How do I make my mortgage payments for the next three months?
When people asked and learned that I am able to work from home, they are a little envious. What they don’t understand is that one cannot “work from home” indefinitely. At some point, there will be no work to work from home. There will be no new clients, no new orders, and the pipeline of work will stop. Hourly workers, contract workers, and salaried workers alike are on the same boat; our income will be greatly reduced or terminated altogether. While some of us have savings, few have sufficient savings to last us several months and our housing expense will be first and foremost on our list of concerns. If you have lost income due to COVID-19, there are things you can do to qualify for relief from your mortgage payments.
Federal regulators, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are ordering lenders to offer flexibility to homeowners; about one half of the home loans in the country, those guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie, will be affected by this policy. However, the entire mortgage industry is expected to follow suit. Forbearance from mortgage payments could last up to 12 months, depending on the borrower’s particular situation, according to Mark Calabria, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. While this type of relief is neither debt forgiveness or free money, it will keep you from falling into the trap of default and foreclosure.
Most important is for you not to just stop paying your mortgage but to contact the entity to whom you send your check every month to work out a payment plan based on the fact that your livelihood or income has been impacted by the Coronavirus. Do this early rather than wait for things to get worse!
Our law firm has extensive experience helping those who were negatively impacted by the economic downturn of 2008 with issues involving their housing and credit and we stand by to assist you in the days to come, until things are back to where we were.