She was proud that buying her first house after a lifetime of renting provided a "real home" for her daughter, her foster child and her grandson.
But after she refinanced her mortgage three years ago to make necessary major repairs, Freeman lost the job with the overtime. Four months later, she lost her tenants.
Her income was cut in half while her $1,147 monthly loan payments were double what her original mortgage payments had been.
She fell $3,500 behind and was receiving foreclosure threats along with a lot of unsolicited offers to "save" her home by declaring bankruptcy.
"I think that's cruel," Freeman said. "I believed that declaring bankruptcy would save my home, wipe the slate clean and give me a fresh start. I found out that's not true."
Swollen by bankruptcy legal fees, her $3,500 bad debt ballooned to $20,000. Her house was scheduled for sheriff's sale last month. She needed a miracle.
Freeman and hundreds of equally desperate Philadelphia homeowners have found that miracle in the person of Common Pleas President Judge C. Darnell Jones II, who recently issued a court order that may become a national model for saving the homes of people drowning in debt.
Whether they succumbed to the teaser-rate adjustable mortgage loans that suddenly readjusted skyward or predatory lenders or deceptively expensive bankruptcies or fragile personal finances that collapsed due to loss of income - all of them could lose their homes to foreclosure if they don't grab the lifeline that the judge is tossing them.
Judge Jones ordered lenders to sit down with foreclosed homeowners in front of a judge and make a good faith effort to renegotiate mortgages reasonably to allow those homeowners to keep their houses.
Jones decreed that lenders can only put an owner-occupied home in a sheriff's foreclosure sale if that good-faith effort fails.
Facing a sheriff's sale of her home on 63rd Street near Lansdowne Avenue, Freeman reached out to the nonprofit Philadelphia Unemployment Project (PUP), where counselor Pamela Kennebrew called Freeman's lender, who quickly agreed to work out a realistic payment plan that would enable Freeman to keep her house.
"When you're delinquent with your mortgage," Kennebrew said, "you get a lot of offers telling you, 'File for bankruptcy. That's the only way to save your home.'
"They fail to remind you that if you file for bankruptcy, you still have to make your mortgage payments plus you have to make payments to a trustee that disburses your money to all your other creditors," she said. "Plus, you have to pay upfront money to the bankruptcy lawyer and that's money you don't have."
Freeman's mortgage company is in the process of modifying her loan, Kennebrew said. "Ms. Freeman's delinquent amount is now high. We hope to add it to the principal and amortize over 30 years or reduce the interest rate to make her payments affordable and make this a win/win situation for both the lender and Ms. Freeman."
Freeman hopes that PUP will soon do for her what it just did for Helen Shiffler, a beautician from Fishtown, who bought her first house in 1985 on Cedar Street, a couple of blocks south of Lehigh Avenue, where she lives above her beauty shop, The Hair Pub.
She paid off her 1985 fixed-rate $45,000 mortgage in 15 years, but in 2006, she needed to borrow $75,000 to address family financial problems and business debt at two other beauty shops she had opened.
Her mortgage broker said that because of her credit problems, the best he could find was a $100,000 loan at a fixed rate of 9.5 percent for 30 years.
But at settlement, Shiffler discovered that the promised 9.5 percent was really 11 percent and the promised fixed rate was really adjustable.
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