Our Mortgage Lender is claiming for Penalties and interests on our mortgage loan that matured last July 2021.

We are pushing our Mortgage Lender to do the final settlement of our mortgage loan with a full waiver on penalties that matured last July 2021. Being both OFW co-signatories with my wife, there was an increase in our monthly mortgage loan repayment schedule around Oct 2020 after a number of months our automatic deduction was stopped by the lender around March or April 2020 due to Bayanihan law. Our monthly mortgage increased from P98000 plus to P150000 plus in Nov 2020 which we still paid via auto-debit arrangement. Around early Dec 2020, I rang our Lender and spoke to the branch personnel to complain about the sudden surge in our monthly payments and requested through my branch if the lender's Mortgage Department would consider extending our home loan repayment an extra 6 months from July 2021 to Dec 2021 because we could not afford the P150,000 monthly mortgage increase. The auto-debit arrangement was stopped by the Lender and never made any response or given any notice or letter since December 2020 even with assistance from Lender's branch personnel. Email correspondence was sent on a regular basis monthly but we never heard from the Lender's Home Mortgage unit from December 2020 up to 18th April 2022 when we finally received a summary of our Loan account from someone from the Lender's RMU Department with penalties over P670000 plus interests 173000 on top of our outstanding loan balance amounting to P1,232,000 plus. Last June 15th, 2022, the Lender's RMU Department representative offered a 50% waiver of penalties after she was informed that the Lender's Mortgage unit was at fault over this matter since no one from the Lender's mortgage department made any attempt to communicate with us since December 2020 in spite of us being assisted by the Lender's branch personnel to try to resolve the matter even before the maturity of our mortgage loan came into effect July 2021. We just want to fully settle our outstanding balance and any interests incurred that is justifiable without any penalty to pay since the Lender's Mortgage unit's inaction was unfair and unjustified. Which type of lawyer can help us? Do we really need a lawyer for the resolution of this matter? Both I and my wife are based overseas.