Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Will the $26B mortgage settlement help you?

Who can qualify?

To share in the financial benefits of the settlement, you need to have a mortgage that is held by one of the five major mortgage lenders who participated -- Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank and Ally Financial (formerly GMAC). You can also be a former homeowner who had a mortgage with any of those five lenders and lost your home to foreclosure.

Residents of Oklahoma are excluded from the settlement ment because the state's attorney general reached a separate agreement with the five lenders.

Even if you have or had a mortgage with a different lender than the five major ones, there's still a chance you could benefit. As many as nine smaller lenders might still sign on to the agreement, meaning their borrowers would be eligible as well.

No Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA

Unfortunately, homeowners whose mortgages are backed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac are not eligible to receive financial benefits from the settlement. FHA mortgages are similarly excluded. This greatly diminishes the potential impact of the settlement, because together the three account for the majority of U.S. residential mortgages.

You should already know if you have an FHA mortgage or not. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both offer a simple tool on their web sites that will look up whether your mortgage is backed by them.

Read the rest of the article at WAFB

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