The “Making Home Affordable Program” is a government initiative to help homeowners who may have Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARM) or have loans with higher interest rates who may not qualify for conventional loans due to their home value versus their mortgage balance.

Your first stop should be the official website www.makinghomeaffordable.gov. Once you are on the MHA site you can determine if your loan meets the general criteria to pursue a refinance or an adjustment with your current provider by filling out their questions. What will come out of this process if you are approved, is a refinance or an adjustment to a conventional mortgage.

Now do you have your loan under Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae? If you don’t know you can look them up at either www.fanniemae.com/loanlookup or www.freddiemac.com/mymortgage — if you don’t have either of those, you may still qualify for a loan adjustment, again check out the Making Home Affordable website.

To qualify for a refinance you also need to be current on your payments.

The first step is to call your lender and tell them you are interested in the Making Home Affordable Refinance program. If you don’t have luck with the first person you talk to, keep trying with someone else. The lenders are still figuring this out, So be persistent and don’t give up. If you don’t qualify under the MHA program, there may still be help available to you but you’ll need ask your lender about loan modification. You may need to demonstrate hardship and inability to pay for them to start working with you and make sure they spell out for you if it’ll affect your credit in any way. If you can pay and just want to take advantage of some of these cheaper rates, you may be out of luck.

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Mortgages