Justin Bartlett

For your entertainment :D If you enjoy this post, please take a look at / consider linking to ModificationZoom.com

YAAAYYYYYs (things we love):

1. 4-6 Refferals for every home saved
2. Its usually cheaper than a refinance
3. Saves homeowners from foreclosure
   
4. Lowers interest rates for those facing financial hardship
5. Lowers mortgage payments, in some cases by thousands of dollars monthly
6. Possibility of achieving a loan balance reduction; some have had hundreds of thousands of dollars forgiven
7. The great and amazing families that you get to meet
8. Obama's Making Home Affordable Program
   
9. Friendly bank negotiators & helping lenders save money too!
10. Being able to modify the terms / duration of the loan.
11. The hard work of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan to put pressure on lenders to modify more loans!
12. Chuck Norris -

BOOOOOOs (things that we hate):

1. Waiting 2 hours on hold with Wells Fargo just to be connected with another department.
2. Bad loan modification companies & scam artists
3. Webspam on loan mods
4. All the "experts" that know little to nothing about mods, and probably have never succesfully negotiated a modification that love to voice worthless opinions and give homeowners bad advice.
5. Investors that don't participate in Making Home Affordable or otherwise wont agree to do modifications, regardless of the position and urging of the homeowner and servicer.
6. B of A "not-recieving" authorization forms repeatedly. And again. And again.
7. The whole Congresswoman Maxine Waters fiasco.
8. Foreclosures
9. Misuse of TARP funds
10. Over 250,000 notices of foreclosure for June
11. Uncaring / inept negotiators
12. Bernie Madoff -

Feel free to add to the list in the form of comments. Peace, love, and chicken grease!

Having had a number of websites with a top ten ranking for hard to place keywords, I've had a good deal of people asking me lately just how I do it. The simple truth is kindness and a good deal of elbow grease...

• For ranking high in Google search results, keywords in the “title tag” seem to be very important. The same keywords have to be mentioned in the “body tag” although the “title tag” seems to be much more important.
• I'm sure that you've heard the expression that content is king. IT IS!! Google absolutely loves constantly updated websites with original, fresh content. Try to update your website daily or at least every other day.
• Use wordpress. Now I'm not interested in opening a debate on the merits of wordpress, but let me tell you, as a CMS it is amazingly versatile, user friendly, and makes it much easier to add fresh content. There are a number of plugins that promote user interactivity. For an example, take a look at a new site that I just posted, here (loan modification website, just finished). Versatile, interactive, easy to maintain & post, and most of all, CLEAN!
• There are a number of great wordpress plugins that will "do" your search engine optimization for you, just list your keywords and your title!!
• Keywords in H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on search engine rankings while keywords in a H1 headline tag don’t have an effect on the rankings (this is something I did ot know before).
• Also “bold” or “strong” written keywords seem to have a slight effect on rankings.
• Websites that used their targeted keyword also as the name of images and as Alt-text of an image, ranked higher than websites that gave their images random names and random Alt-text.
• I know this is SEO basics, but websites that have a keyword inside the domain name usually rank higher than websites that don’t include keywords in the domain name.
• The file size of a website seems to influence the rankings. Websites with a smaller file size tend to rank higher than “heavy” websites.
• Web pages that use only a few parameters in their url’s (something like id?=abc) seem to rank higher than websites using a lot of parameters.
• Inbound links and Pagerank of course, have a big influence on search engine rankings. An interesting statistic is that the first page for a given keyword has 4 times as many links as result number 11 (the first result on the second page)
• Encourage your visitors to come back often, by offering content that no-one else has, from on topic to completely wacky and off-beat, and reward loyalty--- have a once a month winner of a gift card, t-shirt, or something interesting...
• Post articles and press releases - two great sites are www.ezinearticles.com and www.free-press-release.com. I will be posting a full listing of the article sites I submit to at modificationzoom.com, and encourage you guys to visit!

Well, I hope this helps to answer questions and increase your website rankings. I also hope that this help me make a couple of new friends as I am brand new to activerain!

Howdy folks, Justin Bartlett from your favoriteLoan Modification Resource website here to help you achieve mortgage modifications. Now, rather than starting this post with a boring definition of loan modifications, lets talk about benefits. The WHY of a loan modification, and the HOW it can help you, your friends, contacts, family, and neighbors.

First and foremost, I want to throw something out there as food for thought; its not a rare thing now for homeowners to get rates as low as 3% on their loan modification. Think about that. Anyone that has had their loan originated anytime over the last 10 years can get something out of this, possibly multiple thousands of dollars every month in savings, and tens of thousands possibly in yearly savings. Many homeowners also are able to reduce the amount that they owe on their loan; if you owe $300,000, and your lender agrees to reduce your balance by $50,000, that is $50,000 you no longer owe or have to pay interest on. This is not possible through a refinance.

"A loan modification often can be even more powerful than a bankruptcy in terms of just how much it helps homeowners achieve financial stability and lower their monthly debts."

Some lenders make it hard to qualify, others, are quite lenient. I suppose cutting your payment in half, a 3% interest rate fixed for 30 years, and lowering you're balance by $50,000 would be a huge motivator, and, while this is not typical, hopefully I have your attention. Lets get the boring stuff out of the way, and start with a definition:

"A loan modification is an agreement between homeowner and lender to assist the homeowner in mitigating the financial hardship that would otherwise cause them to default and cause the home to go to foreclosure."

The main thing to take out of this is that a loan modification is meant to create a win-win situation for the lender and the homeowner; the lender doesn't have to foreclose and possibly lose a huge amount of money, and the homeowner gets to stay in their home with a lower payment.

Loan mods are a great thing, and with the advent of the Making Home Affordable Program (Obama's Preventing Foreclosure Program), and other initiatives, it is becoming easier and easier to qualify. Lenders want to modify; they are still reeling from losses and the last thing they want to do is foreclose on an upside down house.

So what do you need to do? It all starts with hardship. Contact your lender and write a good hardship letter detailing and dating every horrific event that has happened over the duration of the last 2 years, and why you are / will be having trouble making your mortgage payments.

Support this with an income and expense sheet. Your financial workup should show that you can't afford you're current payments, that you are negative in net income each month, and that after the modification, you will have a positive bottom line.

For this most part, this should get you qualified for a modification. For detailed information on MHA, FDIC, or lender specific guidelines, visit us on the web at www.modificationzoom.com. For current loan modification news and articles, check out our website regularly. We also offer monthly giveaways, such as free legal counsel and representation to one lucky client, loan mod books, a copy of our back-end software, t-shirts, and other goodies.