This is really funny to me.  I used to love playing Monopoly with my dad before he passed away.  I was totally Ivana Trump each and every game.  So, it was no surprise I got involved in real estate later on in life and view it as a game.  Seriously, who else do you know who treats actual buildings with people in them like Monopoly pieces?  Well, big time VC (venture capital) guys perhaps – but not some little blond chick from Connecticut.

Anyway, I own an antique house up in Northwest Connecticut I no longer fancy.  I tried to get it rented or sold both conventionally and unconventionally.  The main stream ways are obvious – the MLS, online & paper advertising, signs, etc. etc.  The unconventional ways not so obvious – meditating on the house, sending all sorts of colored energy, posting the Archangels, talking to the faeries and elementals on the property – you name it.  And absolutely nothing has worked for over a year and a half.  During that time, the pipes burst, the house froze and it was gushing water onto the street at one point.  I spent several thousand dollars to fix it up before it got filled with mold and ugliness again.  Then threw my hands in the air and said to the Universe, ” no more!”  I stopped making payments to the bank, could care less whether they took it and was done.  By this time, it was in a condemned state worth hundreds of thousands less than what I paid.

Then a prospective tenant came along.  A construction guy who was willing to do the work needed for less rent – score!  A win-win situation for both of us.  I told him I wanted to hear nothing about anything and he could stay on a month to month basis for as long as he pleased.

Things had been going along fine without hearing about anything until he just called.  Even though he is happy with the repairs and the house is more than livable, he started to throw words such as bio-hazard out there and I cut him off.  I said if you talk like that, you go ahead and move out right now.  He apologized profusely, thanked me for the wonderful opportunity and said he wouldn’t upset me ever again.

Here’s my point.  I have ZERO attachment to the outcome of what happens to the house.  I could care less if it’s rented (though am grateful for the $$), sold, condemned or foreclosed.  It makes no difference to me.  Because I reached a point of absolute indifference, I attracted a tenant, attracted funds, and have laid the ground rules for what I will accept and will not accept.  A beautiful thing indeed.  So, this is the exact state one needs to be in when creating and manifesting.  A place of zero attachment.  Of course you can have preferences, that is completely normal but you need to release any little niggly things about situations completely to the wind.

Now, why can’t I do this as easily in other parts of my life?  Aaaah, that’s the cruz of the matter, my friend.  We are often tested in areas of our life where we are the strongest before delving into those other areas where we do not feel as secure.  I am fully conscious where I need additional work in my life, which sucks that I have things left to deal with anyway – I swear, does it ever freakin’ stop?  But, at least if I can consciously create good in one area, then I’ll be able to create better in all.

Yes, little ole me, the Master of Light Chick, has to deal with daily nuisances such as going to foreclosure court.  I spent the entire afternoon there today.

This particular story is rather interesting.  I encountered hardships back in 2006 from which I have since recovered.  I was wealthy prior to these blips, and, God willing, hope to regain my wealth again; but, if not, then so be it..  Nonetheless, the hardships I experienced depleted every last cent of money I had here and abroad and spun my real estate holdings into foreclosure.

The one house over which I went to foreclosure court today is a loan supposedly owned by U.S. Bank and serviced by Select Portfolio Servicing (SPS).  Back in March, I reached a preliminary modification agreement with them and wired in $17,000 to show my good faith.  I was assigned to a specific negotiator who was a very lovely man, we’ll call him Mr. B.C..  He had to order an appraisal to update the value of the home and asked me to wait until he contacted me again.  A month went by without any word, so I called him.  The appraisal came in at $850,000 which was much different than their prior appraisal for $450,000, so he needed to order a variance report and asked me to wait again.  Now, I know that $450,000 number was incorrect as this is a beach house in Fairfield County.  There is no way it’d be less than 1/2 million, no way.  So, I waited, and then one day a random person called me from SPS asking for money.  I replied, Mr. B.C., is working on this loan, to which the new representative replied there were no notes in the system confirming that at all….what???!!  I then tried to reach Mr. B.C. and not only was I refused to be connected with him but also his fax number I had been using on numerous occasions had been disconnected!

You can imagine my frustration and dismay.  Further calls from SPS resulted in no progress, not even an admission that my $17,000 would be returned as my loan modification had been abandoned by them.  So, we eventually ended up back in foreclosure court.

