We’re hearing a lot more often about lender banks being uncooperative and refusing to disburse the insurance funds that loss victims need in order to repair their damaged homes.

UP published Texas tips on your insurance money and your mortgage to supplement our popular Getting Your Mortgage Company to Release Insurance Proceeds. The Texas tips were written by volunteer attorneys Ken Klein and Chris Files (Bastrop County Long Team Recovery Team) and published with support from the Austin Community Foundation. When a lender is named on an insurance policy, they will also be named on claim payment checks as a co-payee. The homeowner has to get the lender to sign off before they can cash the checks and use the funds to make repairs.

Under normal circumstances, lenders want borrowers to repair and maintain their homes, and they will sign off on insurance checks so that can happen. But in today’s economy borrowers are falling behind on mortgage payments, lenders are tightening their fists and some disaster victims are having to sign over their insurance payments to pay down loans instead of using the funds to repair their homes.