Here’s another clip in the series that I have been working on. In this one I talk about how the Senate has eliminated a section of the pending mortgage relief legislation which would have allowed a bankruptcy judge to reduce the balance owing on a mortgage. The idea was that in those situations where the mortgage is more than the value of the property, the bankruptcy judge could reduce the balance of the mortgage to be equal to the value of the house. The rest of the balance of the mortgage would be discharged in the bankruptcy. Sounds like a wonderful idea to me. But the Senate committee didn’t think so. Too much lobbying by the banking industry.
So for the time being there is no provision in the bankruptcy law for an option to discharge the part of the mortgage that exceeds the value of the house, while allowing the balance of the mortgage to be a lien on the house. I feel as if I may be doing a bad job at explaining this. It’s the kind of thing that many non-lawyers might not understand. As a result, the Senate gets away with not passing a really beneficial piece of legislation, because nobody quite understands what it is they didn’t pass.
