| Volume 143 Number 68 |
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The People’s Lawyer’s Tip of the Day
If you made accommodations with your lenders or creditors due to financial hardships related to coronavirus, follow these steps to ensure that your credit reports and scores are not negatively impacted. Click here for more.
Bed, Bath & Beyond is closing 200 more stores
The pandemic’s economic fallout continues to be felt among the nation’s retailers. On the heels of Brooks Brothers’ filing for bankruptcy protection, Bed, Bath & Beyond said it will close 200 more stores.
The announcement came late Wednesday as the home goods retailer announced that its sales plunged 48 percent amidst the pandemic. The sales numbers would have been much worse if not for the company’s ecommerce sales.
Bed, Bath & Beyond reported that online sales nearly doubled as it benefited from consumers’ spending binge on cleaning supplies and home decor items. Still, it wasn’t enough to make up for the loss of business in its stores that were forced to close. It reported a loss of $1.96 a share in the just-completed quarter. Click here for more.
Your Money
As COVID-19 spread across the country, states shut down, businesses closed their doors and millions of Americans filed for unemployment. For out-of-work families, state and federal moratoriums on evictions meant they didn't have to worry about landing in the street in the midst of a pandemic.However, those eviction moratoriums are beginning to lift, which means tenants who haven't been paying their rent could be facing an eviction notice soon. The pause on evictions from federally financed properties, implemented by the CARES Act, is set to expire on July 24, and many states are already rolling back protections. If you find yourself on the receiving end of an eviction notice, here's what to expect. Click here for more.
For the Lawyers
Judicial foreclosure is not debt collection under Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed the dismissal of an FDCPA action, concluding that the FDCPA does not apply when a creditor is enforcing a security interest through a foreclosure, but is not seeking a deficiency judgment. Plaintiff filed an action against Fannie Mae, Fannie Mae’s loan servicer, the law firm that represented Fannie Mae in the foreclosure proceeding, and the firm’s attorneys (collectively, “defendants”) for, among other things, violating the FDCPA when seeking to foreclose on his residential property. The district court dismissed the action, concluding that the FDCPA did not apply because the defendants had not engaged in any debt collection behavior by initiating the judicial foreclosure. {In 2018, the 9th Circuit affirmed the dismissal, but subsequently ordered a supplemental briefing based on the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervening decision in Obduskey v. McCarthy & Holthus LLP (which held that law firms performing nonjudicial foreclosures are not “debt collectors” under the FDCPA, covered by InfoBytes, https://buckleyfirm.com/blog/2019-03-22/supreme-court-law-firms-conducting-nonjudicial-foreclosures-are-not-debt-collectors-under-fdcpa). After the supplemental briefing, the appellate court affirmed the district court’s dismissal of the action. The appellate court rejected the plaintiff’s argument that the letter sent by the defendants when initiating the judicial foreclosure, which included monetary amounts owed, amounted to debt collection activity under the FDCPA. The appellate court noted that the defendants were merely fulfilling a procedural requirement (that has since been amended) of Oregon foreclosure law, and “in no event would a money award have been enforceable against [the plaintiff],” because of Oregon’s anti-deficiency judgment law. Thus, the appellate court concluded that a judicial foreclosure is not considered a debt collection activity when it does not “include a request for a deficiency judgment or some other effort to recover the remaining debt.” Click here for more.