ZEELAND, Mich. -- After a nearly 10-year fight to keep her home, a West Michigan woman is days away from losing it all.
Gretchen Molotky made a career out of selling homes to others and making her own 'nest egg:' a dream home she helped build in 2006. The catalyst to her current problem was a change to her insurance policy, which cascaded into a legal battle that's altered her entire life.
It's safe to say that Molotky is a fighter, but she's losing, and she knows it. That's why she reached out to the FOX 17 Problem Solvers.
The simple choice of switching insurance providers led to a spike in her mortgage payments. It drained her savings, but not her spirit.
"My family got sick of coming home from school and work and hearing me be on the phone until midnight," she said.
She says the fight is another full-time job. Wells Fargo was pinging her for double, even triple her initial mortgage payment for month after month, even after proving and re-proving it's the lender who made a clerical mistake.
"They lost it or they didn't record it and it went into the wrong file."
Attorney Paul Ledword has represented Molotky in just one of the many rounds this fight has led to over the years.
"Ultimately, she's not able to make the payments on her house because not only is she trying to pay her mortgage, but she's trying to pay the additional costs of the forced place insurance that Wells Fargo has put on it," he said.
Four years in, the onslaught began.
"In 2010, Wells Fargo threatens they are going to foreclose on me," Molotky said.
When the foreclosure process started, Molotky says she was in contact with people at Wells Fargo.
"He said he would do what he could and check into things," she said. "So I had a dialogue with him for several months."
Ledword and Molotky have logs of some of those contacts to people at Wells Fargo, who eventually say they made a mistake.
"They tell ya 'Oh don't worry about. Fill out these documents and we'll see what we can do for you.'"
Molotky eventually received a letter saying Wells Fargo was not going to foreclose on her.
"So we had a dialogue back and forth, and they couldn't figure out how much I owed... and then all of the sudden, my redemption period is up."
Five days later, the sheriff's sale took place anyway, and three months after the sale, she was cut off.
"What most people don't understand is that is a non-judicial action. It doesn't happen in court. It happens in a public venue," Molotky said. "So if the bank doesn't show up there and somebody else shows up and is the highest bidder, they get the house. Doesn't matter."
Not long after, the highest bidder at this secret sale is revealed.
"In August of 2011, U.S. Bank brings an eviction hearing against her to evict her from the house," Ledford said. "We learned that U.S. Bank didn't own the house after the sheriff's sale... It was transferred to Fanny Mae, and Fanny Mae is the real party in interest, not U.S. Bank, according to Wells Fargo's own records and records that Wells Fargo created and sent to the IRS to identify who the owner of the property was."
"They're selling stuff back and forth between each other... It's the Wild West."
Molotky's fight was about to get wilder. In Part 3, watch the new support Gretchen is getting as her fight moves to the federal level and hear what Wells Fargo told FOX 17 when we brought the case to their doorstep.
Watch Part 3 of this Problem Solvers investigation on Tuesday, Sept. 27 on FOX 17 News at Ten
