[What-a-year]

I spoke to some representative at countrywide and agreed verbally to a goodfaith of $8000 on $17 000 owed and rest reworked into balance. I seperated from spouse and wish to now foot the mortgage on my own.

1) Because I am now footing this alone what is the best strategy to get bank to lower amount owed from $402K to say $350K. I know I may need to get past the first representatives to the real McCoys in loss mitigation. Is this possible?

2)Over the phone I talked to a guy there (before I found this forum) and in pronciple agreed to $8000 good faith $ but did not get him to lower amount owed. Can I revise the numbers I ran with the rep because I found out that I cannot get a loan from my 401K in time due to divorce proceedings. I can only comfortably come up with $4000. I have not faxed anything to them as yet so nothing is written in stone (I hope).

3) We have two properties. Wife and kids live in one and I live in the other(alone). Wife has been trying to short sale the property that I live in but is having no luck so I think the bank is aware and may want to work with me. We are due for mandatory settlement in 45 days but the load modification guys seem to want to move fast. My hope is to get a quitclaim from her and I do a quitclaim to her on the other property, then I want to go through with loan modification. I cannot go through the modification before the settlement in case I do not manage to keep the house. But having the paperwork at the settlement conference should help in negotiation and showing then that I have an ace up my sleeve. It seems the underling at countrywide wants to rush me with this modification and to get the $8000K out of me. The bank has send me a delinqent notice but I think have time because sell date cannot be set before late March, and settlemtn confernce is early March.

Side more details/background:

Going through divorce wife has attorney and I am self representing. In Jan 07 we had two properties with about $100K equity, and two trading accounts with $75K at highest value. Attorney and wife felt I deserve less than half of assets and they simply wanted to beat me down into some lopsided settlement as well as the fact that they were not sure which option gave the highest return (stocks were risky, but housing was weakening). I was willing to take cash or one house it did not matter.

Fistly they froze the trading accounts including a cash trading account that had $38K including 30% margin. Total market value flactuated from Jan to June 07 to as high as $75K on May 31st. Freezing accounts was so that I fall deliquent on mortgages and credit cards and panic into a settlement (Lost to them is that this being a community property state, they can come after her for my debts).

Things went by so fast from February 07 to June 07 and before long we were under water. Stocks reached highest value on May 31st but I could not sell the stocks because accounts were frozen. Went to court three times to try and get the account unfrozen, but they refused to budge. Then subprime and credit crunch hit and trading account went down to $15000 by end of June.

Wife was upset with attorney and how things had went from bad to worse. They separetd for a brief moment and in that window I set court date and got account unfrozen and split equally the remaining cash.

Back in Jan 07 homes could have been sold for a net gain of $100K, but again they were not interested in settlement (attorney wanted to rack in some $$ I suppose). By June the homes were under water as far as quick sale was concerned and after realtor commisions.

Wife did a modification with one property that she and the kids are in, but I still am on title. Wife wants to short sale other property (that I am living in) for no gain just to spite me. I am interested in doing a modification on the second property and we do quitclaims to uncouple title. But wife cannot stand the idea of me retaining anything despite the fact that I was the one working while she was at home due to complicated pregnancies.