100-Year-OId Woman Latest Victim of the Foreclosure Crisis

It's a sad day indeed when you make it to 100 years old only to wind up possibly getting thrown out on the street.

That's the predicament facing Agnes Albinger, an Illinois resident who lives on a large but aging farm and allegedly owes banks nearly $700,000.

Albinger has lived on her 70-acre farm since 1949. But it wasn't until the year 2000 that she first took out a loan on the property. At the time, it was a $100,000 mortgage. Since then, however, as much as $700,000 in mortgages have been placed on the home, primarily via transactions involving a niece of Albinger's.

That niece, 47-year-old Bridget Gruzdis, controlled a real estate development business. Albinger signed over parcels of land to her niece's company. And Gruzdis claims that Albinger also signed mortgage papers and was fully away of what she was doing.

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Six Horror Stories of Mortgage Modification

Ron Nash, Carlsbad, Calif.
Ron Nash is not someone who's shy about pushing to get what he wants; he's a motivational speaker, headhunter and author of "How to Find Your Dream Job; Even in a Recession." But when it came to obtaining a mortgage workout, he wasn't getting anywhere -- even after months of trying. He finally wrote a letter to the president of his lender to try to resolve the issue. The results were very gratifying -- at first. After that, however, and after he was asked to send in all his paperwork for the fifth time, he didn't hear from them again for six months. Then, recently, he finally got a call back with a loan workout offer.
Full Story: Why He Chose to Walk Away

Courtesy CNNMoney.com

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Sue Wright, Las Vegas, Nev.
Real estate agent Sue Wright was one of the earliest homeowners to apply for the FDIC's mortgage modification plan to help insolvent IndyMac's at-risk borrowers keep their homes. But because she was current on her mortgage payments, the bank said it couldn't help her and advised her to stop making payments for two months. She did that and called back right after her second payment was overdue. She was given a plan with a reduced interest rate and told to make the new payments for three months and the modification would become permanent. But after doing that, she received a letter from the bank telling her the modification was off; the investors wouldn't approve it.
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A. G. Chancey, Longwood, Fla.
Chancey has been trying to arrange a mortgage workout since August 2008, when she was only two months behind on payments. Today, after dozens of phone calls to her lender, she's made progress. But she's now five months behind. She has been in the home for 23 years, but family health problems, divorce and economic factors have conspired against her and she's never been able to substantially pay down the loan. She tried to apply for a mortgage workout, but no one ever seemed to know her status.
Full Story: She May Get Good News Yet

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Raul Medina, Moorestown, N.J.
No good deed goes unpunished, they say, and Amber and Joe Tardiff might be forced to agree. When Joe's good friend and partner in a landscaping business, Raul Medina, was left a parapalgegic by an auto accident, the Tardiffs took on the Good Samaritan task of dealing with Medina's mortgage issues. Medina, who's also a minister, owns two properties, his residence and one he bought for a Moorestown, N.J., church to provide shelter for the homeless. But after seven months of roadblocks, wrong numbers, voice mails to people who no longer work for the company, they were told that the lender does not offer any loan modifications.
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Richard and Pati Kays, Stuart, Fla.
"He's 83 and I'm 73, with separate assets, stuck in the mortgage mess. We're not quite in foreclosure but in distress over the inability to sell or refinance," says Pati Kays. Pati married husband Richard seven years ago. He's a retired high-steel construction man. She's a retired attorney who owns five cottages she rents out. Richard was supplementing his pension and social security with the rent from a mortgaged duplex he owns. Not any more. His adjustable rate mortgage reset, and his payment on the $430K mortgage went from $1,750 a month to $2,750. The rent he now receives is only $1,800 a month. Trying to head off problems, Richard called his lender to ask for a workout.
Full Story: Why He's in a Bind

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Ken Mobley, Tampa, Fla.
Ken Mobley had some of his best earnings years ever in the mid-2000s, as an advertising sales representative for a media company. But with newspaper ad revenues in decline, he was "reorganized" by his company and now sells ads to mom-and-pop businesses. He called his lender last fall hoping for a hardship consideration and asking for a two-month postponement of his mortgage payments. He wanted to have them added to the end of his mortgage. Mobley says his credit rating was excellent, and he was merely trying to free up some cash for the holidays. The effort failed.
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The whole thing smells very fishy to me. Not just because I've seen too many people get scammed out of their homes -- often by relatives or friends. But also because of Albinger's age and her background. This is a woman known as a caretaker and a pillar of her community. Over the years, she adopted and raised some 40 foster kids after she and her late husband couldn't have kids of their own. Friends and strangers call her Aunt Aggie and have set up a Web site (http://www.saveagnesfarm.com) to help her, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The fact that Albinger worked so hard on her home and land -- literally milking cows and tending to acre after acre until she was well into her eighties -- also speaks volumes about her character and willingness to put in sweat equity, as opposed to borrowing on the property. So if Albinger says she had no idea there were liens and mortgages on the home, I'd be more inclined to believe her versus that niece.

Ironically, the niece has put the home and the farm up for sale, listing it for $4.6 million -- something else Albinger and other family members said they had no idea was taking place.

I hate to say it, but I suspect that there was fraud involved somewhere in this whole sordid tale. If so, I hope the banks get to the bottom of it, and that those mortgage lenders consider the big picture here as well.

Whatever happened, it would be a shame to see 100-year-old Agnes Albinger evicted from the only home she's known in the past 60 years, a victim of the foreclosure crisis that just keeps growing and growing.

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Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, an award-winning financial news journalist and former Wall Street Journal reporter for CNBC, has also been featured in top newspapers, including the Washington Post, USA Today and the New York Times, as well as magazines ranging from Essence and Redbook to Black Enterprise and Smart Money. Check out her New York Times best seller 'Zero Debt: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom.'