About Shaffer & Gaier

Here are my most recent posts

New Jersey Resident Wins Damages Against Predatory Lending Practices

May 1, 2014 By

The average homeowner does in fact have recourse against the big banks when it comes to mortgage fraud and foreclosure defense. Goods news comes this past January from a ruling by New Jersey Chancery Judge Peter Doyne that says Wells Fargo committed actionable fraud and predatory lending.

The case involves Oscar Montesdeoca, of New Jersey. Evidently, Montesdeoca was persuaded to borrow $600,000 pus dollars for a three-bedroom home at interest rates that ranged from 7.75 percent to 14.35 percent.

The ruling is considered a significant victory in the battle against predatory lending practices in New Jersey, where another home foreclosure occurs every eight minutes! In the case in question, the mortgage for the home was $4800 a month. However, Montesdeoca earned between $500 and $600 a week, with his wife working for $7.00 per hour. They could not possibly have covered the mortgage, which ended up being $5700 a month, including insurance.

It was determined that the loan officer who worked with Montesdeoca had promised that “if he paid the loan and maintained good credit (for two years) he would receive refinancing” to reduce the high interest rates.

The couple couldn’t read the paperwork, which was in English, and learned only later that the bank listed their income as over $10,000 a month, when it was far from that amount. When the couple’s son requested that the bank refinance the mortgage in order to lower the high interest rate, as the officer had promised, the bank officer never responded.

The good outcome is that the bank was made to refinance the loans, and pay all the couple’s legal fees, as well as three times his damages, as required by New Jersey’s Consumer Fraud Act.

Contact Shaffer & Gaier: Protecting Homeowner Rights

The law firm of Shaffer & Gaier protects the rights of those who are facing foreclosure or seeking mortgage modifications in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. To set up a free initial consultation, contact our office online or call our foreclosure hotline at 855-289-1660. Or call our office location in Philadelphia at 215-751-0100, or in New Jersey at 856-429-0970.

Source: http://www.responsiblelending.org/tools-resources/headlines/opinion-nj-court-resurrects-american-dream-from-foreclosure-nightmare.html

Filed Under: Foreclosure, Foreclosure Defense, Mortgage Fraud, Mortgage Modification Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Wells Fargo Sued for Mortgage Fraud and Mortgage Discrimination

April 5, 2014 By

It appears that Wells Fargo is being sued on both coasts for mortgage fraud or discrimination.  In the first case, filed in New York, Wells Fargo, the nation’s largest home mortgage lender, is accused of ignoring terms of a multi billion dollar settlement that was meant to resolve foreclosure abuse. This particular case is being heard in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.

The lawsuit claims that Wells Fargo violated the rules of an agreement between Wells Fargo and five other big lenders and 49 state attorneys general. Evidently, the bank is accused of not reporting defective home loans to the government.

The West Coast case was filed in December of this past year. The Los Angeles city attorney has sued Wells Fargo and Citigroup, claiming that both organizations participated in mortgage discrimination, which led to a rash of home foreclosures in minority areas during the housing bust.

The lawsuits note that “vulnerable, under-served borrowers” who had been denied due to years of unlawful redlining practices leapt at the opportunity to purchase a home when it was possible to obtain a sub-prime home loan, even if they couldn’t afford it.

Contact Shaffer & Gaier: Protecting Homeowner Rights

The law firm of Shaffer & Gaier protects the rights of those who are facing foreclosure or seeking mortgage modifications in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. To set up a free initial consultation, contact our office online or call our foreclosure hotline at 855-289-1660. Or call our office location in Philadelphia at 215-751-0100, or in New Jersey at 856-429-0970.

Filed Under: Mortgage Discrimination, Mortgage Fraud, Mortgage Lending, Mortgage Modification Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Foreclosure Defense in PA and NJ

March 26, 2014 By

If you have encountered financial problems and fallen behind on your mortgage, you may believe that your only option is to move out and allow your lender to foreclose on the property. To the contrary, there are many good reasons to fight foreclosure. Fighting foreclosure could give you an affordable place to live until you get your financial situation turned around. You may even be able to renegotiate your loan to make it affordable. The attorneys at Shaffer & Gaier, can help protect your rights.

