Foreclosure is one of the scariest words a homeowner can ever hear. In Georgia in particular, it’s absolutely shocking how easy it is for a lender to foreclose on your home and basically wipe out your equity and leave you homeless with your belongings in this literally in the street.

If you ever receive anything from a lender even suggesting that foreclosure might be a possibility, you need to contact an attorney immediately! Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Drop whatever you are doing and immediately call a qualified attorney. This cannot be emphasized enough.

Failure to contact an attorney after receiving a foreclosure notice could be the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your entire life, and the consequences could be absolutely catastrophic.

In Georgia, we have what’s called non-judicial foreclosure, which basically means for a lender to foreclose on your home, they do not need to go to court. There are certain very simple requirements they have to meet, where all they have to do is send you a letter in the mail, advertise the foreclosure for a few weeks in a newspaper that you’ll never see and will probably never hear about, then conduct the auction (which you will likely receive no further notice of).

One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking the lender won’t foreclose because they are in the process of negotiating a workout or modification, so the bank won’t foreclose, and you’ll get another notice if they’re really going to foreclose, right? Wrong! Being in a modification process does not stop foreclosure!  And that one letter might be the only notice you ever get.

About a month after you receive that foreclosure letter, on the first Tuesday of the month (which is known as Foreclosure Tuesday), this is when the foreclosure auction will happen, unless you have gotten the lender to agree in writing that you have an approved settlement agreement or unless you pay off the entire amount of the loan in full (including all interest and fees) before Foreclosure Tuesday.

As for the actual auction, you would think there is an organized process for these auctions and that there is an auctioneer and there is lots of bidding, and you’ll at least get some money for your equity, but you would be completely wrong! Actually, what happens is the lender will have their lawyer or somebody else walk up onto the courthouse steps and read off a property description and say this property is for sale.

The opening bid will be the amount owed to the bank. Then there will probably not be any other bidders, because nobody even knows who this person is or what they are talking about, and even someone who might have been interested in bidding would have no idea when the auction would be starting (or perhaps even who would be conducting it), and there are probably lots of other people on the courthouse steps doing the same thing at the same time in one of the most chaotic scenes imaginable.

So what happens next? No other bidders (probably) so… Sold! To the lender for the amount of the debt. And your equity simply disappears. Poof. Perhaps more accurately, the lender just took your equity. And your home.

And that it. It’s over. Just like that. No further notice. And virtually nothing you can do to unwind the foreclosure once the foreclosure sale happens. The lender records the transaction in the real estate records, and they own your house now. Shortly after that, they will probably be filing a court case to evict you from your home (which is legally theirs now), and they will almost certainly quickly win that case. If you do not move out voluntarily, they will send the sheriffs out to remove you and literally leave your personal possessions at the side of the road like so much trash.

Nowadays, with people having so much equity in their homes, this is a major concern for many people so please, anytime if you are ever in a situation where there is any possibility that you might be facing foreclosure, you need to contact an attorney immediately to know your options. Don’t let this happen to you.