The Judge is a good, fair man and is trying to administer justice – there is no doubt about that and he is doing a very good job.  The Plaintiff’s attorney works for Hunt Liebert, one of the two foreclosure mill law firms in the state of Connecticut; he is a loose cannon acting as if he is still in the U.S. Military and throws grenades at people and truly behaves as if he is still in active combat – I do not understand how he is not disbarred but that is beside the point.  The thing is I know he has a good heart underneath that super tough facade.  Still, he is my adversary in this little drama.

I wasn’t too happy knowing I’d have to go into active combat today myself as I really hate war; Peace is the way, Man.  The truth was on my side but it is still disconcerting to be hated by the opposing side and to try and be portrayed as an evil person.  I had been paying millions of dollars of mortgages on time every month for about 18 years.  So, for 2 years, I fell behind.  Doesn’t my prior record or getting back on my feet since mean anything?  Sadly, not a bit, in realms like this.

So, instead of focusing hate on my Hunt Liebert adversary before the main event, I looked at is as an opportunity to face an adversary Art of War style.  As I said, I think this particular man has a heart but some out there in this world literally do not have hearts nor have compassion for humans.  So, I went into the event to learn how to deal with such beings.  Not everyone will be on your side at all times and there may be no way of winning over these beings either in the typical combat like fashion.  The little man (literally) kept trying to lock eyes with me, must have been some sort of military engagement tactic.  Usually, it is my M.O. to engage back in some way, shape or form, be it with kindness or to stand my ground, but this time I just chose to ignore it and look away and let him feel superior.  I had nothing to prove and nothing to hide, so let him have his way this time.

Nothing was resolved today anyway and the Judge ordered us to go back in two weeks time.  A lot can happen in two weeks.  The supposed banking system shutdown and introduction of the Amero was supposed to have happened last week, so who knows if that is still on tap?  Thing is, I still have possession of my house with no pending law date and $17,000 still being held by Select Portfolio Servicing.  That is not a bad position to be in and the drama continues….

New York Times article on 8/30/2009 by Michael Powell in its entirety…BLESS this judge…bless him for doing the right thing!

The judge waves you into his chambers in the State Supreme Court building in Brooklyn, past the caveat taped to his wall — “Be sure brain in gear before engaging mouth” — and into his inner office, where foreclosure motions are piled high enough to form a minor Alpine chain.

Every week, the nation’s mightiest banks come to his court seeking to take the homes of New Yorkers who cannot pay their mortgages. And nearly as often, the judge says, they file foreclosure papers speckled with errors.

He plucks out one motion and leafs through: a Deutsche Bank representative signed an affidavit claiming to be the vice president of two different banks. His office was in Kansas City, Mo., but the signature was notarized in Texas. And the bank did not even own the mortgage when it began to foreclose on the homeowner.

The judge’s lips pucker as if he had inhaled a pickle; he rejected this one.

“I’m a little guy in Brooklyn who doesn’t belong to their country clubs, what can I tell you?” he says, adding a shrug for punctuation. “I won’t accept their comedy of errors.”

The judge, Arthur M. Schack, 64, fashions himself a judicial Don Quixote, tilting at the phalanxes of bankers, foreclosure facilitators and lawyers who file motions by the bale. While national debate focuses on bank bailouts and federal aid for homeowners that has been slow in coming, the hard reckonings of the foreclosure crisis are being made in courts like his, and Justice Schack’s sympathies are clear.

A spokeswoman for OneWest Bank acknowledged that an official, confronted with a ream of foreclosure papers, had mistakenly signed for two different banks — just as the Deutsche Bank official did. Deutsche Bank, which declined to let an attorney speak on the record about any of its cases before Justice Schack, e-mailed a PDF of a three-page pamphlet in which it claimed little responsibility for foreclosures, even though the bank’s name is affixed to tens of thousands of such motions. The bank described itself as simply a trustee for investors.

Justice Schack came to his recent prominence by a circuitous path, having worked for 14 years as public school teacher in Brooklyn. He was a union representative and once walked a picket line with his wife, Dilia, who was a teacher, too. All was well until the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

“Why’d I go to law school?” he said. “Thank Mayor Abe Beame, who froze teacher salaries.”

He was counsel for the Major League Baseball Players Association in the 1980s and ’90s, when it was on a long winning streak against team owners. “It was the millionaires versus the billionaires,” he says. “After a while, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘He’s making $4 million, he’s making $5 million, and I’m worth about $1.98.’ ”

So he dived into a judicial race. He was elected to the Civil Court in 1998 and to the Supreme Court for Brooklyn and Staten Island in 2003. His wife is a Democratic district leader; their daughter, Elaine, is a lawyer and their son, Douglas, a police officer.

