SmartMoney Online has an interview with Henry Sommer, president of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, about the 2005 BAPCPA amendments –  Bankruptcy Law Doesn’t Jibe With Modern Mortgages

Some tidbits –

SM: How do you propose to change the bankruptcy law?

HS: There are a couple of different types of changes we propose. One is to make filing for bankruptcy less complicated. One of the side effects of the new law — and I’d like to think Congress didn’t intend this — is the phenomenal increase in paperwork and cost associated with filing, and it’s therefore denying access to people who can’t afford them. So one type of change we’d like to see is a cutback on the paperwork and the expense of bankruptcy. The other is that bankruptcy laws be changed to give people more tools to deal with foreclosures, including these exploding adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) you see now, where payments just go so high because of the interest rate adjustments. So we propose changes to make bankruptcy more useful.

SM: What’s an example of that?

HS: Typically, when people face a foreclosure, bankruptcy has allowed them to take up to five years to catch up on their arrearages. In a Chapter 13 case, [usually you would] start paying your monthly mortgage payment of, say, $1,000. You [pay] arrearages over 12 months…. Bankruptcy allows you to do that. That’s worked well for people who had a temporary income interruption that caused them to fall behind on payments. [Our proposal] gives three, four or five years to catch up, instead of typically two months…. The two months, or slightly longer, is how long mortgage companies will usually give debtors to catch up outside of bankruptcy.

That doesn’t work so well when your monthly payment has been bumped up because of an adjustable rate mortgage. That’s the problem suddenly facing a lot of people. It doesn’t work if you can’t even afford the monthly payment. Our proposal is to take the ARMs and re-amortize them over 30 years as a fixed rate. They’d do that as part of Chapter 13 bankruptcy. [This would apply] if your house was overappraised or it’s fallen in value. Say you got a 100% mortgage for your $200,000 house, and now it’s worth $170,000. You re-amortize it over 30 years and pay off the mortgage that way. That’s the crux of our proposal — strip down the mortgage to the current value of the house and re-amortize that over 30 years. We’re hoping that will be introduced in Congress in September.