Contact Us

To schedule a private meeting with an experienced foreclosure defense attorney, call our foreclosure hotline at 855-289-1660 or contact us online. Evening and weekend meetings can be arranged upon request. We will travel to your home if necessary to meet with you.

Filed Under: Foreclosure, Foreclosure Defense Tagged With: , , , , ,

Medical Malpractice Lawsuits Make Hospitals Safer Study Finds

March 13, 2014 By

The most common medical errors are not surgical errors, labor-and-delivery errors, or drug mistakes. The medical mistakes that lead to the most medical malpractice lawsuits and payments are diagnosis mistakes.

Researchers* used the National Practitioner Data Bank, an organization that records all actions taken against health care professionals by state licensing boards, to determine that 28.6 percent of medical malpractice lawsuits are for mistaken diagnosis, delayed diagnosis, and other diagnosis errors.

Diagnostic mistakes accounted for 33.8 percent of disabilities and nearly 40 percent of deaths that led to medical malpractice payments. There were more than 100,000 payments as a result of diagnostic mistakes from 1986 to 2010. The senior author of the study, Dr. David E. Newman-Toker, who is an associate professor of neurology of Johns Hopkins, said, “This is a major health problem . . .. There’s a lot of room for improvement. You can’t get the treatment right if you don’t get the diagnosis right.”

Error relating to medical treatment and surgery were the second and third most common causes of medical payments stemming from lawsuits. Obstetric, medication, monitoring, anesthesia, and the rest accounted for 20 percent of medical malpractice lawsuit payments.

Contact Shaffer & Gaier – Medical Malpractice Attorneys, New Jersey and PA

The law firm of Shaffer & Gaier protects the rights of those who have suffered injury as a result of a medical mistake that should never have happened. To set up a free initial consultation, contact our office online or call our foreclosure hotline at 855-289-1660. Or call our office location in Philadelphia at 215-751-0100, or in New Jersey at 856-429-0970.

*BMJ Quality and Safety: International Journal of Healthcare Improvement
http://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/early/2013/03/27/bmjqs-2012-001550.abstract

Filed Under: Medical Malpractice, Medical Misdiagnosis, Personal Injury Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Despite Housing Market Turnaround, Foreclosures High

March 3, 2014 By

Data released in late January notes that New Jersey may become the nation’s leader in the number of foreclosed homes by summer 2014. Mark Fleming, a chief economist for the online analytic firm CoreLogic.

Since the real estate bust in fall 2008, Florida had the highest percent of foreclosed homes, with New Jersey coming in second. By 2013, slightly over 10 percent of Florida homes with mortgages had undergone foreclosure. In contrast, New Jersey’s rate was slightly over 7 percent. It seems that New Jersey is going through the process much slower than Florida.

In fact, in the past year, while Florida competed 119,000 foreclosures, New Jersey’s completed just 5,138. It evidently takes about 1,002 days to resolve foreclosures in the Garden State, while the Sunshine State completes them in 883 days.

Foreclosure Backlogs in New Jersey

New Jersey’s struggles escalated when the state Supreme Court ordered the six largest banks to review their procedures for lending money. Filings at that time fell from 58,000 in 2010 to 6,000 in July 2011, creating a significant backlog.

It will be just a matter of time before New Jersey gets to the top of the list. The good news is that home sales have reached their highest levels since 2005, up about 18 percent in 2013.

Contact Shaffer & Gaier: Protecting Homeowner Rights

The law firm of Shaffer & Gaier protects the rights of those who are facing foreclosure or seeking mortgage modifications in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. To set up a free initial consultation, contact our office online or call our foreclosure hotline at 855-289-1660. Or call our office location in Philadelphia at 215-751-0100, or in New Jersey at 856-429-0970.

Filed Under: Foreclosure, Foreclosure Abuses, Foreclosure Defense Tagged With: , , , , , ,

MORGAN STANLEY AGREES TO PAY $1.25 BILLION FOR MORTGAGE SETTLEMENT

February 18, 2014 By

Morgan Stanley has now joined the ranks of JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America and other big banks in agreeing to pay huge sums of money to the Federal Housing Finance Agency to resolve claims that it sold bad mortgage securities to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during the run-up to the housing market/mortgage crisis. Morgan Stanley recently agreed to pay $1.25 billion to the FHFA, which is the Federal conservator for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The settlement resolved a lawsuit in which the Agency claimed that Morgan Stanley sold over $10.5 billion in mortgage-backed securities to Fannie and Freddie during the credit boom, while presenting a “false picture” of the riskiness of the loans. This is the same allegation that runs through all of these lawsuits against the big banks, but this lawsuit in particular involved securities issues between September 2005 and September 2007.

