Protect Your Ascension Parish Home in Hard Times

Ascension Parish is booming these days, with its 6.7% unemployment over 2% lower than the national average, as new businesses going up all over town. If you happen to be one of the unlucky people who lose their job, you have to figure how to stay afloat until you return to work. If you have a mortgage, you want to save your home while taking care of your other bills too. These days, many households already have two wage earners, so if one loses a job, there is no one else who can jump into the job market to help out.

Ideally, you should have three to six months in savings to carry you over in case of emergency, but many people live paycheck to paycheck without this safety net. Finding a new job is often taking longer so having savings will not spare you from what every homeowner needs to do: develop a game plan for making it through till income returns to normal. When your income is down, you must the order in which you pay your bills, but every creditor feels like they should come first. You need to first pay your mortgage, insurance, utilities, and other necessities like food, followed by your car note, then your loans and credit cards. If you have no reserves, obviously you will have to modify the list.

When you income changes and you have having difficulty paying your mortgage, there are programs designed to help make it through and avoid what will happen if you cannot ultimately pay: foreclosure. Before you get to that point, it's good to ask yourself if you want to keep the home. You may realize that the maintaining the home always made things tight for you. Though the current real estate market can be challenging, you might consider selling. If you owe more on the home than it is worth, you may ask your Realtor® about selling it on a short sale, where the bank agrees to accept less than the loan value as full payment. In any case, the time you are off is a good time to prepare the home for sale in case you would later decide to that. Even though you might not be able to afford costly remodeling projects, you can paint and declutter - tasks you may have need to do anyway.

If you want to keep your home, you need to take advantage of available resources. This means contacting your lender (or an outside housing counselor who will do this for you). Your lender may be able to help you if you contact them early and agree to reduced payments, forbearance (where you don't have to pay for a short time), or a loan modification.

For some of these plans to work, you need some income. This may mean that you accept a job that pays less than what you were making but is enough to cover the house payment and your other basic expenses. There is no point of jumping through all the hoops to get a loan modified if you will default in a few months because the payment is still too high for you.

Some people who have tried to get help say contacting the lender is more than a notion. Though lenders say they want to work with customers, many distressed borrowers report that they can't reach them, don't hear back from them, or wait forever, only to be told that they don't qualify or that they should apply to the Federal Making Home Affordable program. This is why it is often a good idea to talk with a HUD-approved counselor who might be able to get in touch with your lender or at least help you explore other resources before foreclosure looms.

In trouble with your mortgage due to job trouble or any other reason? The State of Louisiana has many resources to help you. Want to discuss your situation with a knowledgeable Realtor®? Sandy-Ogburn-Sandlin and her Team can talk to you about selling your home at short sale. We can show the best homes in Ascension Parish, as well East Baton Rouge Parish or Livingston Parish.