By Gretchen Morgenson
Published: July 13, 2008
Dan Bailey Jr. was desperate when he sat down on May 19 to send an e-mail message to his mortgage lender, the Countrywide Financial, pleading, yet again, for help.
...
Bailey, 41, promised in his e-mail message that he would pay every nickel he owed if Countrywide would modify his mortgage in a way that allowed him to keep his home. He sent the message to a grab bag of Countrywide e-mail addresses, which he had received from www.LoanSafe.org, an online forum for borrowers.
Among the recipients of his e-mail was someone he had never heard of before: Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide's co-founder and chief executive. Lo and behold, Mozilo replied — inadvertently, as it turned out.
"This is unbelievable," Mozilo said in his message. "Most of these letters now have the same wording. Obviously they are being counseled by some other person or by the Internet. Disgusting."
...
For Bailey, however, the disdain that Mozilo expressed was depressingly familiar.
After all, Bailey had received little else from Countrywide after he began trying to renegotiate an adjustable-rate loan that he could no longer afford. Until then, he says,
the only guidance the lender provided was a suggestion from an employee of Countrywide's "home retention team" that he cut back on groceries to pay his mortgage....
Many borrowers have trouble even reaching a workout specialist; others
soon find that the modifications they received are as unaffordable as the mortgages they replaced. Some homeowners, eager to sell their homes before the value falls further, say they are impeded by loan servicers' inaction or incompetence.
IHT