Behind on your mortgage in California: what your options actually are

California’s foreclosure process is slow, prescribed and public, which is genuinely good news if you know where you stand. A servicer generally cannot record a Notice of Default until you are more than 120 days delinquent. Once it is recorded, at least three months must pass before a Notice of Trustee’s Sale can be issued, and that notice itself has to be given at least twenty days before the auction. Added up, that is usually the better part of a year from the first missed payment, not the few weeks people fear.

That time only helps if you use it, and selling is not the only option — nor always the best one. Reinstatement, bringing the loan current in a lump sum, is a right you generally hold up until five business days before the sale. A repayment plan spreads the arrears across future payments. Forbearance pauses them. A loan modification changes the loan itself. If you have equity and the house is sound, an ordinary listing may serve you far better than anything we would offer, and if the debt exceeds the value, a short sale negotiated with the lender may be the route. Talk to a HUD-approved housing counsellor before you talk to anyone selling you a solution — that service is free, and it is not free advice from someone with an interest in the outcome.

Where a cash sale genuinely fits is a narrow but real case: you have equity, you have concluded you cannot keep the house, and the auction date is close enough that a conventional sale will not complete in time. A financed buyer needs a lender, an appraisal and an underwriter, and any of those can push past the trustee’s sale date. A cash purchase can often close before it, and closing before the auction is what preserves your equity and keeps a completed foreclosure off your credit record. We can often work to a specific auction date; we will tell you honestly if the date is too close for even us to help.

One thing worth saying plainly: nobody can promise to stop a foreclosure. Anyone who does, or who asks for a fee up front to help you avoid one, or who wants you to sign over your deed or make your mortgage payments to them instead of the servicer, is running a scam that California has specific laws about. Real help does not require any of those things.