Mortgage Loan Blog » Making Home Affordable

Mortgages Loans :CCO Mortgage & Citizens Bank Loan Modification

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 02:49:34 +0000

CCO Mortgage (also known as Citizens Bank) provides a number of loan modification programs to help borrowers stop foreclosure and lower their payments. Additionally, Citizens Bank now participates in President Obama’s Making Home Affordable Program.
Regardless of whether or not

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CCO Mortgage (also known as Citizens Bank) provides a number of loan modification programs to help borrowers stop foreclosure and lower their payments. Additionally, Citizens Bank now participates in President Obama’s Making Home Affordable Program.

Regardless of whether or not you are current on your mortgage, if Citizens Bank is your lender, we most likely can qualify you for a loan modification. Actually, if you are behind on your mortgage, this may create even more of an incentive for Citizens Bank to modify your loan. If you are on time, getting a loan modification is still possible, and modifying now can avoid irrevocable damage to your credit.

How can this help you? Well, a loan modification can help you decrease your interest rate, payment, and possibly even the principal balance of the loan. An aggressive loan modification can help you keep your house, and in the process lower your payment by hundreds if not thousands of dollars.

Let’s take a look at what exactly a loan modification is: A loan modification is an agreement between you (the borrower) and your lender (Citizens Bank) to lower your mortgage payments to an affordable level to help you avoid foreclosure. Citizens Bank has faced significant financial setbacks over the last two years due to the high number of foreclosures, and, as such is willing to work with qualified homeowners to lower their monthly payments and help them keep their homes.

When applying for a loan modification with Citizens Bank / CCO Mortgage, it’s important to remember that the primary basis of whether or not you will be approved for a loan modification is based on whether or not you are facing what Citizens will look at as an “acceptable financial hardship”.

Citizen’s Bank and CCO Mortgage’s loss mitigation guidelines cover a number of acceptable financial hardships, here are a few of the more common ones: Decrease in income, job loss, unemployment, adjustment of an ARM (Adjustable Rate Mortgage), any increase in mortgage payment, death in the family, illness, disability, child birth, excessive credit card debt, decrease in assets, and increases in other household expenses.

As previously stated, Citizens Bank now participates in the Making Home Affordable Program, meaning that it’s conceivable to get an interest rate as low as 2% on a 30 year fixed loan through an aggressive loan modification. For more information on the Making Home Affordable Program, check out these HAMP Guidelines.

If your mortgage is currently held by Citizens Bank, it may be in your best interest to take a look at a loan modification as you are most likely paying more than you have to on your mortgage.

Items You Will Need When Applying for a Loan Modification
When applying for a loan modification with Citizens Bank, you will need to document your income, assets, and expenses. Here’s a quick list of what you will need:

Please note that Citizens Bank may ask for additional supporting documentation when reviewing your loan modification package.

What to do When You Call Citizens Bank
You can reach the Citizens Bank Loss Mitigation Department directly at (800) 234-6002. Now, as with most lenders Citizens Bank has two different departments that field calls on delinquent loans and how homeowners are treated and the help they receive varies base upon which department of Citizens they have reached!

The first department of Citizens Bank that speaks to delinquent homeowners typically is their collection’s department, who will try to get the homeowner to catch up by immediately paying back the amount they are late on, including the legal and late fees that Citizens Bank assesses.

The second department at Citizens consists of loss mitigation specialists and negotiators. Modification Zoom has significant experience working with lender loss mitigation departments and getting the best loan modifications for our clients. If you believe you need help getting a loan modification from Citizens Bank / CCO Mortgage, complete the form to the right, or apply here.

Often, homeowners contact us after they have presented financial information to their lender that makes it impossible for them to get a loan modification. If you do not have years of loss mitigation experience, the time to learn is not on your own foreclosure.

Modification Zoom can help get a loan modification from Citizens Bank / CCO Mortgage that will put you in a much better financial situation. Complete a form on any page of this website, and we will contact you immediately. The consultation is quick, absolutely risk free, and completely confidential. Take the first step today!

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Best Mortgage Loan :Making Home Affordable Loan Modification

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:14:40 +0000

Loan modification help is just a few seconds away. Find out more about Making Home Affordable here!

