A servicer letter about insurance gave me four days to figure out my answer
Rural county, house I picked up subject-to eighteen months ago. Purchase was 71k, seller's balance was 58k at 3.5, I paid her 13k for equity in two pieces, half at closing and half six months later. Tiny deal by the standards of this room, normal for where I buy.
In month sixteen the policy renewed and the agent, doing his job, updated the named insured to reflect the trust the deed sits in. New declarations page went to the lender automatically the way they always do. Ten days later the servicer sent a letter to the borrower of record, the seller, asking her to confirm the ownership status of the property.
She called me before she called them, which is the only reason this story has an ending I like. I'd told her at the kitchen table before signing that this exact letter could arrive someday and that if it did, she should call me first and I'd get her the answer and pay for a lawyer to look at it if she wanted one. She remembered. Eighteen months later, she remembered.
So I had four days before the response window they printed on the letter. My options were to answer plainly, to say nothing, or to start moving toward the exit. I had a Plan B already, which was a small local bank that had told me they'd look at a refi on this thing at a rate about three points worse, and cash to cover the payoff gap if I had to sell instead.
We answered it. I paid a real estate attorney in that state for two hours to write four sentences and she sent them. Nothing happened. Payment posted on the first, the way it has every month since. But for four days I priced out selling a house I like, and I learned my contingency plan was more theory than I'd thought.