Wondering how long you have before your McHenry County foreclosure case concludes, and you are evicted? This article provides you with a basic timeline for what to expect in McHenry County foreclosure court.

DISCLAIMER: Every case is different. Your case may move at a different pace than what this article sets forth. This article is meant only to provide an average timeline for uncontested mortgage foreclosure cases in McHenry County. Numerous factors could vary the amount of time your case takes. You should not rely on the information contained within this article when making decisions about the current status of your foreclosure case or to decide much time you have left. If you really need a good answer, I am more than happy to chat with you at no cost. My contact information is at the top of this page.

Here is a rough timeline of what you can expect in McHenry County foreclosure court if you do nothing:

0-3 months from first missed payment. After your first missed mortgage payment, your bank is required to send you a “Grace Period Notice,” and in many cases conduct a “Face to Face” interview with the homeowner to discuss solutions to the late payments. The Grace Period Notice will advise you of your right to obtain housing counseling, and during the time you obtain counseling, the bank can take no further action. After three missed payments, so long as you are not in approved housing counseling, the foreclosure action can begin.

4-6 months from first missed payment. The bank has filed a foreclosure lawsuit against you. If you are unlucky, you are served with papers shortly after the lawsuit is filed. For 90 day from the date that the foreclosure complaint is filed, you have a right to reinstatement. Hypothetically, you could gather enough money to pay off what you owe on the mortgage (plus court costs and attorney fees) and reinstate your mortgage loan. If you had that kind of money laying around, you would not be in foreclosure in the first place.

6 months from the first missed payment. This is likely to be your first date in court. Historically, few of the banks’ attorneys are ready to proceed on this day. Better attorneys, however, are. An order finding you to be in default will be entered, and a future court date (approximately 6 weeks out will be set for the bank to prove the amount it is owed).

7.5 months from first missed payment. Bank proves up its case, a “Judgment of Foreclosure” is entered. This starts the clock for your redemption period. You now have three months to pay off all overdue amounts on the mortgage including attorney fees and costs.

8.5 months from the first missed payment. JUDGMENT EFFECTIVELY BECOMES FINAL, AND YOU WILL ALMOST CERTAINLY LOSE YOUR HOUSE. Illinois law grants judges the discretion to modify any non-final orders or judgments. The Judgment of Foreclosure is not the final order in the case, the Order Approving Sale is. However, in my experience the foreclosure judges in McHenry County will not use that discretion to disturb the Judgment of Foreclosure after 30 days without a showing of exceptional circumstances. If you are thinking about hiring an attorney to defend the foreclosure you should do it well in advance of this point.

10.5 months from first missed payment. The bank has to publish public notice of the judicial sale in the newspaper. The bank will publish the required notice in the newspaper during the redemption period and will schedule the judicial sale to occur shortly after redemption expires. The bank will conduct the sale and sell your house for 60 to 80 cents on the dollar. About a week later, the bank files a motion for an “Order Approving Sale.”

11.5 months from the first missed payment. It takes about a month for the Motion for Order Approving Sale to be heard in McHenry County foreclosure court. On that date, the judge will enter an order approving sale and staying enforcement of the eviction order 30 days. If the proceeds of the judicial sale were not enough to satisfy the outstanding amount you owed, the judge will enter a judgment against you for the rest. Some of these judgments are huge—in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

12.5 months from the first missed payment. The eviction order attached to the order approving sale is actionable. The order is delivered to the McHenry County Sheriff’s Department, which takes about two weeks to process the eviction order.

13 months from the first missed payment. You are evicted.

 

 

How an attorney can help.

Losing your house in foreclosure is terrible for two main reasons. First, you lose your house that you and your kids love. Because your credit is ruined from the foreclosure and judgment, you will have a very difficult time finding even a place to rent. Second, and even more terrifying, is that you will likely walk away with a judgment against you for the difference between what the bank is owed (including its attorney fees and costs) minus what your house sold for (which is about 60 to 80 cents on the dollar of what your house is actually worth). The bank can take this judgment and garnish your wages, freeze your bank accounts, and periodically drag you into court. It is the ultimate addition of insult to injury.