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What is Making Home Affordable?
Loan modification help is only a few seconds away! Read this article to find out more about the Obama Administration’s Making Home Affordable loan modification program and to see whether or not you qualify.

The Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) is the single best way to achieve a fixed rate loan modification that will significantly lower your monthly mortgage payments. You do not have to be late on your mortgage to qualify under the Government Initiative, and your loan does not necessarily have to be held by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae.

Financial incentives are given to lenders that participate in modifying mortgage loans under the initiative, and to date hundreds of thousands of homeowners have saved their homes and avoided foreclosure through loan workouts.

Which Lenders Participate in Making Home Affordable?
If your loan is currently guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, participation by your mortgage holder, or servicer, is mandatory, and if you qualify for a loan modification under the guidelines, they must approve it. Otherwise, lender participation is voluntary. Here’s an up to date list of which lenders participate in Making Home Affordable:

1. American Home Mortgage Servicing, Inc.
2. Aurora Loan Services, LLC
3. Bank of America, N.A.
4. Bayview Loan Servicing, LLC
5. CCO Mortgage
6. Carrington Mortgage Services, LLC
7. CitiMortgage, Inc.
8. Citizens First Wholesale Mortgage Co.
9. Countrywide Home Loans Servicing LP
10. EMC Mortgage Corporation
11. Farmers State Bank
12. First Banks
13. First Federal Savings and Loan
14. GMAC Mortgage LLC
15. HomEq Servicing
16. Home Loan Services, Inc.
17. IBM Southeast Employees Federal Credit Union
18. J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, NA
19. Lake City Bank
20. Lake National Bank
21. Litton Loan Servicing

22. Mission Federal Credit Union
23. MorEquity, Inc.
24. Mortgage Center, LLC
25. Oakland Municipal Credit Union
26. Ocwen Financial Corporation, Inc.
27. PennyMac Loan Services, LLC
28. PNC Bank, National Association
29. Purdue Employees Federal Credit Union
30. RG Mortgage Corporation
31. Residential Credit Solutions
32. Saxon Mortgage Services
33. Select Portfolio Servicing
34. Servis One Inc., dba BSI Financial Services, Inc.
35. ShoreBank
36. Technology Credit Union
37. Wachovia Mortgage, FSB
38. Wachovia Bank, NA
39. Wells Fargo Bank ,NA
40. Wescom Central Credit Union
41. Wilshire Credit Corporation

What Are the Guidelines for Making Home Affordable?
You can qualify for a loan modification under Making Home Affordable if you meet the following guidelines:

1. Your home is your primary and only residence
2. The amount that you owe on your first mortgage is equal to or less than 9,750
3. You are having trouble making your monthly mortgage payments
4. You got your current mortgage before January 1, 2009
5. Your payment on your first mortgage (including principal, interest, taxes, insurance, HOA fees if applicable) is greater than 31% of your current gross income

What are the Benefits of Making Home Affordable?
Many borrowers say, ok, I want to save my home and lower my monthly mortgage payment as much as possible. How much money will I save if I get a loan modification through the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP)?

Under Making Home Affordable, your new monthly payment will be the maximum amount that you can afford under program guidelines. The target maximum amount for your monthly mortgage payment is based upon your “front end” DTI or Debt-to-Income Ratio. To calculate your new mortgage payment and to determine how much money you will save, multiply your gross monthly income by 31%.

For qualification purposes, do not include any payments on your second mortgage. Make sure to account for taxes and insurance by dividing the yearly or quarterly amounts to monthly figures. If you are currently escrowed, make sure to account for your Taxes and Insurance only once.

HAMP expires on December 31,2012. Your trial loan modification must be in place prior to this date in order to get a loan modification through MHA.

If you are in need of loan modification help, or your lender is being uncooperative in helping you get a mortgage loan modification, please contact us by completing a quick application right here on our website. We are Modification Zoom, and we are here to help!

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Mortgages Loan :Making Home Affordable Isn’t Helping Enough

admin — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:14:40 +0000

To date, approximately 240,000 homeowners have gotten loan modifications through Obama’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). While this sounds impressive, this is actually terrible; originally President Obama was quoted saying he hoped that government initiative would help

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Loan modification has been all over the news as of late as struggling homeowners have been seeking a way to avoid foreclosure and lower their mortgage payments to affordable amounts. Since the implode of the housing bubble, on average over 200,000 Americans have been served foreclosure notices each month, and they are desperately in need of a solution.

