Beginning today, hundreds of countless struggling borrowers could be in for an enjoyable surprise: a fast and simple means to obtain their mortgage payments back on track– and conserve significant money.
As a result of a brand-new effort called the Streamlined Modification Campaign, customers with home loans backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac who are at least 90 days behind on payments will begin getting offers from loan providers to lower their home loan payments.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which looks after Fannie and Freddie, will not state the number of delinquent homeowners will receive the modifications, but the Home loan Bankers Organization reported in May that about 1.1 million borrowers are behind on their loans by three repayments or more. Not all of those mortgage holders have Fannie or Freddie loans, nonetheless.
FHFA claims to have helped 2.7 million customers keep their your houses with its other repossession prevention efforts, such as the House Affordable Modification Program which was introduced in March, 2009.
Unlike those previous efforts, nevertheless, the Streamlined Adjustment Campaign will not require customers to submit any financial documentation. Rather, they simply should make the new payments for a trial duration of three months and afterwards the modification becomes permanent.
FHFA said the substantial paperwork and treatments that various other foreclosure avoidance efforts require has been a significant barrier in getting individuals the help they need. Documents gets lost, borrowers are asked to provide documents over and over again, and evaluating a customer’s eligibility can be time consuming.
“This is a piece of cake and should have been done years ago,” stated David Berenbaum, who collaborates fair housing and fair lending compliance campaigns for the National Area Reinvestment Union, a non-profit focused on battling repossessions.
Lenders will decrease a borrower’s monthly payments by either extending the regard to the loan– generally from 30 to 40 years– and lowering the interest rate. The new program falls short of decreasing the principal on the loan, a step FHFA acting supervisor Edward DeMarco has consistently obstructed.
Nevertheless, the modifications can mean big savings for anyone with a high-rate loan who was not able to refinance to the historically low rates of the past couple of years.
Modifying a 30-year, $200,000 loan with a 5.5 % rate to a 40-year term with a 4 % rate will lower the monthly payment to $835 from $1,135– a $300 difference.
The loans should be at least 12 months old, borrowers cannot be more than 24 months behind on payments and their principal balances should be 80 % or even more of the value of their houses. The brand-new program is scheduled to last with December 2015.

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