A competent, experienced McHenry County foreclosure defense attorney can help you. You have three primary options in foreclosure: attempt loss mitigation (a loan modification or short sale), fight the foreclosure as hard as you can (you will certainly lose, but you may extend the time you have the house for), or walk away (in most cases, you will still receive the personal liability judgment at the end of the day). None of these solutions are perfect, but obtaining competent legal counsel at the beginning makes your options much easier.

We have experience processing loan modification paper work for homeowners, arranging short sales (and we can give you a good referral for a short sale real estate agent, too), fighting foreclosures, and assisting McHenry County homeowners with dealing with the personal liability from the default.

We offer McHenry County mortgage foreclosure defense clients a free, no obligation consultation to discuss your issues. For most people, we are able to craft a solution that is cost effective and helpful to homeowners in distress. Give us a call today and sleep better tonight.

 

 

 

 

This post is the first of three blog posts explaining the basics of criminal record expungement in Illinois. Many of my clients come to me with misconceptions about what expungement can do and how to go about it, and it is my hope that these blog posts clear up some of those misconceptions.

This post covers whether you even qualify to have your record expunged. Part two will cover the process for obtaining an expungement. Part three will attempt to explain what expungement does (and does not do) for your day-to-day life. Links to those other two posts will be added to the bottom of this post when the articles are published, so stay tuned.

What law governs the expungement process?

In Illinois, the primary source of law guiding the expungement process is the Criminal Identification Act , which is codified at 20 ILCS 2630/0.01, et seq. The Criminal Identification Act is dense, but if you are interested in expunging your record you should try to read it.

Do you qualify for expungement?

A number of things prevent you from having your record expunged. Generally, the following issues come up:

• Current pending criminal charges. You need to wait until your cases is resolved and reaches a final disposition (meaning you are no longer on parole, probation or court supervision) before you can qualify for expungement.
• Prior conviction of a criminal offense (or a municipal ordinance violation in the nature of a criminal offense) is a bar to expungement. 20 ILCS 2630/5.2(b). If any of your prior court cases involved probation (other than limited first-offender drug probation programs), conditional discharge, a fine for anything other an a petty traffic ticket, time served, jail or prison, or a finding of guilty by a judge or jury (without having received supervision), then you cannot have your record expunged.

If you have no prior convictions but you received supervision for a charge, there still may be a waiting period:

If you received a disposition of supervision for any past charge, you must wait five (5) years after the successful completion of your supervision if your charge was for:

• Domestic battery
• Criminal Sexual Abuse
• Retail Theft
• Operating an Uninsured Motor Vehicle
• Display of a False Insurance Card
• Scrap Processors to Keep Records

If you received supervision for any other criminal charge (and remember that most traffic offenses are petty offenses, not criminal offenses), then you must wait two years after completion of your supervision.

If there was no finding of guilt, you can seek to have your record expunged immeditately. If you were released without charges, or if you were charged and that case resulted in a disposition of not guilty, finding of no probable cause, or a disposition of nolle prosequi (commonly referred to having the charges “Nol Prossed” or “NP’ed”), then you can file your expungement petition immediately.

Next steps if you qualify to have your record expunged.

Hopefully you are still with us and are eligible for expungement. Next week in Part 2 of this series, I will explain what you have to do to have your record expunged and why it is a good idea to retain an attorney.

The purpose of this article is to explain (1) why all small business owners and successful people need an asset protection planning strategy, (2) why products such as liability insurance are insufficient on their own to preserve your wealth, and (3) how a proactive approach with your attorney can make your assets safer (but they will never be 100% safe).

More risks to your wealth than ever.