Prior to implementation of the Obama Administration’s Making Home Affordable Program, lenders all had completely different and often completely arbitrary guidelines for which homeowners they would or would not grant a mortgage loan modification.

Towards the end of the Bush Administration, a program was implemented called “Hope for Homeowners”. It was a smashing failure. Hope for Homeowners required borrowers who achieved modifications through the program to agree to give a significant amount of the equity in their homes to the Government should they decide to sell their property. Additionally, a horrific assumption was made that lenders would simply voluntarily participate, however nothing could be further from the truth.

To date, approximately 240,000 homeowners have gotten loan modifications through Obama’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). While this sounds impressive, this is actually terrible; originally President Obama was quoted saying he hoped that government initiative would help 8-9 million homeowners in need. Clearly we are missing the mark, however this time around there are at least incentives to lenders to help homeowners get a loan modification under Making Home Affordable.

Embedded video from CNN Video

Fundamentally, there are a number of problems with the programs. First and foremost, lenders do not want to help the neediest homeowners as they are the riskiest. Homeowners that are days away from foreclosure are very much more likely to re-default even after a loan modification.

From the homeowners’ viewpoint, they are simply fed up with hours of time wasted on hold with lenders only to be connected with a “specialist” that is under-trained, or worse, simply will not take the homeowner seriously unless there is also an Attorney on the line. Turn times are horrific; for homeowners attempting to get modifications on their own they often have to wait 3 months or more for any kind of mortgage relief.

President Obama, The Department of Treasury, and The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have become so fed up with Lender inaction that they have on numerous occasions called in the CEO’s of the major lenders to explain why more hasn’t and isn’t being done.

Across the internet on websites such as Mandleman Matters, Loanworkout.org, Blown Mortgage, and numerous others, as well as in the media through print and TV, there has been a public outcry against lenders inaction, and unwillingness to help borrowers get mortgage modifications.

Here’s a recent and interesting article from CNN on the failure of the Making Home Affordable Program:

(CNN) — When President Obama unveiled the Making Home Affordable Program in March, he said it would help “responsible folks who have been making their payments” reduce their monthly mortgage bills and avoid losing their homes to foreclosure.

But six months into the program, only 6 percent of the 4 million eligible homeowners have gotten help. A lot more say they’ve been frustrated with the runaround they’ve been getting from lenders.

Are the new program’s growing pains responsible for the slow start, as bankers say, or is pain to their bottom lines really preventing the program from working, as critics say?

The Making Home Affordable Program is supposed to work this way:

In return for billions of dollars in taxpayer bailout money, banks would offer loans that would reduce troubled borrowers’ monthly mortgage payments to 31 percent of their income. To qualify, a homeowner must have an income and must live in the house, and that house can’t be worth more than 0,000.

The bank is also allowed to calculate the value of the mortgage against the profit it would make from a foreclosure.

Banks are prohibited from selling a house in foreclosure while the homeowner is being considered for an adjustment. The Treasury Department oversees the program, and the banks signed contracts with Treasury binding them to cooperate. Watch more about how the program has worked so farVideo

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has been so unhappy with the program’s pace that he called in lenders for a meeting and demanded they do better.

In a July 9 letter to one servicer, JP Morgan, Geithner and Shaun Donovan, secretary of Housing and Urban Development, wrote “there is a general need for servicers to devote substantially more resources to this program for it to fully succeed and achieve the objectives we share.”

They called on the banks to hire more staff, expand their call centers and allow homeowners “an escalation path for borrowers dissatisfied with the service they have received.”

The mortgage industry’s top lobbyist says any problems to date are the growing pains associated with getting such a massive program up and running.

“It is working, and it needs to be given some time,” says John Courson, head of the Mortgage Bankers Association. He says banks are still staffing up and getting the program off the ground. “It took 90 days to get out the rules and the procedures and the forms, and so that’s a fairly new program,” he said.

Courson says that lenders are still “training more and more staff as they are getting more and more people who are familiar with this program.”

He insists that the banks want to cooperate.

“It’s in the banks’ best interest to work with those borrowers to keep those loans on the books and avoid foreclosure,” Courson said.

