Danielle Antosz
4 min read
After almost a decade of fighting to stay in their Lynn, Massachusetts home, Joe and Kathy Cavaliere had given up hope. They faced foreclosure on their home of 24 years.
Just days away from being evicted, the couple, in their 80s, began packing their things.
“This has been the center of our family,” Kathy told WBZ-TV’s Cheryl Fiandaca. “All holidays, all get togethers. And it was going to be gone.”
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But thanks to Fiandaca’s last-minute intervention, the Cavalieres can stay put, and they own their home.
Here’s how they ended up in the dire situation in the first place.
The Cavalieres’ financial struggles began in 2006, when Joe, then in his 60s, took out a “pick-a-pay” mortgage from World Savings Bank.
The bank told him he could choose how much to pay each month. What he didn’t realize was that any unpaid interest on the mortgage would continue to compound. And it did — exponentially.
The couple’s lawyer Paul Collier describes the pick-and-pay mortgage model as “insane.”
“It was to get people lower on the economic scale to buy homes under predatory mortgages that would end up yielding profits to the lenders and, honestly, foreclosure to the borrowers,” he said.
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Joe ended up out of work for a while and they fell behind on mortgage payments. The couple sent $5,000 to the World Savings Bank to catch up on payments. Things went from bad to worse.
“They said they wanted the whole thing, which was somewhere around $400,000,” Joe recalls.
Then through a series of mergers, Wells Fargo took over the Cavalieres’ mortgage in 2008. The couple continued to struggle to keep up with payments until Wells Fargo foreclosed on their home.
At that point, Kathy reached out to WBZ-TV’s Call for Action team and reporter Cheryl Fiandaca successfully intervened on the Cavalieres' behalf. Wells Fargo reversed the foreclosure and announced it would return the title of the home to the couple.
