Five years of missed mortgage payments and the champagne comes out. The cause for celebration? Lenders exceeding the statute of limitations for completing the foreclosure process and the owners keeping the home – while not paying the mortgage for years. Many call it “getting over”; others call it a win for the “little guy” and others are just exhausted with the entire topic because in the end, banks just pass on costs to consumers anyway.
Since housing prices peaked in 2006, roughly 6.7 million Americans have lost their homes to foreclosure with another 800K+- in the foreclosure pipeline. Tens of thousands of homeowners have missed more than five years of mortgage payments, many of them clustered in states with judicial foreclosure proceedings like Florida, New Jersey and New York, where lenders must get judges to sign off on foreclosures. This neither fast or easy; in fact many homeowners in duress just stopped paying the mortgage knowing full and well that they could live in the home for an extended period essentially for free. As the years roll on, lenders are discovering that they may never be able to seize the homes because the state statutes of limitations have been exceeded.
Crazy? We think so and so does at least one judge: 
“No one gets a free house,” Judge Michael B. Kaplan of the United States Bankruptcy Court in Trenton wrote in an opinion late last year, reflecting what he characterized as a longstanding “admonition” he and others made during the foreclosure crisis. But after effectively ending a New Jersey homeowner’s foreclosure case in November because the state’s six-year statute of limitations had expired, he wrote in his opinion, “With a proper measure of disquiet and chagrin, the court now must retreat from this position.”
So no worries; don't bother with hiding assets or strategically defaulting. Just rely on the one constant - the slow, grind of the courts and the ability of tons of paperwork to do the work for you.
Read more at The Hank Miller Team site.
THE HANK MILLER TEAM COUNSELS HOME BUYERS AND SELLERS IN THE ATLANTA AREA WITH OVER 25 YEARS OF SALES AND APPRAISAL EXPERIENCE.
