Stop Home Mortgage Foreclosures Within 48 Hours
MORTAGAGE LOSS PREVENTION: THE HOMEOWNER DIRECTLY NEGOTIATING WITH THE LENDER
GOLD CROSS OF AMERICA
In many cases, it is possible to negotiate directly with your lender, on your own, in order to stop foreclosure and reinstate your mortgage. However, we now know that using an experienced, reputable Loss Mitigation Professional Organization, like Gold Cross of America, can drastically increase your chances of approval and save you tens of thousands of dollars over the life of the mortgage loan. Nevertheless, some H.U.D. - sponsored Home Mortgage Housing Counselors are still encouraging delinquent homeowners to make a courageous, honest attempt on their own before hiring a professional.
If you are among those valiant and highly patient homeowners who are willing to take this advice, I have lifted the following directions from a letter written to one of our clients by a HUD-Certified Housing Counselor. Here are the steps (with editorial comments in parentheses and bold italics) that the Housing Counselor recommended that you will need to take:
1. Gather all your income and expense documents for the last two years. You should have pay stubs, income tax returns, bank statements, property tax statements, and proof of any other income you receive.
2. Prepare a hardship letter that includes exact dates when your hardship started and ended, as well as documentation to collaborate your hardship claim. This should be as detailed as possible and should be typed, so the agent can clearly read and understand the letter.
3. Contact your lender once you are two months behind. (Most lenders will not negotiate with you until you have missed a few payments, so even if you have contacted them previously, with no results, you will need to do it again.)
4. You should be prepared for long hold times (sometimes more than an hour and a half) and don’t expect the agent to always be friendly. (However, they may agree to listen to your case if you are persistent and keep calling.)
5. Once you have gotten the lender to talk to you, tell them that you would like to apply for a workout plan or a loan modification plan. (Both of these options may be available, depending on your financial situation.) Your lender should then be willing to send you a financial worksheet to fill out and return to them along with the financial documents you have already gathered. (There is no HUD regulation or law that requires the lender to provide you with any assistance, but some of them will if you are diplomatic, diligent and persistent in your efforts.)
6. If the lender does provide you with a copy of their financial worksheet form, you should try to complete it and fax this back to them on the same day that you received it. (This helps move the process forward, as “the clock is ticking” against you and toward the date that the lender is going to officially serve you with a Notice of Foreclosure – including the foreclosure date.)
7. When (and if) you and your mortgage lender have verbally agreed to a workout plan, you will need to get (and here’s the really hard part) everything that has been verbally agreed to in writing from them and signed by them.
8. Once the mortgage lender has completed Step #7, you will need to sign their paperwork, fax it back to them and send them the total monthly payment amount stipulated in the workout plan (no matter what the increased amount works out to be) as soon as possible by certified check, cashier’s check or money orders to solidify the legality of the workout plan.
Your lender will be looking for several things to see if you qualify, but the main qualification will be to determine if you can afford to keep the home. You will need to show that you can afford the monthly
payment after all your other monthly expenses. If you are attempting to get a workout plan, then you will need to be able to afford your normal monthly payment plus an added amount to pay off the arrears. In
direct negotiations with the homeowner, most lenders will require that the arrears must be paid off in 18
months or less and you will usually need a minimum of one and a half payments to begin the workout plan.
In most cases, if a homeowner qualifies for a loan modification through direct negotiations with a mortgage lender, the borrower is required by the lender to also begin a “stop gap” repayment plan while waiting for the loan modification to go through. A “stop gap” repayment plan requires the mortgage borrower to make payments at a much higher rate than the original mortgage contract in order to “stop the gap” created by the missed payments until the mortgage company allows the loan modification plan to go through.
Mortgage lenders routinely take from 60 to 240 days or more to finalize an approved loan modification plan in writing. This also serves, even if unintentionally, to move the mortgage borrowing homeowner closer to the irrevocable nightmare of a foreclosure date.
If you are not successful in trying to work with your lender on your own, or if the payment plan that they set up for you is unaffordable, then you may want to consider hiring a professional loss mitigation company, like Gold Cross of America, to negotiate a better plan for you. Remember, we are the foremost, “not-for-profit”, Christian faith-based Mortgage Resolution Service Company in the entire United States of America.
Gold Cross of America is the only Christian faith-based Mortgage Foreclosure Prevention Service. http://www.goldcrossofamerica.org/ 877-797-3731