Three years ago I was the proud owner of my own construction company. I built it from the ground up and was grossing about five million dollars a year. Not soon after my entire life began to crumple. The bottom fell out of the Real Estate market and building came to an end. At the same time I was going through a nasty divorce.

I went from never worrying about money to having nothing. I owned three homes and the renters in two of them stopped paying their rent and I had to evict them. In no time I was facing foreclosure and had no money to hire an attorney.

Since I had no work I decided to begin educating myself and learn everything possible to defend myself. I am not an attorney but from what I have learned there are not many attorney's that have the knowledge to properly defend you anyway.

I will do my very best to educate you so you can and will win in court. That is if your case even gets to that point. I will try to cover every possible defense in an understandable format so you can decide if it is worthy of more in depth research. I am going to guess that you have just been served with a summons and know very little about defending a foreclosure. Basically at the same point I was at when I began this journey.

Please remember that I am not an attorney but feel confident that I have spent more time researching foreclosure defense than 99% of the attorney's practicing law today. Remember that interpretation of laws will vary from state to state and jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So please check your local rules and interpretations of the law when planning your case. I will also suggest other resources that I found to be of great benefit to me when doing my research.

One last note before we get started. Don't allow this terrible economic situation that we are all stuck in to get you down. Everyone has lost so much but we will all recover one day. Remember that NOTHING CHANGES IF NOTHING CHANGES! Do not allow yourself to get stuck in a rut in life. To change our lives we have to change our habits and to change our habits we need to change our thoughts.

Stop focusing on what is wrong with your life and start focusing on what you want your life to be. The key to success is to spend more time focusing on what we want in life. Stop complaining about your current situation and except it for what it is. If you keep acting as though you are a victim you will be powerless.

We all have the ability to change our lives. All it takes is for you to make the decision to do so. To change our current situation we must change are thoughts and focus our energy on what we want our lives to be. So fight back and keep the home!

I know you are probably freaking out because you have already been served the lawsuit and only have 20 days to answer the complaint. Relax because more than likely you are not going to have to file an answer just yet because you can file a flurry of motions to dismiss. Lets not get ahead of ourselves. We need to learn a few of the basics before we go any further. Then you will see that you can stop foreclosure.

Lets briefly go through the possible defenses which we will try to use to attack the lenders ability to file the lawsuit. If nothing else filing a motion to dismiss will buy you some additional time to file your answer.

Your first possible defense to look for is to see if the mortgage and note are attached to the complaint. Check your states own rules governing their attachment to the complaint but most state that a copy of the written instrument must be attached. If your lender fails to attach them then their is a procedural defect which you can attack with a motion to dismiss.

Your next defense to look for is insufficiency of process. This iis a check to see if the lender properly notified or served you. This rule of civil procedure varies from state to state so check your states rules. If you were not served according to your states rules than the lawsuit may not proceed. This is a matter of constitutional due process and should be attacked with a motion to dismiss.

The next defense we will look at is an extremely efficient way to get a foreclosure suit dismissed. This defense is the failure to establish conditions precedent which means that something that was required to be done by the lender has not been completed. The most common mistake made by lenders is failing to mail a notice of acceleration to you. When a condition precedent has not been done by the lender the action must be dismissed and the lender is forced to start over from the beginning. Check your mortgage for a paragraph requiring a notice to be sent or for any other requirements not met.

The last defense which we may use to motion for dismissal is the lack of standing or failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted. This defense can be used in many different ways. One way is you can argue that the plaintiff is not the actual owner of the mortgage. Is there an original note and mortgage and was the assignment completed as required by law? Did the lender fail to state in the claim the the loan is in default? In most cases it is better to use this as an affirmative defense in your answer because it is a sort of catch all defense. It can be used with all most any other defense and can buy you a lot of time in court.

I hope that you are feeling a little bit better knowing that you can stop foreclosure. Now you can see that if nothing else you can definitely buy yourself more time. In my next post I am going to start to discuss filing your answer to the lawsuit. Later we will get all possible defenses out on the table and dive even deeper into the ones which we just discussed.

I have barely touched the surface of the overwhelming amount of information you will need to learn but at least you can buy yourself some time while you educate yourself further. I welcome you to go to my blog where I will be going through everything you will need to know to represent yourself through the foreclosure proceedings. Just go to: http://keepthehome.blogspot.com