I want to tell you a quick
story about how I avoided foreclosure. My hope is that perhaps you will learn
something if you ever are faced with foreclosure on a first or second mortgage.
I’m a relatively new homeowner having only owned my home for about ten years.
Many mortgages take several decades to pay off, and that’s basically what my
intention was when I purchased my first home. In hindsight I didn’t spend
enough time wondering how life can change so dramatically over the course of
even one decade.
Over the past few years the
economy has grown and digressed many times. This has coincided with the failure
of the housing market to recover from the recession that caused financial
markets to crash across the country. Mortgage foreclosure rates have slowed
somewhat recently, but many people are still struggling to make their monthly
payments. In 2009 the Obama administration recognized that this problem was not
going away on its own and families needed government help to stop foreclosures
from continuing. Their policies created that year were part of a larger
government program called HAMP.
- HAMP benefits both the lender and the
homeowner.
- Eligibility requires that the mortgage
was created before 2009, and the homeowner must show significant signs of
financial hardship that make paying the existing mortgage impossible.
- The lender and the borrower can
renegotiate an existing mortgage to make the payments more manageable for
the homeowner and the repayment of the entire loan more assured for the
lender.
Two
problems
In my particular case my
family had been hit with a double whammy. I had lost my job because of cut
backs, and my wife fell very ill. The bills for her medical expenses were
piling up quickly, and the income coming from unemployment was barely covering
food, clothing and utilities. We were in desperate need of financial stability,
and had no choice but to put off paying our mortgage so she could continue her
treatments in the hospital.
How
will I avoid foreclosure?
The mortgage lender worked
with us the first couple months reluctantly, but eventually they began talking
about foreclosure because they worried that we’d never repay the loan we owed.
I sat down one evening and wrote out a long list of all our expenses as a
family, and all the income we had coming in. I did this all in great detail.
When I had finished I presented it to the people at the bank the next day. It
showed how there was no way with my current income that I was going to be able
to sustain the payments the way things were lined up. This is when they
suggested HAMP.
It turns out that they had
already worked with another family under this government program and were even
up to date on second mortgage foreclosure laws. They sent my information in to
the Department of Housing and Urban Development to be reviewed and shortly
thereafter I was accepted for eligibility. My mortgage lender likes the system
because they get a substantial financial return by participating.
Together we reworked a new
mortgage that was lower in total principal as well as monthly payments. I was
assured of keeping my home, and my mortgage lender was assured of being repaid
in full. It was a win-win situation.
For even more help on how to stop a foreclosure sale visit credit-yogi.com. Call 1-866-964-9644 today for a
free consultation from an expert.
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