Robin Basichis

Everywhere you look there's ads for Loan Modification - it's becoming like one long billboard. Law Firms popping up on TV and on the Internet telling you how they know more than anyone wears ties how to save your home through Bankruptcy. Of all the shysters out there trying to steal your money in the guise of saving your home is the dirty stinking lawyers. Lawyers are scum. They lure you in with promises of interest rate and principle reductions that they can't keep. They tell you new laws are coming from the Obama Administration any day. All these new laws are coming that will help you out of a jam. 'Don't you worry, by the time you get up in front of the Trustee the new law you were counting on will have passed both houses.' Don't count on it. Here is what happens when you file a Chapter 13: If there is a pending foreclosure sale on your property that sale is stopped immediately. You then must produce financial documents that prove you can handle a payment plan. If you can demonstrate to the court that you can make payments then you have to start paying on your first within a month or two after the filing plus make good on all of your arrears payments which are tagged onto the Chapter 13 Payment Plan. So if you are behind say $12,000 on your loan you pay that off in a five-year payment plan to the Trustee. If you have an IRS Tax Lien that goes into your payment plan also. Let's say your tax bill is $18,000 - so here is how it works. Tax Bill- $18,000/60 months = $300 Arrears Debt - $12,000/60 = $200 Regular Monthly Payment $2150 per month. This scenario brings you to $2650 per month. The good news is your second gets wiped out in a Chapter 13 so you will probably be making about the same size payment you were making on your first and second for five years while your getting rid of your current tax debt and arrears debt on your loan. If you are currently earning the same or more money than you were when first got in trouble it's not a bad deal, especially if your second was twenty-percent or better of the entire loan amount. But what if you are not making what you were making a year or two ago. I think this may be the more likely scenario for many people. You may be working but your spouse lost that cushy job with the county. Or you got laid off and your wife's hours got cut or both of you aren't working and your running through your savings and calling up your favorite rerelatives - buttering them up and telling them how much you love them just in case you have to ask them for some money in the near future. If any of these things have happened, and chances are they have, or you wouldn't have defaulted on your loan in the first place, then Chapter 13 may not be the ch-eerie paradise the Attorneys claim it is. Most of the time you are better off working out some kind of Loan Modification Plan with the bank on your own or hire a guy like me who works cheap and tries hard to get you a reduction. A lot of times the bank will roll your arrears payments back into say a thirty-year loan so you are only paying say $75 more a month instead of $$200. If you are facing foreclosure and have to file you Chapter 7 Bankruptcy will stop a sale. You can't use it to go into a payment plan with the court but it will stop the sale and you still have the opportunity the work out a plan with your lender. Most Lenders will try and make a deal with you. Unless you have tons of equity in the property and you living right on the beach, they don't want your house - they have enough houses. They have to foreclose on you - fix the property up for resale and then re-market it at current market value. So, it really is not in their best interest to kick you out of the house if they don't have to no matter how tough they act. There are several ways to get free help and if you contact me I will refer you to those sources. If you do have to file Bankruptcy ssometimes as good paralegal that's hooked up with a law firm is the best way to go. They are a lot cheaper and if they work in bankruptcy only they will do a more thorough job than some ambulance chaser that just got in the Bankruptcy business to cash in on all the action. Best thing to do if you are in trouble is to keep talking to the bank - don't ignore them. Ignore them and you'll get an NOD in the mail and in 35 days a Notice of Foreclosure Sale. Call them - tell them you want to keep your home. they will usually send out a packet for you to fill out - financials - hardship letters and such. Get that into them. If they see your are trying to be proactive they won't be so fast to drop the hammer on foreclosing. Try and keep a cool head. And again you can contact me Rob Basichis at this site or call me at 702-279-8025. Good luck.