Asset protection planning is more important than ever. Over the past 25 years, numerous social factors have resulted in unprecedented risks to personal wealth. Lawsuits are a big part of it. In 2006, there were 5,806 lawsuits filed per 100,000 Americans. In contrast, in that same year there were only 1,542 lawsuits per 100,000 Australians, 1,450 lawsuits per 100,000 Canadians, and 1,768 lawsuits per 100,000 Japanese. Our car insurance rates are three-times greater than what Australians pay, and we have 1 lawyer for every 250 people. We Americans are quick to take our disputes to the courts.

Even worse, punitive damages are asked for and granted in increasing numbers of cases. Two Duke University law professors published a study of all jury trials conducted in the United States in 2005. They found that there were requests for punitive damages in 45% of slander/libel/defamation cases, 38% of real estate disputes, 36% of employment discrimination cases, and 6% of personal injury and car crash cases. Punitive damages are almost unrelated to the actual damage caused and can reach into the millions or tens of millions of dollars range.

Liability insurance helps but is not a complete solution.

Your insurance policies do not cover punitive damage awards that are directly assessed against you. Since 1981, Illinois courts have consistently held that public policy prohibits insurance coverage for punitive damage awards. See Beaver v. Country Mut. Ins. Co., 420 N.E.2d 1058 (5th Dist. 1981) for a discussion of why Illinois courts believe punitive damage insurance is contrary to public policy.

Choose an attorney with experience crafting asset protection strategies for his clients.

Every asset protection strategy must be custom-tailored for the client. This field of law constantly evolves because asset protection is a game of cat and mouse—people trying to preserve wealth develop new strategies and people trying to take wealth develop new ways to get around those strategies. Moreover, some clients face greater levels of risk than others. If your attorney is not on the cutting edge of asset protection strategies, you are less safe than you could be. Call my office to schedule a free, no-obligation consultation to see how we can work to preserve your wealth.

 

 

The foreclosure crisis is basically over, which is bad news for you if you are about to be hit with a foreclosure suit.

The good news is that McHenry County foreclosures are on the decline. In 2012, at the height of the foreclosure crisis, there were 3,129 chancery actions filed in McHenry County. Residential mortgage foreclosures are approximately 90-95% of chancery actions, meaning that there were approximately 2,800 – 2,900 foreclosure cases filed in McHenry County in 2012.

As of the middle of August 2014, fewer than 850 chancery actions have been filed, putting us on track for fewer than 1,400 chancery actions this year, and fewer than 1,300 residential mortgage foreclosure filings. This is approximately where we were at before the bottom dropped out in 2007. It is fairly safe to say that the mortgage foreclosure crisis is over.

The bad news about this is that the foreclosure crisis actually worked to the advantage of homeowners who were being foreclosed on. The overwhelming number of mortgage foreclosure filings in 2007 through 2013 literally swamped the courts. It used to take uncontested cases more than a year to reach judgment and judicial sale in McHenry County merely by virtue of the fact that the foreclosure judge physically could not keep up with all of the cases. As more and more of the old filings are cleared out of the court system, the foreclosure court can now dedicate more time to each case. The take away from this is that your foreclosure case is going to take much less time than your neighbors’ case took in years past.

It is more important than ever to be proactive about your McHenry County foreclosure.

No matter what your intention is–defend your McHenry County foreclosure case, counter-sue your mortgage company for deceptive practices and federal law violations, mortgage modification, short sale, try to get your payments current–you need to be proactive about your McHenry County foreclosure case. Once you have been served with papers relating to a McHenry County foreclosure lawsuit, you have 30 days to answer or otherwise plead to the foreclosure complaint, and on the 31st day the bank can and will seek a default judgment against you. Your options will quickly dissolve once you have been defaulted, and (barring extraordinary circumstances), the default judgment likely will not be unwound.

I have experience defending residential mortgage foreclosure cases. I also help my clients modify their mortgages and short sell their homes. Sit down with me for a free, no-obligation consultation to discuss the best strategy for defending your McHenry County foreclosure case.