Many of the loans were originated by sub-prime lenders, like New Century and Indy Mac, and then bundled into bonds and sold to Fannie and Freddie. The lawsuit said that one group of these loans had default and delinquency rates as high as 70%. As was common in the industry, the big banks turned a blind eye to these default rates while continuing to serve as warehouse lending conduits to keep the train rolling on.

If the Morgan Stanley settlement becomes final, it will be the third-largest monetary payment by a Wall Street firm to settle an FHFA lawsuit. The largest was JP Morgan Chase at $4 billion, followed by Deutsche Bank at $1.2 billion. The FHFA still has some work to do, in that it still has approximately 12 other lawsuits filed against other financial institutions.

Contact Shaffer & Gaier

To set up a free initial consultation, contact our office online or call our foreclosure hotline at 855-289-1660. Or call our office location in Philadelphia at 215-751-0100, or in New Jersey at 856-429-0970.

Filed Under: Foreclosure, Foreclosure Defense, Mortgage Lending, Mortgage Modification, Predatory Mortgage Practices Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

RELIEF FOR SOME HOMEOWNERS – BUT THEN A TAX BILL?

February 12, 2014 By

The big banks will be able to write-off the billions of dollars in debt relief they agreed to give to homeowners, but for the homeowners that received that help, the debt relief is treated as taxable income, which can result in large tax bills. There had been a tax exemption for mortgage debt forgiveness, but Congress let this expire on December 31, 2013. While Congress often allows tax breaks to expire, only to reinstate them later, the mortgage debt relief exemption has not yet occurred. This could partly be because there is a movement in Congress to broadly overhaul the entire tax code, and in an election year, this year was considered “small” relative to other tax matters that affect the nation as a whole.

The tax exemption helped homeowners who are underwater in their mortgage – that is, those who owe more on their mortgage than their home is worth (approximately 6.4 million households nationwide). Put in real terms, this means that if you owe $250,000 on your mortgage, and your bank lets you sell it by way of a short sale for $150,000, then the $100,000 difference is treated as taxable income. This would lead to an approximately $28,000 tax bill because of the typical tax laws in which if someone lends you money and then later says you do not have to pay it back, the IRS counts the amount forgiven as income (except in cases of bankruptcy or insolvency). Nationwide, approximately 100,000 people used the mortgage debt relief exemption in 2011. In 2013, however, that number will be much greater, simply because there were approximately 250,000 short sales, yielding an average debt reduction of approximately $37,000. A homeowner in the 25% tax bracket would then face an extra $9,250 tax bill.

What remains to be seen is if Congress recognizes the unfairness of giving the banks a welcome form of tax relief, while piling even more debt upon the innocent homeowner.

Contact Shaffer & Gaier

To set up a free initial consultation, contact our office online or call our foreclosure hotline at 855-289-1660. Or call our office location in Philadelphia at 215-751-0100, or in New Jersey at 856-429-0970.

Filed Under: Foreclosure, Foreclosure Abuses, Foreclosure Defense, Mortgage Debt Forgiveness, Mortgage Lending, Mortgage Modification Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

COMPLICATED LITIGATION RESULTS IN FAVORABLE SETTLEMENT

February 10, 2014 By

On June 30, 2005, my client took out a $104,000 loan and mortgage on his family’s home in Southwest Philadelphia. The original lender was Indy Mac Bank, a sub-prime lender, whose operations were essentially taken over by the FDIC for what many believed were shoddy lending practices. The loan carried a low interest rate for the first two months, and then increased to an exorbitant interest rate for the next 29 years and 10 months. The mortgage broker, however, told my client at closing that he would be able to refinance the loan within a matter of months. This false promise never materialized, leaving my client with a deceptive, unfair and unreasonably high interest rate for the life of the loan.