To supplement my Real Estate practice here in LasVegas I have a Remediation Company called the Touch-Up Man. (robsellsvegas.net) My company gets REO's and Foreclosed properties ready to sell. There are a lot of Bank Owned properties here in Vegas. When you drive through certain neighborhoods you see sign after sign - FORECLOSED - AUCTION - BANK WILL SELL - In some areas prices of homes have dropped to under 80 dollars a square foot. When I bought my first home here in 1993 it went for 80 dollars a square foot. That was seventeen years ago, so most homes in this town are worth what they were seventeen years ago. Somebody said to me a long time ago a house is no longer an investment, it is a commodity. I should have listened to that piece of wisdom. Now I work with banks and Realtors fixing homes up and getting them ready for sale. Some properties are completely trashed - the owners take everything including the kitchen sink - literally. They take the sinks, the toilets, the air-conditioners, the water-heaters - all the appliances - the kitchen cabinets - flooring - switch plates - ceiling fans... and on and on and on. Some people like to stink their places up with trash and animal droppings. One house I finished last month had animals living in it for three months and the place stunk so bad you couldn't open the door or the whole neighborhood would start stinking. On the second floor there was a pile of trash in the master bedroom about four-feet high - I'm not exaggerating - four-feet high, with beer cans strewn all over the top of the trash like ornaments on a Christmas Tree. This place was so disgusting I had to put Vics Vapor Rub under my nose to mask the odor. The whole thing is sad. There was another house where the people walked out and left everything they owned. There was a big ashtray in the middle of the bed and a bunch of empty containers of pain medicine. I guess when they ran out of the pain killers they put out their last cigarette and walked out the door - at least that's what it looked like. It made me feel sick. It could happen to anybody. Most people who loose their job are about a month or two away from going broke, and unless they have somebody like a family member to help them out they can loose everything. I'm no Bleeding Heart, and I believe and working hard and being responsible - but next time you or one of your clients getS real excited about landing a great deal on a Foreclosed Property you might want to take a moment and think how it might have gotten there. Sometimes a little humility can be a good thing. Rob Basichis - REPORTING TO YOU LIVE ON THE FRONT LINE OF THE FORECLOSURE CRISIS. It up to us to get our cities cleaned up. If you wait on the government it's never going to happen. All of us in the business have to get involved.

DISCLAIMER: This post does not mean to offend any hardworking Appraisers who do their job like everybody else. This is just about the ones that I know.

In recent posts I have seen people's concerns about property values declining further by the hands of crooked Appraisers. There is reason to be concerned. When the boom was on appraisers who walked the gray line would manipulate property values every day. If you wanted to refinance and get that extra Ten Thousand out of the deal all you had to do was find the right appraiser to do the job. If you wanted to receive Cash Back at Closing there were appraisers who would skew the numbers and make a $300,000 Property look like a $450,000 Property. They would go as far as take pictures of another home - stick it in their appraisal package, and submit it to an out of town bank. Most of the time they would get away with it. The key to manipulating values and defrauding banks is having a dependable corrupt appraiser on your team. If they are self-employed or working for a small firm a crooked appraisers will do what they have to do to make a deal happen. Now that properties are in decline the scam works in the opposite direction. Say you want to do a Loan Modification, or you want to buy a home and get the value reduced way down. Say you want to convince the bank the property is worthless, maybe worth less than half of its original value. Don't you want the lowest appraised value you can find? For a fee there is an appraiser out there who will provide it for you. It doesn't matter that the game is working in an inverse proportion of how it used to work - it's still a game; and when you have a game you are going to have players. So make no mistake, some property values will decline at the hands of appraisers on the take. I'm sure that some day they will crack down more on Appraisers. They are being scrutinized more now than they were a couple of years ago, but there still there is the hired Gun Slingers out there that will continue to get away with murder. Maybe they should make it a little harder to become an Appraiser as well as they should make it harder to become a Realtor. To become an Appraiser you have to finish a course that is given at any school that teaches Real Estate either in a classroom or on-line. The course last a couple of months and you are given a certificate. At least that's how it works in Nevada, I don't know the rules for all the other states. Then the Appraiser has to find an apprenticeship which lasts two years. After the two year requirement is met the Appraiser gets a license and can go to work on their own. They are not really monitored by any governing body so they have the opportunity to stick their hands out. Unless they are reported to the Division of Industry for unethical practices or misconduct they can carry on doing what they do for years and years. Once in awhile they do get caught. I know of one who had to move back to Iran for all the dirty stuff he did as an appraiser in the United States. Bad appraisers are kind of like cockroaches - you can keep on fumigating but you'll never really get rid of them.

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Philadelphia, like all major cities had its share of crime and psychos, but it was a more innocent time - most of us not yet hardened and cynical enough to shrug off a sex murder of a child by another child as just another story in the newspaper or just another day in the hood. For many Philadelphians, my parents included, it was a first time experience with a juvenile crime of this magnitude sending shock waves through Philadelphia neighborhoods that scared people into becoming more aware there was an evil presence lurking in the shadows, bringing about a bitter realization that their children would now have to be protected not only from the buggie-man but from monsters donned in corduroy and horn-rimmed glasses.