But critics say that the program works against the banks’ best interests, as the homeowners who most need the program are the riskiest bets.

“If the borrower is really in trouble, [the lenders] probably don’t want to do the modification, because they think there’s a good chance the borrower will redefault, and they will do a lot of work and they won’t collect money,” said Paul Willen, an economist with the Boston Federal Reserve who has studied bank foreclosures and modifications.

“The problem with this is in some deep sense, you can’t penalize the banks for acting in self-interest. It’s a for-profit business.”

Others are critical of the voluntary nature of the program and the Obama administration’s hands-off relationship with lenders.

The Treasury Department official charged with overseeing the program insists it’s “off to a strong start, with hundreds of thousands of trial modifications already underway.”

Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Michael Barr acknowledges that “servicer performance has been uneven, but servicers have committed to ramping up efforts to improve the process for borrowers,” and he insists that “the administration will hold these institutions accountable for their progress.”

He says Treasury is on track to help 3 million to 4 million homeowners in three years.

Diane Thompson of the National Consumer Law Center has a theory on why the Obama administration isn’t getting tougher with the banks: “This is a voluntary program. I think Treasury has been very concerned to make sure that servicers [the banks] are willing to participate.”

She’s convinced that banks will improve their track record only if they’re forced to make loans.

“Until it’s made a mandatory program, I think we will not see a significant drop in foreclosures,” Thompson said.

Another problem with the program is that banks don’t always have the final say.

Many of these mortgages are held by private investors, and the bank simply acts as a middleman. If investors think they can make more money by foreclosing than modifying the loan, experts say the bank is powerless to override that decision.

Susan Wachter, professor of real estate and finance at the Wharton School, explains, “These are contracts. The government does not have the right to rescind contracts. The government can legislate all they want, but there can be lawsuits.”

Willen adds: “What’s upsetting about this is that with Making Home Affordable, what you ended up with may be worse [than doing nothing]. We’re giving more money to banks, and not preventing many foreclosures.”

The Treasury Department has begun stepping up pressure on banks. This month, it began publicly reporting the number of the program’s loans the banks had offered, as a way to shame banks into better participation rates.

While JP Morgan-Chase has enrolled 20 percent of its eligible customers and Citibank 15 percent, two banks that got the biggest bailouts have some of the lowest enrollment rates, according to Treasury: Wells Fargo has enrolled 6 percent of eligible customers, and Bank of America 4 percent.

Both banks say that those numbers are misleading — that they have many more offers in the pipeline and have increased staffing.

Bank of America also says it is bigger than other banks, so it has more applicants to process. Wells Fargo also says that it has refinanced many hundreds of thousands of loans outside of the government program.

Courson said many other banks are also offering their own mortgage modification programs, and if you count those, “a million and a half borrowers were assisted in the first six months in this year.”

Multiple administration officials insist to CNN that there is adequate oversight of the program and that the Treasury Department has enlisted Freddie Mac to monitor the banks.

A Freddie Mac official, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because it is acting “at the direction of Treasury,” told CNN that its investigators visit banks, but only after giving the banks’ management notice that they’re coming.

The agency reviews loan documents, but only those that lenders provide. There are no surprise visits, no tape recordings of bank calls to assure quality assurance, and no way to respond to individual homeowner complaints.

Recently, Freddie Mac began random reviews of cases in which homeowners were denied Making Home Affordable loans. So far, Freddie Mac has not found a single instance of noncompliance worth referring to the Treasury Department for a penalty.

The Treasury Department was unable to show CNN any instance of a lender being penalized for breaking the program’s rules.

Source: Jessica Yellin, CNN National Political Correspondent

Its rapidly becoming apparent that as lenders become more profitable and pay back the TARP stimulus funds loaned to them by the Federal Government, they are going to become less and less likely to approve loan modifications. During the refi boom, if you were late on your mortgage, there was almost no such thing as a loan modification, or mortgage relief.

Already, it is almost impossible to get a loan modification without a strong Attorney forcing the lender into granting a loan workout. Soon, it may become even more difficult for the Attorneys to get mortgage loan modifications for clients. Homeowners are urged to take the time to speak with a Modification Zoom Consultant, and possibly connect with an Attorney. We’re here to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, and can answer the tough questions that lenders may not want to or refuse to answer.

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