Letter to John Tierney (D-MA)

I've posted a letter that my wife wrote to the office of Rep. John Tierney. The letter is addressed to one of the people in his office because over the course of the last year that we've been trying to reach him and speak with him and get some answers from him, he's been too busy to call us himself.

I mean we're only a couple of insignificant voters losing our home.

I mention the congressman in a recent piece on the Huffington Post titled Deck Stacked Against Homeowners.

Any way here's the letter. Feel free to use it or parts of it for your own congressman.

Well Michaela,

We are now one year into what has been an exhausting and unbelievable year. We have educated ourselves and advocated for ourselves with no outside support from anyone anywhere at any time. Richard even began to blog for the Huffington Post in addition to writing about this on his own blog to have his voice heard...to hopefully effect some sort of sanity into what is becoming the biggest criminal offense of all times.

We have done our part in writing to every one of our elected officials in Washington, and it is appalling and quite telling that at no point in time did any of them think we were important enough or our experience and story meaningful enough to so much as call us.

And we were frankly speechless to receive a call from Tierney's office noting "we didn't realize you required any action from our office....we don't know what type of action we can offer" - really? People are losing their homes due to predatory practices and you don't know what to do?

You could maybe take a cue from Maxine Waters (D-CA) who is actually meeting the people she represents and calling banks on their behalf; or Marcy Kaptur (D-OH) who told her constituents to squat in their homes. Tierney has done nothing - not even so much as a phone call.  We are completely abandoned; at no point over the past year has Congress implemented any action or regulation against the Banking and Financial Industry.

We continue to lobby and advocate for ourselves as it's clear no one from Congress gives a damn. And as no one gives a damn, the banks move forward doing whatever they want. Why wouldn't they - I mean Congress showed them the bigger they are, the larger the bailout.

For homeowners this means continued abuse of legal rights. Our loan servicer, Ocwen Loan Servicing, who was hand selected by Freddie Mac in Feb to roll out the Making Home Affordable plan has seen fit to plague us with delays and excuses, missing paperwork, lost paperwork, threats and insults. We've written the Ombudsman no less than once a month. In July, Ocwen even had our home appraised and learned it is 65% under water. Their solution then to modify our loan by increasing our principal makes absolute sense...doesn't it? And while the modification would appear to be one we'd even agree to with the increase to principal, they failed to disclose the terms.

You know why? They assert they have no legal obligation to disclose the terms because they're doing us a favor in modifying our loan and Congress has created a climate that makes this possible.

You should know that the modification "Agreement" we received was reviewed by both a Harvard Law Professor who is a Housing Law specialist as well as our private attorney and both of them advised us against signing it noting the document as ambiguous, poorly structured, and that the way it was written would grant Ocwen the right to add any amount of fees/charges at any point going forward.

Even more disturbing are the larger implications for what you have here is a "hand picked" loan servicer who is praised for their efforts sending out hundreds of thousands of modifications with no disclosure to homeowners who are signing them out of fear of losing their homes that will lead to the next round of what will be Modification Meltdowns - only this time, there will be no money left to bail them out.

While we filed a formal complaint with the Attorney General's office and the Division of the Banks, and submitted the details to the Congressional Oversight Committee, and again inform your office of the outrageous deceitful tactics the lenders are employing, we doubt our story or rants will make a difference.

Which is why we've switched gears and are throwing all our efforts at a state level - we provided verbal testimony to the Judiciary Committee at the State House yesterday to put a face on the foreclosure issue in regards to and in our support of pending foreclosure legislature that would actually help to protect and guarantee homeowner rights in the legal process.

It's shameful that this has to happen at a state rather than federal level.

It seems to us there are only a handful asking the right questions - Elizabeth Warren, Maxine Waters, Marcy Kapture and Ariana Huffington; that they are the minority is appalling.

Given all that's gone here with broken promises you have made between the Mortgage/Student Loans  (you never did get back to me on the Student Loan issue either), it is clear that Congressman Tierney does not have our interests at heart and is not working on our behalf. As such, we  will not be supporting any re-election for Tierney in any capacity for it's very clear to us that he simply doesn't care one iota about any of us.

Maybe it's time "we the peasants" used our right to vote everyone in office out as there's been no fulfillment of  the "changes" we were promised last November.