The story began to hit the papers in January of 1949, and soon Seymour Levin would become a household name. Seymour was only sixteen when he comitted the murder. There was no reference point for this. No one could remember it happening before - a middle class kid from a nice family commits this senseless brutal act. Seymour Levin had single-handedly blazed the trail for a whole new generation of psychopaths and maniacs that would soon follow in his wake.

The victim, twelve year old Ellis Simons defiled body was found lying dead in his underwear in Seymour's backyard. The press had a field day with the gruesome details of the murder. With kitchen knives and scissors Seymour had slashed the boy multiple times and kept on going after the boy was dead. One blow was directly through Ellis's heart and the coroner said there wasn't a drop of blood left in the boys' body which Seymour laid to waste in a rage of misguided passion and fear. The detectives on the case said it was the most violent act they had ever seen. It was like the boy was attacked by some wild animal slashing the child from head to foot leaving no part of his body unscathed.

After he murdered Ellis Seymour hog tied him with a rope and dragged him from the second floor bathroom where he killed him, pulled the body down the stairs and through the kitchen and out a back door. He tried to drop the boy in the neighbor' yard but couldn't get him over the hedges so he left the body behind a detached garage on his own property. Seymour made a half-hearted attempt to clean up the mess by wrapping the boy' clothes in newspaper and throwing it out the window, and then tried to wash up the blood, but there was too much to hide. Seymour's parents didn't get home until late that night and they woke him up to explain the mess. Seymour said his Chemistry Set exploded.

The next day the police found Seymour and started to question him. Seymour told his story. He met the boy on a corner not to far from his home. They struck up a conversation and Seymour invited Ellis back to his home to see his chemistry set. Ellis tagged along. Seymour told the detectives he brought the boy into the bathroom to show him his chemistry set, but the boy was not impressed and made fun of it, telling Seymour that it was cheap. Seymour said he got mad and told the boy to leave the house, and according to Seymour the boy pulled a knife and they began to fight. All Seymour could remember was the initial struggle and then he blacked out. He stuck with the black-out story through-out the trial.

Seymour's neighbors started talking to the cops and the press painting his image as a bully who picked on and beat on smaller kids. Eighteen months before the slaying it was found that Seymour was put on probation by the juvenile court for kidnapping. He had taken a boy for a ride on his bike and disappeared for a couple of hours. The parents panicked when they found the boy missing and called the cops. The court hearing which resulted in probation and a psychiatric evaluation was done on Seymour. The evaluation determined that Seymour had discipline and academic problems. Although he was of average intelligence he had managed to fail seventh grade.

It was later found that Seymour did not meet Ellis Simon on a street corner but in a movie theatre. Ticket stubs were found on in the dead boy's clothes and in Seymour's pocket. They were at the Pix Theatre at 19th and Market where they watched the Marx Brother's "Night at The Opera," and "San Francisco" starring Clark Gable. It was never explained how they boys met inside the theatre, but they did leave together and took the Market-Frankford El home.

What happened in the house was never drawn out graphically. The three judge panel saw no purpose in reciting the details. What they did know was a thirteen year old boy was lured to a home by a stranger whom committed perverted sexual acts upon the child, which was irrefutably established with forensic evidence. The panel questioned Seymour's motive for killing the boy after he satisfied himself sexually. Their conclusion was Seymour, afraid of being exposed by the victim as a sexual pervert, killed Ellis to keep him from talking.

Several people observed that Seymour was never fully aware of the gravity of his crime. He clinged to his father and cried - asking him when he was going home and back to school. His lawyer entered a plea of guilty. The court ordered a psychiatric examination to help with the sentencing. The psychiatric report concluded that Seymour was neither psychotic nor feebleminded, and that he could distinguish from right and wrong. They said the crime was motivated by sadistic homosexual impulses.

The doctors made their diagnosis by coming up with the term Constitutional Psychopathic Inferior which soon turned into the acronym CPI. CPI was characterized by one's inability to exercise self-control, impulsive behavior and disregard of ethical and moral considerations. Pop Psychology and the Media would soon label legions of children considered abnormal or having emotional problems with CPI.

