of these companies?
ABC Action News ran a story about a Tampa student loan borrower tonight for whom we just filed an adversary lawsuit in bankruptcy court seeking an undue hardship. Unfortunately he was duped into what is now $164,000 worth of student loans for a worthless degree from IADT. Worst decision of his life. In our interviews we got the news journalist to understand and communicate what a fraud the accreditation process is. The differences between national and regional accreditation was a main focus of the story. We’ve been trying to get the word out on this for awhile now. Accreditation is not all equal. Our client’s degree is in IT – not basket weaving. But since it is from a nationally accredited school, this IT degree is essentially the same as a degree in basket weaving. Most employers and educators do not recognize it as a valid degree. If he wants to advance in his career he has to “do it all over again”. This means late nights studying, time out of the workforce, more student loans…
If you’d like to know more about why your nationally accredited school may not be what you think it is, see our earlier blog post Student Loan Nightmares at For-Profit Schools: Have accreditation agencies dropped the ball? For more info, please contact Arkovich Law
Consumer debtors routinely have various related difficulties with mortgages following the filing of a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Unfortunately, the first thought is that the bankruptcy attorney messed up when that really is not the case. They think the attorney put the home into the bankruptcy when it was meant to be left out. However, all debt and assets must be listed and included for disclosure purpose in a bankruptcy. Debtors who want to keep their home, have a choice to reaffirm the debt by signing a Reaffirmation Agreement or by simply continuing to make monthly payments. In most cases, it is advantageous for a debtor not to reaffirm a mortgage debt, but rather just continue to maintain payments, particularly when the home is under water and no equity exists in the property. If they reaffirmed the debt and eventually had to give up the house because they moved to take another job for instance, they would be back on the hook for the mortgage debt.
So what kind of problems come up when a debtor does not formally reaffirm the debt in bankruptcy, but their intention is to keep the property and continue making payments:
Yesterday I was back for a full day after being sick with the flu for a few days. The day was surprisingly productive. Many people have asked me what we can do for people with student loans. This question is often combined with a statement that they thought nothing could be done.
To the contrary, here are the results for our Tampa Bay clients just yesterday. First I received an email from a client who thanked our law firm for greatly improving the quality of his life. You see when this client initially contacted us six months ago he owed over six figures in private student loans and could see no end in sight – he was in his late 50s. The student loan companies were always asking him to make payments for more than he could afford. He was single, healthy and able to work making 40k a year. Despite this, we put him in a bankruptcy and filed an adversary proceeding asserting that he was due a partial discharge due to the non-affordability of the private student loans among other things. Within a few months, we had negotiated settlements with both servicers of his student loans which included substantial principal (50% or greater) and interest rate reductions (to 0-2%) and an affordable monthly payment plan.
Another client returned a signed rehab agreement to us today where she accepted the $10 a month payment plan we had negotiated for her to bring her federal loans current and remove the default on her credit report. She had narrowly avoided garnishment by hiring us just in time. When her rehab is done, we’ll put her into a specific income based debt forgiveness plan that takes into account her loan types, marital status and type of employment for the best result.
Tax Relief for Certain Students Whose Education Loans Were Discharged: The IRS has announced that taxpayers, who took out Federal student loans to finance attendance at schools owned by Corinthian Colleges, Inc., and whose loans were discharged under the Department of Education’s Defense to Repayment or Closed School discharge processes, will not have to recognize gross income as a result of the debt discharge. Furthermore, these taxpayers will not be required to increase their taxes or income if they claimed Section 25A education credits or took Section 221 interest deductions or Section 222 higher education expense deductions in a prior year for payments made with proceeds of these discharged loans. This tax treatment is effective for tax years beginning in 2015. Rev. Proc. 2015-57, 2015-51 IRB .
This is great news for our Tampa Bay clients who had the back luck to go to one of these schools. Similar to letting an underwater home go, the tax forgiveness is potentially huge for student loans, principal reductions on mortgage modifications, short sales and foreclosures. Normally, a person would have to file bankruptcy to discharge the potential tax debt for written off or forgiven debt. For more information, please contact Arkovich Law
Our Tampa Bay area clients are still in good shape under the recent court and FCC rulings under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). Oral revocation is alive and well in Florida (although it’s always good to follow up in writing that you’ve asked a debt collector to stop calling your cell phone). Many other favorable rulings have come out in the past couple years some of which are now being appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court by various debt collectors and creditors.
A number of federal district courts have recently stayed TCPA cases pending the outcome of Supreme Court proceedings in Robins v. Spokeo, Inc. and Campbell-Ewald Co. v. Gomez, and the outcome of petitions seeking review of the FCC’s July 10, 2015 Declaratory Ruling and Order (“FCC Order”) that are currently pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. See ACA Int’l, et al. v. F.C.C., No. 15-1211 (D.C. Cir. 2015).
On April 27, 2015 the Supreme Court granted certiorari in Robins v. Spokeo, Inc. to address whether “a plaintiff who suffers no concrete harm, and who therefore could not otherwise invoke the jurisdiction of a federal court” can bring a private right of action based solely on a technical violation of a federal statute. 742 F.3d 409 (9th Cir. 2014) cert granted, 135 S. Ct. 1892 (2015).
Unfortunately, student loan borrowers in default on federal loans are experiencing tax intercepts around this time of year, sometimes for the first time ever. Some tips: 1) if we can cure the default before your taxes are filed and the intercept occurs, we can stop it from ever happening; 2) if you can’t cure the default, there is a 20 day period to request a hearing, but ultimately unless you are completely destitute they will be able to keep your tax refund. We recommend that if you know this is coming, delay filing your tax return and request an extension until you can cure the default.
Curing a default in federal student loans does not mean you have to bring it current and pay all missed payments. Instead what we do for clients is negotiate a rehabilitation plan or sometimes a consolidation of certain loans to cure the default. Often the payments to rehab a loan are as little as $5 and it does take into account your income and expenses. We have a very thorough budget we like to use in negotiations so the debt collector can see what your true disposable income is.
You can also stop a tax intercept by filing bankruptcy. If you have have enough personal property exemptions, you would be able to keep a portion or the entire tax refund. Filing a bankruptcy petition before the offset activates causes the automatic stay to stop all collections even those initiated by the federal government.
Reboot Your Life: Tampa Student Loan and Bankruptcy Attorney Blog