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After You Receive a Formal Notice of Intent to Foreclose

Before your house can be sold, you must get some sort of formal notice required by your state’s foreclosure laws. (See Ch. 2.) The kind of notice you will get depends on where you live.

If you’re in a nonjudicial foreclosure state, you may get:

• a notice of default (allowing you time to reinstate your mortgage by making up all the back payments) followed by a notice of sale (if you haven’t reinstated your mortgage by the deadline)
• a combined notice of default and sale (stating that the property will be sold on a certain date unless you make up the missed payments)
• only one notice—a notice of sale announcing that the property will be sold on a certain date unless you pay off the mortgage, or
• in a couple of states, notice only by publication and posting.

If you’re in a judicial foreclosure state, you might get a pre-filing notice telling you that foreclosure proceedings will begin within a particular period. You will definitely get a summons and complaint telling you that foreclosure proceedings have been filed in the appropriate court and that you have a certain amount of time to respond.

In almost all judicial foreclosure states, if the judge orders the foreclosure sale, you’ll get a notice telling you when and where the sale will take place. In Connecticut and Vermont, however, the judge can transfer title to the property as part of the judgment of foreclosure.