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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