Tag Archives: debt
Know when to get a home loan modification
If life is throwing you lemons and it’s hard to make lemonade, especially when that lemonade is your livelihood,then you need to step back and look at what is going on. 9.2% of Americans today are unemployed. 23% of Americans are “underwater” in their homes. 5.3 million homes in America are in foreclosure.
Lets face it, if you have a family and no place to live, then you are in trouble. So let’s start with the basic necessities, you need your home. Lets try to save it from going into foreclosure and keep you in your home.
The government has a program called Making Home Affordable that helps home owners modify their mortgage. There are requirements you must have in order to qualify you for the program. One of the main requirements is that your payment on your first mortgage (including principal, interest, taxes, insurance and homeowner’s association dues, if applicable) is more than 31% of your current gross income. So that means to help you qualify, you need to lower your debt. Once the service provider can verify your debt-to-income ratio or DTI, they have to also verify that you can pay the new amount. So in order to do that you must lower your debt.
The most important thing is to look for non-essential items to eliminate from your debt. Such items as a car could be a huge debt that when eliminated may increase your chances greatly for the home loan modification.
Most people have a car that they commute with to work. The car could easily take up a big chunk of your monthly nugget. If you factor in insurance and very high gas prices then that nugget could reach between $800-$1200. Think of any possible way to lower that payment monthly because the goal is to decrease your debt. If you can decrease your monthly debt then you are more likely able to get a loan modification by showing the bank that you have saved money in one place and are able to apply that money saved to your home loan. The bank is more willing to qualify your loan modification if they see that you are making an effort to pay the newly reduced monthly mortgage payment. If this means that you have to sacrifice waking up late and leisurely take the car to work and now you must wake up an hour earlier to catch the bus, then just do it.
There are many other subjects to learn about the Making Home Affordable program.
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Starting Over With Debt Consolidation Loans
If you have accumulated too much debt and it has become asphyxiating, if you can not handle your monthly payments anymore and you can not make ends meet, you can get a fresh start for your financial life by consolidating all your outstanding debt so you can enjoy some ease for you and your income and concentrate on further eliminating debt.
Debt Consolidation can provide you with a new beginning but it will not eliminate all your debt within the blink of an eye. Debt consolidation can contribute to debt elimination but it is a long process that may take years. What debt consolidation can provide is a significant reduction on your expenses in terms of debt repayment and thus it can provide you with more available income for other purposes.
Debt Consolidation Explained
Consolidation basically consists on replacing all your current expensive debt with a single financial product with a lower interest rate and lower monthly payments. Lower monthly payments can be obtained either by the mere reduction on the interest rate charged for financing the money owed or by combining this with an extension on the repayment program.
Debt consolidation liberates a fair amount of income that otherwise would have to be used for debt repayment. The extra money can be used for any purpose you want. However, it is suggested that it is used for further eliminating outstanding debt. This accelerates the debt elimination process and you will find yourself debt free within a shorter period of time.
Debt Consolidation Loans
These financial products are known as debt consolidation loans. These loans are meant to replace all existing debt with them. The interest rate charged for debt consolidation loans tends to be lower than the rates charged for other financial products with the sole exemption of other secured loans like home loans, home equity loans and some student loans which are subsidized.
Actually most debt consolidation loans are home equity loans or mortgage loans featuring rates below 8%. If you compare these rates with the abusive 20% APR that some credit cards and store cards charge for finance purchases, you can easily understand the kind of money you will be saving by consolidating your debt with a debt consolidation loan.
There are however, unsecured consolidation loans available too. The only problem is that the unsecured nature of these loans limits their usefulness as consolidation tools. Unsecured loans feature higher interest rates, lower loan amounts and usually shorter repayment programs than secured debt consolidation loans. This implies higher monthly payments too and thus, those who want to consolidate their debt will not find such a good and beneficial solution with unsecured consolidation loans.
Where To Get Them
If you are looking for debt consolidation loans, the best thing to do is to make a quick search on the internet for debt consolidation loans and you will be presented with tons of results. Among these results, you will find lenders offering debt consolidation programs. You can request from them loan quotes in order to compare what they have to offer and after picking a particular lender you can request a debt consolidation loan. Applications are usually processed online and you will have an answer in a matter of minutes.