Doris contacted Legal Services at the end of the summer of 2023. She had fallen behind on her property taxes, which constituted a default on her reverse mortgage. She did not fully grasp the severity of the situation until she received a notice that her home was in foreclosure.

Advocates in LSNJ’s Foreclosure Defense Project (FDP) recognized that Doris was just a couple months shy of 80, when she could apply for an At Risk Extension (ARE), a Housing and Urban Development (HUD) program that permits a one year deferment of the foreclosure process for homeowners over 80 with critical circumstances and cannot afford a repayment plan. Her advocate with FDP helped her to get two back-to-back 30-day adjournments on the foreclosure sale, pushing it from November, 2023 to January, 2024. He then assisted her with obtaining the necessary medical documentation to support her application, calling her physicians directly to explain what she needed and the reason.

It was a race against the clock with stumbling blocks each step of the way. She had difficulty getting appointments with the correct medical providers and the plaintiff’s counsel was hard to reach during the December holidays. Doris’s attorney managed to assemble the necessary forms, obtain her signature, and submit her completed application on January 3, just six days before the scheduled sheriff’s sale. Her right to two adjournments had already been used, so further advocacy was needed to convince the mortgage servicer to adjourn the January 9 sheriff sale until her ARE application was approved. After numerous additional calls and emails to the plaintiff’s attorneys, the sheriff’s sale was finally cancelled. “I got the best lawyer in the world,” says Doris. “He really did a great job with me.”