One West Bank acquired the mortgage loan, which was later serviced by Ocwen Loan Servicing. One West filed a foreclosure lawsuit, and we filed a counterclaim and cross-claim against other lenders. The bank’s attorneys and I engaged in written discovery and multiple depositions, and in the fall of 2013, the Court scheduled a series of settlement conferences. The case was scheduled for trial in March, 2014.

By the time the case would be presented for trial, however, the balance on the loan was going to be approximately $187,000, almost twice as much as the original mortgage loan. The parties, however, reached a settlement, which lowered the principal balance by nearly $100,000, to $93,000. The settlement also called for an interest rate of 2% for the first 5 years, and for the remaining 5 years at 4.35%. While the case took almost 3 years to wind its way through the court, we were able to reach a favorable result.

Contact Shaffer & Gaier

To set up a free initial consultation, contact our office online or call our foreclosure hotline at 855-289-1660. Or call our office location in Philadelphia at 215-751-0100, or in New Jersey at 856-429-0970.

Filed Under: Foreclosure, Foreclosure Defense, Predatory Mortgage Practices, Sub - Prime Lending Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

PA and NJ FORECLOSURES ROSE IN 2013

January 27, 2014 By

In 2013, Pennsylvania foreclosures rose more than 18 percent—and New Jersey foreclosure rose by 25.5 percent—even though, nationally, the foreclosure rate rose by a relatively small 5.9 percent.

New Jersey was ranked 13th nationally in foreclosure rate, with 1.1 percent of all homes in foreclosure, just above the national average of 1.04 percent. The 3.5 million filings in the Garden State were 44 percent above 2012 and 123 percent higher than 2011. It is still well below the rough years between 2009 and 2010 when foreclosures skyrocketed as the economy plummeted. Pennsylvania was ranked 18th nationally in foreclosure rate at 0.84 percent in 2013. The 5.6 million filings last year were 12.5 percent above 2012 and 44 percent higher than 2011. But unlike New Jersey, the number of filings in 2013 do not represent a drop-off from the height of the recession. In fact, while filings were down in Pennsylvania by 9 percent from 2010, they were 4 percent higher than 2009 and 25 percent higher than 2008.

An explanation? Both states resolve foreclosures through the state judicial systems, which tend to process foreclosures less quickly. The states may still be dealing with a backlog of cases going back to 2010, it has been reported.

Contact Shaffer & Gaier

To set up a free initial consultation, contact our office online or call our foreclosure hotline at 855-289-1660. Or call our office location in Philadelphia at 215-751-0100, or in New Jersey at 856-429-0970.

Filed Under: Foreclosure, Foreclosure Defense Tagged With: , , , , , ,

City Board Agrees our Client is not Subject to Real Estate Taxes

January 16, 2014 By

We represent a large and influential Mosque in Philadelphia which has been in existence for over 20 years. The Mosque was not just a place of worship, but it also contains a K-8th grade school and serves as a community center, near 4th and Germantown Avenue. Even though we had secured IRS section 501c3 non-profit status years ago, and have continually complied with all levels of governmental regulation, the City of Philadelphia would not agree that the Mosque was entitled to tax-free status for local property taxes (like churches, synagogues, private schools, etc).

The City required that we prove the Mosque was a “charitable organization”. We appealed the tax assessment and litigated the matter for over 18 months. I am pleased to report that on December 24, 2013, the Board of Revision of Taxes issued a decision that our client is only responsible for a tax on 2% of the property (representing the portion of the property that is “for-profit”—a small restaurant located inside the building.

Contact Shaffer & Gaier

To set up a free initial consultation, contact our office online or call our office location in Philadelphia at 215-751-0100, or in New Jersey at 856-429-0970.

Filed Under: Church Representation, Commercial Representation, Current Events, Real Estate Taxes Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,
«Previous Page
Next Page»

Our Services

img

Our Latest News Posts

Firm Newsletter: April 2019

April 3, 2019 By

Click here to download a printable pdf of this newsletter. Supreme Court Victory Leads to Arbitration Award It certainly seemed like a long-time coming, but our firm was successful in taking our client’s case all the way to the Pennsylvania … [Read More...]

Diagnosing Traumatic Brain Injuries

June 1, 2018 By

Nearly 50,000 patients die annually from traumatic brain injuries. Now a new study led by the University of Pennsylvania reveals that tiny blood vessels in the brain can offer clues to better treatment, according to an article from UPI’s Health … [Read More...]