I have found that one of the major obstacles to a loan modification request is a lack of prior budgeting to ensure the request is feasible. This requires budgeting out all your bills, analyzing your income, and seeing what type of modification would be required to balance your budget.
For example, a Making Home Affordable loan modification is designed to adjust your first mortgage payment to 31% of your current income. However, if you simply guessed at monthly expenses your lender may decide you do not appear capable of affording the new payments. It may even be something as small as needing to reduce how much you eat out to make your budget balance.
To aide you in understanding your financial status and how a loan modification would affect your budget I have created a free Microsoft Excel spreadsheet for you to use. You can fill in your budget, analyze your income, and then fill in loan modification scenarios such as Making Home Affordable to figure out if your budget will balance with a loan modification.
I made this so you would be able to understand your own situation. If loan modification scenarios seem unlikely, you may wish to consider alternative situations in addition to trying for a loan modification.
I’m providing this tool free for you to use. When I was working on loan modifications in the past, I ran across a lot of families that suffered from predatory loans or other deceptions involved with their home purchase. I have helped them by preparing forensic loan audits and mortgage litigation support for attorneys who file suits to obtain relief. If you feel that you have suffered from a predatory loan long enough, please contact me.
