What Is A Deficiency Judgment?

By Author: Groshan Fabiola
Total Articles: 2678
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This is a question that many people are trying to find an answer for. This is a process that occurs when a lender wants to accumulate the remaining balance after another recovery action, such as foreclosure, has not garnished enough to cover the losses that the bank has occurred. The most important fact regarding deficiency judgment operations is that most people are not aware of the possible consequences. Most people are interested in learning what is a deficiency judgment and what do the banks stand to gain from initiating a deficiency judgment. Well, it is pretty simple actually; as you might already suspect, banks will try and do pretty much anything when dealing with debtors.

The deficiency judgment allows banks to increase the level of financial restitution from their clients. There is however more than one aspect that need to be met in order for a bank to even consider starting a deficiency judgment, however, in today's market with the increasingly high numbers of foreclosures and short-sales it is getting more common for lenders to file for deficiency judgments where in the past this was not so. Due to the large ...
... number of foreclosure and short-sales that have quite simply created very large negative debt for the lenders, the lenders now have to do something to off-set the massive loses. One has to understand that in the past these loses where calculated as a percent; the percent of loses generally speaking may have been three to twelve percent previously, but in today's market lenders are now seeing massive loses ranging from forty to sixty percent. This has created a large demand for lenders to create and stream line new processes to deal with pursuing previous homeowners to recover monies lost through short-sales and foreclosures; due to the fact that real-estate in today's market has seen major declines in values, essentially creating a situation that renders the homeowner over financed and under collateralized.

In the recent years of the real-estate economic downturn, there has been a very large number of homeowners that have found themselves with loans against their property that are greater than the current appraised values of the real-estate in the current market. When understanding the process of foreclosure and short-sales, the new buyer of the property, thru foreclosure or short-sale process, are now offered subject to short-sale offers. This means the new purchasers of the real-estate are now offering full current market value which in fact can be thousands less than the previous mortgage held prior to foreclosure or short-sale. Thus this is how the deficiency judgments are being created on a massive scale.

Deficiency judgment, even though it poses quite a risk to debtors, is not advertised and most people have no idea about what a deficiency judgment is. A large number of resource websites and blogs have popped up in recent years. Pretty much all these sources try to reassure people that banks and creditors will not take deficiency judgment actions against them, and most of these sites don't even bother on educating their visitors on what is deficiency judgment, and what are the risks that they could be submitted to as a result of banks starting a deficiency judgment action. As a result of the global economic crisis, the number of deficiency judgment actions started by banks has been on the rise. Banks are now finding it increasingly more beneficial to successfully pursue deficiency judgment actions.

Banks have to allocate funds for all deficiency judgment actions; and now lenders have devoted the necessary resources to enable them to cost-effectively, and efficiently to position themselves to be able to go after the previous homeowners for deficiency judgments at a later date. Thus it makes it increasingly important to contact your lender immediately after foreclosure or short-sale and start the negotiations in offering some sort of monetary reimbursement to entice the lender to accept a reduced settlement or agreeable terms rather than ignoring the deficiency judgment, only have the lender serve you with the deficiency judgment a year or two down the road.

For more resources about what is deficiency judgment or about deficiency judgment, please review http://www.judgmentdeficiency.com