Once a homeowner is behind on their mortgage payment, they can expect a lot of harassing calls from their bank. Unfortunately, that isn’t the worst of it.

The difficult part for the homeowner is that once you get more than 30 days late the bank requires full payment of all monies in arrears. So let’s say a person hasn’t made a payment for a couple of months and you manage to scrape together the 2 months mortgage payments of $4,000 and you call your bank to let them know the good news. But what you hear is the bank saying "Hey you know that $2,000 monthly mortgage and you know how you owe us 2 months worth of payments, right? Well you actually owe us $4,500 because you’re two payments late and we’re not going to accept anything less than full payment on all monies that are past due. Oh, and by the way there are some penalties and fees and things we’re going to add onto that, so that’s why you need to send us $4,500 to get back in our good graces. If you don’t send us this amount, we’re going to go forward with foreclosure proceedings and take your home from you."

And rightly so, that freaks people out. Most families typically can’t come up with two or three or four times their monthly payment in one lump sum. If they try to send monies in that are anything less than that full lump sum amount, the bank will usually, quite literally, send the person the check back. If the person says, "Hey all I can do is come up with one month payment. I’ll send you the $2,000 plus fees, so I’m going to send you $2,400." and they send in the check and the bank is more than likely not going to cash it and they will send it back to the homeowner.

With the banks refusing to take partial payments the bank will then often proceed into the next stage of the foreclosure process. Typically after 3 or 4 months that have gone by without a payment, the bank at that point is going to legally file against the homeowner and submit a legal document to the homeowner’s county recorders office. The document is what is called a Notice of Default (NOD). This takes the homeowner one big step closer to losing their home.