Yes, it s true. Due to the economy and the general decrease in income in the American household, the feds have a program that can cut your mortgage rate to 2 in order to make your payment 31 of your gross income. However, it seems that qualifying for this program will take some pretty fancy maneuvering. Here are some tips to give you a general idea if you can qualify, and what to do to get the loan to the closed and funded status.
The program that I am speaking of is the Making Home Affordable program. This program only applies to the mortgages held by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. These are the giant mortgage holders that were taken over by the government about one year ago. They are cutting rates on mortgages to as low as 2 in an attempt to get the payment at or below 31 of borrowers gross income.
First, you need to know if one of these two agencies owns your mortgage. Even if you got your home loan at a bank, it may be owned by one of these lenders now. These two large companies buy loans from commercial banks; they own a major portion of the nation s home loans.
To find out if Freddie or Fannie owns your mortgage, you will need to visit both the lenders web sites and fill in the requested information about your residence and yourself. Remember, you may not know if either of the two agencies owns your loan. The bank that you received the loan from may still be servicing the loan even though Freddie or Fannie may own the loan. So you need to check no matter what you think. If they don t own your mortgage, well, you don t qualify.
To estimate if you qualify, figure the amount of your mortgage payment (including principle, interest, taxes and insurance) and figure what percentage this amount is of your gross income. There are two reasons you know that you have and excellent chance to qualify.
You may have taken out an adjustable rate mortgage that has skyrocketed in interest and the payment has gotten almost twice what it was in the beginning. The second would be that one of the two of you as income earners has either lost their job or has had hours worked cut back considerably.
There is a trick to qualifying, you have to convince the bank that your are in dire straights but with the help of the mortgage payment reduction, you will be stable financially. You will not qualify with a large savings account, this is the biggest dis qualifier. You cannot spend 45 of your income on private schools or golf club dues.
You cannot be in to bad of position ether, for example, you won t qualify on unemployment income that is considered a 6 month income, and the requirement of employment is a strong chance of continued employment for 9 months or more.
You get the picture, the window for qualification is small, and one Lender stated it would not hurt to go delinquent by 1 or 2 months, I feel terrible saying that but that will get the banks attention .
There is help on the inter net to see if your qualify, contact HUD, or another non profit, Homeowner s toolbox who claim they can estimate the probability of approval for you.
Author Resource:
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