Who is FHA Secure helping…?

I wanted to give some “success” stories to allow you to gauge where you may fall in the very wide spectrum of borrowers that take advantage of the FHA programs. There are several benefits to government insured loans that many continue to find a mystery and thus fail to take advantage of them.

My borrowers are a young married couple that just recently closed on a FHA refinance. When I received their call I could hear the stress in Randy’s voice and as he recited his situation I could tell he had it well rehearsed due to telling it to numerous loan officers. He told me that he purchased their first home two years ago at an interest rate of 9% and that in a month it was getting ready to adjust. He speculated that the reason he was given such a high interest rate initially was because his and his wife’s credit scores were very low due to all the medical collections they had. His son was born with a severe illness and required many surgeries, as well as repeated doctor visits and rehab appointments. They described that as the bills continued to pile up it just became over whelming and seemed like there was no way out. The result was credit scores lower than what they were when they purchased the home (below 580 FICO).

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It doesn’t mean that you are a bad person. 

It doesn’t mean that you are a bad borrower. 

It doesn’t mean that you need to wait to see what options are available to you. 

It means that you need to get educated about what your options are n-o-w.

First, check your loan paperwork.  Does the ARM have a pre-payment penalty?  Most do.  A pre-payment penalty can limit your options, but it doesn’t mean that nothing can be done.  If it does have a pre-payment penalty…when does it expire?  Most expire at the end of the 2 year period.  But I have seen a couple of 2/28 ARM loans that had a pre-payment penalty that did not expire until a full year after the first rate adjustment.

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Your ARM is Resetting!

The dreaded day has come.  The day that you go out to your mailbox and find a letter from your current mortgage company.  You open the mail and find out that your adjustable rate mortgage is going to reset within a short period of time and your new payment will be… $WHAT?!!!

A number of things have lead up to this day.  You might not have known you had an adjustable rate mortgage if your lender wasn’t honest with you.  You may have forgotten that this was the loan that you had taken out to begin with.  You may have not understood what an ARM was or what exactly it meant.  You may have known that this day was coming and had hoped for the best.

And now you’re looking at what your payment is going to be and you find yourself thinking, “How am I going to afford that?” 

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Friday, I received a call about 15 minutes before I was supposed to leave for the day (no, it wasn’t 1:45 :)). 

The woman calling had received a notice of sheriff’s sale because she had not been able to make her mortgage payments.  She had an adjustable rate mortgage that had adjusted for the second time in less than a year, pushing her payments up over $500 per month. 

She wanted to know if I could help. 

I gathered the appropriate information, faxed her what I needed her to sign and asked that she fax everything, including the request for sheriff’s sale that she had received, back to me right away.

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