Justice Schack’s duels with the banks started in 2007 as foreclosures spiked sharply. He saw a plague falling on Brooklyn, particularly its working-class black precincts. “Banks had given out loans structured to fail,” he said.

The judge burrowed into property record databases. He found banks without clear title, and a giant foreclosure law firm, Steven J. Baum, representing two sides in a dispute. He noted that Wells Fargo’s chief executive, John G. Stumpf, made more than $11 million in 2007 while the company’s total returns fell 12 percent.

“Maybe,” he advised the bank, “counsel should wonder, like the court, if Mr. Stumpf was unjustly enriched at the expense of W.F.’s stockholders.”

He was, how to say it, mildly appalled.

“I’m a guy from the streets of Brooklyn who happens to become a judge,” he said. “I see a bank giving a $500,000 mortgage on a building worth $300,000 and the interest rate is 20 percent and I ask questions, what can I tell you?”

He has tossed out 46 of the 102 foreclosure motions that have come before him in the last two years. And his often scathing decisions, peppered with allusions to the Croesus-like wealth of bank presidents, have attracted the respectful attention of judges and lawyers from Florida to Ohio to California. At recent judicial conferences in Chicago and Arizona, several panelists praised his rulings as a possible national model.

His opinions, too, have been greeted by a cry of affront from a bank official or two, who say this judge stands in the way of what is rightfully theirs. HSBC bank appealed a recent ruling, saying he had set a “dangerous precedent” by acting as “both judge and jury,” throwing out cases even when homeowners had not responded to foreclosure motions.

Justice Schack, like a handful of state and federal judges, has taken a magnifying glass to the mortgage industry. In the gilded haste of the past decade, bankers handed out millions of mortgages — with terms good, bad and exotically ugly — then repackaged those loans for sale to investors from Connecticut to Singapore. Sloppiness reigned. So many papers have been lost, signatures misplaced and documents dated inaccurately that it is often not clear which bank owns the mortgage.

Justice Schack’s take is straightforward, and sends a tremor through some bank suites: If a bank cannot prove ownership, it cannot foreclose.

“If you are going to take away someone’s house, everything should be legal and correct,” he said. “I’m a strange guy — I don’t want to put a family on the street unless it’s legitimate.”

Justice Schack has small jowls and big black glasses, a thin mustache and not so many hairs combed across his scalp. He has the impish eyes of the high school social studies teacher he once was, aware that something untoward is probably going on at the back of his classroom.

He is Brooklyn born and bred, with a master’s degree in history and an office loaded with autographed baseballs and photographs of the Brooklyn Dodgers. His written decisions are a free-associative trip through popular, legal and literary culture, with a sideways glance at the business pages.

Confronted with a case in which Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs passed a defaulted mortgage back and forth and lost track of the documents, the judge made reference to the film classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the evil banker played by Lionel Barrymore.

“Lenders should not lose sight,” Justice Schack wrote in that 2007 case, “that they are dealing with humanity, not with Mr. Potter’s ‘rabble’ and ‘cattle.’ Multibillion-dollar corporations must follow the same rules in the foreclosure actions as the local banks, savings and loan associations or credit unions, or else they have become the Mr. Potters of the 21st century.”

Last year, he chastised Wells Fargo for filing error-filled papers. “The court,” the judge wrote, “reminds Wells Fargo of Cassius’s advice to Brutus in Act 1, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ ”

Then there is a Deutsche Bank case from 2008, the juicy part of which he reads aloud:

“The court wonders if the instant foreclosure action is a corporate ‘Kansas City Shuffle,’ a complex confidence game,” he reads. “In the 2006 film ‘Lucky Number Slevin,’ Mr. Goodkat, a hit man played by Bruce Willis, explains: ‘A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left.’ ”

The banks’ reaction? Justice Schack shrugs. “They probably curse at me,” he says, “but no one is interested in some little judge.”

Little drama attends the release of his decisions. Beaten-down homeowners rarely show up to contest foreclosure actions, and the judge scrutinizes the banks’ papers in his chambers. But at legal conferences, judges and lawyers have wondered aloud why more judges do not hold banks to tougher standards.

“To the extent that judges examine these papers, they find exactly the same errors that Judge Schack does,” said Katherine M. Porter, a visiting professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a national expert in consumer credit law. “His rulings are hardly revolutionary; it’s unusual only because we so rarely hold large corporations to the rules.”

Banks and the cottage industry of mortgage service companies and foreclosure lawyers also pay rather close attention.