100-Year-OId Woman Faces Foreclosure, Latest Victim of the Foreclosure Crisis

Filed under: The Economy, Housing, Mortgage, Lynnette Khalfani-Cox

It’s a sad day indeed when you make it to be 100 years old only to wind up possibly getting thrown out on the street.

That’s the predicament facing Agnes Albinger, an Illinois resident who lives on a large, but aging farm and allegedly owes banks nearly $700,000.

Albinger has lived on her 70-acre Monee, IL farm since 1949. But it wasn’t until the year 2000 that she first took out a loan on the property. At the time, it was a $100,000 mortgage. Since then, however, as much as $700,000 in mortgages have been placed on the home, primarily via transactions involving a niece of Albinger’s.

That niece, 47-year-old Bridget Gruzdis, controlled a real estate development business. Albinger signed over parcels of land to her niece’s company. And Gruzdis claims that Albinger also signed mortgage papers, and was fully away of what she was doing.

The whole thing smells very fishy too me. Not just because I’ve seen too many people get scammed out of their homes — often by relatives or friends. But also because of Albinger’s age and her background. This is a woman known as a caretaker and pillar of her community. Over the years she adopted and raised some 40 foster kids, after she and her late husband couldn’t have kids of their own. Friends and strangers call her “Aunt Aggie” and have set up a website (http://www.saveagnesfarm.com) to help her, according to the Chicago Tribune.

The fact that Albinger worked so hard on her home and land — literally milking cows and tending to acre after acre until she was well into her 80s — also speaks volumes about her character and willingness to put in sweat equity, as opposed to borrowing on the property. So if Albinger says she had no idea there were liens and mortgages on the home, I’d be more inclined to believe her versus that niece.

Ironically, the niece has put the home and the farm up for sale, listing it for $4.6 million — something else Albinger and other family members said they had no idea was taking place.

I hate to say it, but I suspect that there was fraud involved somewhere in this whole sordid tale. If so, I hope the banks get to the bottom of it. And that those mortgage lenders consider the big picture here as well.

Whatever happened, it would be a shame to see 100-year-old Agnes Albinger evicted from the only home she’s known in the past 60 years, a victim of the foreclosure crisis that just keeps growing and growing.

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Lynnette Khalfani-Cox, an award-winning financial news journalist and former Wall Street Journal reporter for CNBC, has also been featured in top newspapers including the Washington Post, USA Today, and the New York Times, as well as magazines ranging from Essence and Redbook to Black Enterprise and Smart Money. Check out her New York Times best seller, ‘Zero Debt: The Ultimate Guide to Financial Freedom.’

 

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