Less than two months after the murder a frightened and shaking Seymour stood in front of the Judges Panel as they pronounced sentencing. He was sentenced to life in prison. The judges said his age was the only thing that saved him from the Electric Chair. After sentencing Seymour was remanded to the Eastern State Penitentiary to serve out his life sentence.

In the aftermath of the trial there were some editorials about the need to separate psychopathic children from normal children. There were some neighborhood meetings in West Philadelphia, the area where the crime was committed, wherre concerned parents discussed problem children. Nothing was ever really accomplished.

It wasn't until June of 1977 that Seymour Levin was released on parole. The boy who spent his seventeenth birthday in prison was now 45. Ellis Simon's father was enraged at Seymour's release. Seymour told the parole board and the press that he knew he had committed a horrible crime and that could not be changed. But he had truly repented and would continue to repent for the rest of his life. He is now over sixty and lives in obscurity with his father in New Jersey. For those who lived in Philadelphia at the time of the murder the name Seymour Levin brings to mind a shift in the social paradigm about caution and child protection. Mother's and father's now thought twice about letting their children roam the streets alone.

I'll always remember the look in the eyes of my mother and grandmother as they related the tale of Seymour Levin, which for some reason I never grew tired of. There was a fear in their eyes when they told that story - a fear of the unknown, and a fear of instinctively knowing there were more Seymour's on the rise. My mother would point her finger at me and say, "Don't you ever go anywhere with strangers. Never get into a strangers car and never go back to a stranger's house, do you hear me." I always nodded yes because I knew she was right. Seymour had struck a nerve in my psyche too and I will never forgot his story. My mother always said he would never get out, but he did. If Seymour were around today would he have made front page news or would he have been relegated to the back section of the newspaper? I'm sure there would have been a blurb on the Internet, at least for an hour or two.

I have long since moved from Philadelphia and it was a dangerous city when I lived there. Now it vies for contention with cities like Washington DC and Detroit for Murder Capitol of the Country. At least one to two murders a day are committed in Philly. Many of them are gang and drug related and most of them are not sex crimes, but they are still murders. For some reason in a world gone mad, I will never forget corduroy clad and be-speckled image of Seymour Levin. (Details of this case were chronicled by Ron Avery)

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Unless you don't have any faith in what you have to say I believe you should be writing on all the interactive sites like Facebook- Twitter - Myspace- Linkmen or anywhere you can find an audience to promote yourself and your business. Networking makes for good business sense, plus its fun and stimulating when people pay attention to what you have to say and make comments. When I Blog I think about content and the spirit of what I am saying the same way I think about what I say in a business meeting or in mixed company. If you write like an ignoramus then your ignorance most certainly will be immortalized on these networking sites because internet information will be around as long as discarded Styrofoam. Since the quest for immortality is an integral part of human nature and hardwired into the human psyche, I believe there will always be those who will choose to take their place in the annals of time anyway they can, no matter how they may be perceived in the present or scrutinized in history. Facebook, and all these other sites act as perfect forums for people whom only wish to be remembered but don't care what they may be remembered for. There are is no shortage of sickos out there, and it surprises me that Blogging, at least on sites like Facebook, has remained reasonably intelligent and civilized. Unfortunately there is always the exception. There are those few who insist on going on these sites acting like the embarrassing uncle that most families share - you know the one I'm talking about. The guy that shows up at parties or a family events, dressed in a cheap suit wearing a loud tie, talking over everyone in the room. He gets drunk, starts talking religion and politics, insults people and makes a complete ass out of himself. When the uncle dies everyone is relieved that they no longer have to fret about sending him party invitations, and he is remembered by most as the idiot who should have never been allowed out in public in the first place.

As a professional person doing business on these sites you should be looking to set a standard for yourself. If you are putting things out there without much thought - things you later wish you could retract but you can't, we'll that can be harmful not only to your good name, but to the partner, spouse or organization that you have left behind. The world certainly will keep on spinning long after we are gone and I don't want my child to find a stupid Blog that Daddy wrote years ago. I don't want her to find something that she should be ashamed of or have to defend. This Blogging stuff is new to a lot of people. I think great benefits can come from it. Huge wealth of information is now being shared to fill several types of knowledge bases. When we write, share, and communicate ideas and opinions we should take our responsibility as Bloggers seriously because we are now being recorded in the annals of time.