Clouded Titles-

I have been saying for years that conveying your property into a trust to avoid foreclosure is about the most idiotic thing I’ve ever seen a homeowner do. Many homeowners however are duped into believing that this scheme will mess up the foreclosure proceedings because the homeowner fell on hard times, couldn’t make their mortgage payments and became desperate. This is false!

A Palm Beach County, Florida judge has just undone over 100 quit claim deeds assigned over to Fidelity Trust Company, who the Florida Attorney General is aggressively pursuing on civil claims. The scheme involves the homeowner quit claiming the properties to the trust, who then attempts to quiet the title using default judgment methods. Fidelity then would allegedly work out a payment plan with the homeowner to fund its scheme, resulting in a restructured mortgage payment plan in exchange for the attempted lien stripping.

Instead, the quit claim deed clouded the titles to everything from high-priced waterfront mansions to condominiums, all of which were under water in value anyway. This is akin to the well-meaning Patriot-type scams I’ve talked about before. You can’t take a square peg (your own brand of justice) and put it into a round hole (the pigeonhole of a justice system that focuses on rules of civil procedure and rules of evidence). If you’re going to fight the banks in a foreclosure proceeding, you have to take the issue to the venue responsible for handling the ruling of the matter … the county court system. This county court system (whether you like it or not) was set up by the people, for the people. Granted, this system is far from perfect, but this is the system that offers some relief if the judges will just be fair and honest about how they rule. With the foreclosure mess the way it is in the State of Florida, it seems like most of the time, the judges are siding with the banks because they pay mortgages too and giving the homeowner a “free house” just isn’t their cup of tea. So they ignore the facts and the law and rule based on emotion. This is why homeowners get frustrated and succumb to alternative measures like the scheme I described earlier.

[CLOUDED TITLES]

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