My grandmother bought the home we lived in the 90s for 90k at a 8% interest rate. I found out she refinanced the house several times from what seems like predatory practices and malicious advice and now owes 250k at 6%. Basically the house I thought was paid off now has 30 mortgage and she is 90. Her grandkids are in the will to inherent the house but do we inherent this mortgage?
In the US:
When you pass away, your mortgage doesn’t suddenly disappear. Your mortgage lender still needs to be repaid and could foreclose on your home if that doesn’t happen. In most cases, the responsibility of the mortgage will be passed to the beneficiary of the home if there is a will.
https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/what-happens-to-mortgage-when-you-die/
This partially depends on how much the house is worth now. If it’s somehow a million dollar house today, and the amount owed is $250K, then you could refinance that and make payments. This would be a reasonable transaction.
But if you have negative equity - if you owe more than the house is worth - the best thing to do right now is stop paying that mortgage. In the short term, you’re just throwing money away, because that mortgage is never going to be paid off. In the longer term, see the above. Stop paying the mortgage.
Yes, this will end in foreclosure. Yes, you’ll “lose the house,” but honestly, it was lost a long time ago, you just didn’t know it. Once the foreclosure has happened, your grandmother will be relieved of that debt, because the home was collateral. Foreclosure is highly likely to happen anyway after your grandmother passes, but then it becomes infintely more complicated, especially if there are multiple beneficiaries of the property.
My in-laws were in a similar situation long ago. They had gotten a now-illegal “reverse amoritization mortgage,” which basically guaranteed that their mortgage payments would always be less than the interest accrued. Same kind of result: they owed way more on the house than it was worth, way more than they had originally borrowed, and were essentially never going to get out from under it. The advice they took was exactly as above. Stop paying the mortgage.
Her estate is responsible for the mortgage. You have to pay the mortgage out of whatever resources her estate has or “sell” the house to the grandkids at which point they are responsible for the mortgage. The bank has to get their money somehow. If the grandkids don’t want to assume the mortgage and the estate doesn’t have the money to pay the mortgage then you will default and the bank will foreclose and take the house to auction.
Would there be any advantage to convincing her to sell before her passing? Im assuming the remaining balance of the sale would go to us anyway?
I would not let the house go to auction. That will be the least advantageous. Having her sell now means that she has to have the balance of the mortgage available at closing to pay down the loan. That would of course reduce the value of her estate and then it’s less going to the grandkids or whoever. Whether she or her estate sells when she is alive or afterward is likely moot. She still owes the bank the balance of the mortgage no matter what.
It sounds like maybe you have more context to the situation, but I just want to say that cash-out refinancing on its own isn’t necessarily predatory or malicious.
I just can’t fathom why she would need to do this. She was getting rent from mutiple people. “This came up because we’re all like sooo the house is paid off this year right? So rent can go down?” I was planning write her a check for w/e balance is left just to wrap it up this year. Like I can only believe she was scammed somehow. She’s An old lady with 2nd grade education (no joke) and not a good speaker.
Is there any evidence the money was used inappropriately or stolen? How was she paying her living expenses? How confident are you that she shouldn’t have needed the cash just to live?
Discussing this with my siblings I don’t know why she would need money to live when we lived with her and people are paying her rent. Her kids and grand kids have degrees. Going to a bank for money and not just asking us more seems like madness. However, she does take frequent trips to the old country that she claimed was being paid for by her siblings. she maybe have more skeletons than we thought.
You sure do if you want to keep the house. It also sounds like she leveraged the house for some extra cash when she refinanced.
That’s not necessarily a bad strategy, either. Most people, their home is their major asset, but you can’t really access that value to buy groceries in retirement. Take money out on a new mortgage on the inflated value of the house, buy groceries and pay mortgage with that money, and move in with the kids when/if the money runs out. The bank will take the house in the end, but leaving nothing to the heirs may be better than spending your last years living in your kid’s basement. The whole ‘reverse mortgage’ industry has grown up around just that plan.