Many people struggling to pay their mortgages across the nation are discovering that the government programs which have been set forth to help them stay in their homes are just not doing enough to help them accomplish that. While the federal programs currently in place are leaving many home owners still struggling for help, one program in Pennsylvania is helping many home owners keep their homes and regain some stability with their loan payments.
The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency has come up with a program available in that state to home owners who are out of work or struggling to make their mortgage payments. Home owners who need a temporary short-term loan to set them back on track with their mortgages can apply for the Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program and get a loan of up to sixty thousand dollars with payments starting in about three years, with approximately ten years to pay back the loan. The program is funded by the state government and the interest paid by loan recipients.
For many people, three years is enough time to get back to work and find their feet again after suffering a financial hardship; in Pennsylvania, this program has helped 43,000 home owners since 1983, and saved 80% of those from having their homes foreclosed on.
Other states are sitting up and taking notice of Pennsylvania’s program, particularly states that have been very hard hit with the recession. If other states could set up a similar program with the same regulations, thus ensuring the same high levels of repayment, then thousands of home owners might potentially be able to keep their homes instead of having them foreclosed on.
Hopefully these states can put together a better program than Fannie Mae attempted to manage in 2008/9. Fannie Mae’s program, for some reason, was not nearly as successful as the Pennsylvania state’s program; the defaults for the Fannie Mae program were a staggering 70 percent within the first year of the program beginning and the program was subsequently terminated.
If the individual states that need to be more proactive about helping their home owners keep their homes and stay out of foreclosure can manage to build their loan program closely to that of the Pennsylvania state program, they are far more likely to reduce the number of homes falling to foreclosure in their areas.
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