Disclaimer: These results should not be taken as a guarantee, as each case is unique. We have helped over 7,000 homeowners. Here are some of their stories.

Every week we obtain loan modifications for our clients with a variety of loan servicers. You can see these results as they are announced on Twitter (#loanmodwow) or Facebook. Here are some of our results from this week with Freedom Mortgage, Carrington, Wells Fargo, Capital One, Ditech, and Bayview:

Freedom Mortgage

Our Freedom Mortgage client was 8 months and $15,334 past due on his mortgage, but now he has an FHA loan modification with $32.22 cheaper monthly payment!

March 2018 Update: If your lender is calling you regarding delinquent payments after making you an offer of assistance, act immediately. We have been contacted by several homeowners who have received foreclosure notices after believing their lender or servicer had granted them relief.

Temporary mortgage assistance has been made available to homeowners in parts of the country that were declared disaster areas as a result of 2017's major hurricanes, including Hurricane Irma in Florida, Harvey in Texas, and Maria in Puerto Rico. That help is much needed for many people, but what happens when the relief ends?

After getting some kind of assistance, you and your mortgage could end up in better shape, but you could also find that your problems are worse. It all depends on your situation and what kind of assistance you get. So it's important to understand what you're getting into.

Let's take a look at some of the assistance available.

What happens when your mortgage servicer changes in the middle of making trial loan modification payments? Do you have to start the process all over again, or does your old agreement transfer to the new servicer?

First, let's define what we're talking about. A mortgage servicer is the company that accepts your house payment and credits your account. They're the accounts receivable department for your mortgage.

Your servicer could be a big bank like Wells Fargo or a non-bank like Ocwen or SLS. Servicers are also involved in the foreclosure process and evaluating borrowers for loss mitigation options, such as a loan modification.

Servicing rights transfer from one company to another all the time, including in the middle of a trial loan modification. You, the borrower, have no say about it whatsoever.

A servicer change should be simple when the borrower is current on the loan, though servicers have been known to botch even that. But things can become complicated when the borrower is in default and working toward a loan modification to avoid foreclosure.

When you’re behind in your mortgage, it seems like your lender is playing mind games with you about auctioning off your home. Every day may be the day the lender wants to take your home without you knowing and sell it to the highest bidder. In Pennsylvania, a lender can’t foreclose on your home without letting you know and going through the proper steps. In 2012, Governor Tom Corbett restarted the Pennsylvania Homeowner’s Emergency Assistance Program (HEMAP) that included the Act 91 Notice. It was enacted years ago, but stopped in 2011 because of lack of funding.

Does an Act 91 Notice Mean You’re in Foreclosure?

HAMP, the federal government's loan modification program, expired December 31, 2016, but we're still talking about it in 2018. Loan modifications remain a possibility for homeowners who need help avoiding foreclosure and keeping their home.

What Was HAMP?

In 2009, during the subprime mortgage crisis, foreclosures were happening at a rate not seen since the Great Depression. The Obama administration created HAMP to help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure by modifying the terms of their loans to make them affordable.

HAMP provided guidelines for modifying mortgages and incentives for lenders to do so rather than foreclose. The program allowed for the term of the loan to be extended, the interest rate to be lowered, and the principal balance to be reduced or restructured so that the monthly mortgage payment was lowered to an affordable percentage of the borrower's current income. 

Disclaimer: These results should not be taken as a guarantee, as each case is unique. We have helped over 7,000 homeowners. Here are a some of their stories.

Every week we obtain loan modifications for our clients with a variety of loan servicers. You can see these results as they are announced on Twitter (#loanmodwow) or Facebook. Here are some of our results from this week with Seterus, Carrington, SLS, Penny Mac:

Seterus

Our Seterus clients were an unbelievable 91 months and $265,701 past due on their mortgage. We helped them get a final in-house loan modification with 3% lower interest rate, $471.53 lower monthly mortgage payment, and $149,666.01 interest-free deferment!

A recent client of our law firm, who I'll call Mrs. McMillan to protect her privacy, hired us to help her elderly mother save her Florida condo from foreclosure.

Mrs. McMillan had power of attorney for her mother, who owned a beautiful condominium, worth more than $800,000, located on the water on the northern gulf coast of Florida. It has almost a half a million dollars in equity.

Usually our clients are being foreclosed on by the bank because they've missed mortgage payments, but our client's mother was facing foreclosure due to missed homeowner's association (HOA) payments.

Mrs. McMillan hired us in January of 2017, and shortly thereafter her mother passed away. Now she had to deal with the property for herself since she was the sole heir to her mother's estate.

Though she and her husband lived in Georgia, they did not want to lose the property. Their goal was to avoid foreclosure and keep the condo in the family if at all possible. 

Mrs. McMillan and her husband, a doctor, were doing pretty well financially, and were able to pay the mortgage on the property. That kept the bank from trying to foreclose. But they didn't have full rights to the property and weren't able to pay all the past-due HOA fees to get out of foreclosure. It was going to take some work to fix that.

Many people who want out of their timeshare get an unpleasant surprise when they try to sell it: they find that their timeshare is worthless. Despite what they were told before buying it, most timeshares just don't have a very good resale value. Why is that?

1. Timeshares are not a good investment.

Remember, with a timeshare, you don't own any physical property. You just own the right to use a unit in a building for typically one week a year. The average cost of buying that week from the resort developer is around $14,000 to $20,000, which is probably a lot more than it's worth. You likely won't be able to get anywhere near that much if you try to sell it on the secondary market.

2. There are other costs and fees.

The cost of the timeshare isn't the whole story. All timeshares also have maintenance fees that cost hundreds or thousands of dollars per year. And the fees increase annualy!

In 2012, the CEO and president of the American Resort Developer's Association, a trade organization that represents the timeshare industry, said that the average yearly maintenance fees for a one-week timeshare was $660. 

There is a wild beast lurking outside the door of many homes in America. Its name is foreclosure. For some homeowners it's not the first time they have encountered it. It came snarling and threatening to take their home from them once before, but they were able to drive it off with a loan modification.

Now the beast is back at the door, as dangerous and close as ever, and homeowners are wondering if a loan modification could be used to defeat it again.

Fortunately for distressed homeowners, loan modifications are not strictly one-time use. Having saved your home from foreclosure with a modification once does not automatically disqualify you from getting another.

Disclaimer: These results should not be taken as a guarantee, as each case is unique. We have helped over 7,000 homeowners. Here are a some of their stories.

Every week we obtain loan modifications for our clients with a variety of loan servicers. You can see these results as they are announced on Twitter (#loanmodwow) or Facebook. Here are some of our results from this week with Rushmore, Penny Mac, and BB&T:

Rushmore

Our Rushmore clients were 62 months (5 years) and $120,007.45 past due on their mortgage payments and had been served foreclosure. We got them a three-month in-house trial loan modification plan with a fresh start and opportunity for a permanent loan modification!