8 Tips For Mortgage Modification Success
8 Tips For Mortgage Modification Success
by Mike Rockwood
Home Loan Modifications
High School physics to the rescue! Let me tell you how inertia…in this case, file inertia…can help you get a mortgage modification.
“File Inertia” is my own term, coined to describe my acute observation of a basic fact-of-life in the mortgage modification game. And, while it may not win me a scientific award, it does help my readers get mortgage relief.
Applications that are in motion tend to stay that way unless acted upon by other forces. Applications that are stopped tend to stay that way. While this discovery may not bring me fame, it has brought my readers lots of mortgage modification success. And, with the acute dissatisfaction with the whole mortgage modification process, that’s a lot.
Here is how an appreciation of this new principle can help you help your family. There exists a force in mortgage modification process that is acting upon every application, slowing it down or stopping it altogether. This “drag” is the fact that the banks are overwhelmed. They have been for 18 months and it’s not getting better any time soon. So, the system is biased towards rejecting your application for any available reason and sending it to “rework” for updated information, missing docs, missing signatures, missing signatures on missing docs…Whew! Here’s how smart applicants deal with file inertia.
For anal retentive types, this will be easy (and, do not read into that statement any insinuation that the whole process has a relationship to excrement). And, for others with less obsession with details, I will make it easy for you. Your application has to be perfect. Not only do you need to provide all the information that is required but you must also organize it and present it in a way that is perfectly understandable to an inexperienced, barely trained loss mitigation agent. Items such as missing documents, unsigned Tax forms, expired form 4506-T and inadequate income documentation make it vulnerable to rework.
8 Tips to get file inertia on your side:
1. Calculate and verify your income correctly. Notarize self-employed P&L, include annual award letters for SSI and EDD benefits, show calculations with explanations for monthly gross amounts and calculate recent 1099 income.
2. Show rental property correctly. This is especially important if you are applying for a HAMP modification on your primary residence.
3. Be certain your front-end Debt-to-Income ratio is right. Calculate this as the total monthly payment on the 1st mortgage divided by your gross household income. It must be higher than 31%.
4. Your back-end DTI (total indebtedness as percent of gross household income) must be less than 70%. If it is higher, you will get rejected for having too much debt.
5. Get your credit report (it’s free annually at www.annualcreditreport.com). Make sure all current debts are accounted for.
6. Bottom line of your budget…after income taxes, debt payments and costs-of-living…you should have $0 remaining.
7. T get serious consideration for a mod you must be late. In fact most banks do not start to evaluate your application until you are late. Oh, sure, they “handle” your applications and they say all the right things, but you won’t get a mod offer until you go late.
8. Construct it like you are there live, presenting it in person. Include a cover letter, a table of contents page, and notes to clarify every little thing.
If you take these 8 tips seriously you will get file inertia working for you. It can be one piece of high school physics that really pays off for you.
Need more “insider tips” to get Mortgage Modification? Visit Rockwood’s site about DIY Loan Modification at Home Loan Modification