Time for something that might shine a light in the dark…
In the mail today I got a letter from the Administrative Offices of the Community Lending Group – Records Division. the letter was telling me about the implementation of the Home Affordable Refinance Program, which will give eligible homeowners an opportunity to refinance into more affordable monthly payments. The HARP program is supposed to commit $75 billion to keep up to 4 million people in their homes by preventing avoidable foreclosures.
For some of us who are under stress right now because we have mortgages that we want to pay and yet are unable to because we don’t have a yob right now, this is good news. The possibility that our situations could be made easier to deal with is very good news indeed. Let’s be clear there are some of us out here who want to work things out with the banks, be able to keep our homes and fight to keep what we have. There are those of us, like wifey and me, who want to pay what we owe and remain in our homes and not simply walk away like I have heard so many others do. We’re not asking for the entire debt to be forgiven (don’t misunderstand me – that would be nice, but I’m not counting on it) we’re just asking for a chance to make things right and some of us need some help in that regard.
I know that whenever I have seen one of these programs come up I have always given you guys some advice: “If it looks too good to be true…GOOGLE IT!!!”
Well today I decided to take my own advice and I Googled the program.
Imagine my surprise when I found out it was legit!
Yeah you read that right, it’s a legitimate program.
They gave me a phone number and a website that I can go to in order to determine our eligibility for this program. It’s a simple form you can fill out at HUD-Secure.org and once you give them the information they ask for (name, address, contact number, income, mortgage, value of your house, interest rate, etc.) they tell you that a rep will be in touch with you shortly.
I also found some other sites that deal with the same program:
There is a site called MakingHomeAffordable.gov that allows you to check your eligibility for these programs. You can learn if you are eligible for refinancing because the value of your house is less than your mortgage, or you can see in you’re eligible for modification if your income has gone down – like if you have been laid off of your job recently or have been out of work for an extended period of time. This is good news indeed for those of us who are unemployed and underutilized and don’t know where we can turn to.
Now for refinancing there is some fine print – the refinancing program will only help those whose mortgages are held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If you don’t know then here is the site where you can check if your motgage is backed by Fannie Mae, and here is where you can check if your mortgage is backed by Freddie Mac. I’ve already checked our mortgage and it is not backed by either Fannie or Freddie, so we would need to go the modification route. In our case we have already made some modifications through Wells Fargo who holds it, but there might be some further modifications that we could make. We’ll just have to check and see.
This is good news for those of us out there who could use some good news right about now. It’s not really a bailout, but it is a lifeline that could buy some of us some needed time that will allow us to find employment, live up to our promises and get back on our feet. Like I have said before, we’re not looking for a handout, we’re not asking for government cheese, all we need is some time to make things right.
Now that’s change we can all believe in, isn’t it?
