Ryan Rockwood: Welcome, everyone to the Sixty-minute Loan Modification Teleconference series. We’re just about to start. Bear with us. All right, if you’re joining us today and you’re near a computer, please feel free to check out http://60minuteloanmodification.com/october13. If all goes just swimmingly here we will be broadcasting there at the same time with video, too. Ok, cool. So it looks like we’re going. The problem that we have had in the past is that some people have tried to log into and have tried to watch online and listen on the phone and that doesn’t work because it’s out of synch so you got to pick one or the other. If you don’t have speakers on your computer, it’s probably best just to listen on the phone. Anyway, check it out – http://60minuteloanmodification.com/october13 and there’s also a place to chat there. You can sign in. You have to create an account and that is a little bit a pain in the butt. What I do is I go down into that bar there and I type test. Send it and then it asks you to log in and/or create an account. I do that and if I do that, it lets you back in and I have to retype whatever it is I want to ask. So go ahead and check that out if you want to. It’s not the only way you can ask questions. There are several other ways. We will take questions live, also on the phone and you can also email me at questions@60minuteloanmodification.com. I see Helen’s already emailed us so that means that it must be time to start. I’m going to make sure that our connection is up here and it looks like it is. Ok great. Welcome, everyone. Today is Foreclosure Doctor Teleconference. We’re joined today by my three-year old who’s in danger of really destroying everything behind us here. So we’re here to care for your sick home one mortgage at a time. My name is Ryan Rockwood. I’m here with my father and business partner, Mike Rockwood.
Mike Rockwood: Hello, everybody.
Ryan Rockwood: Before we get started, a couple of quick announcements. Number one, we occasionally get emails with clients who say they had $8,00 worth or mortgages and $8,000 worth of income and in this case your debt level is just way too high for the bank to take a risk on you. Actually, that’s not even a risk ‘cause that’s just not going to work and I know you’ve been making it work somehow with borrowing and credit cards and all that kind of stuff but if that’s the case, a loan modification just from a logical point of view, looking on the paperwork, looking at the spreadsheets and stuff, it’s just not the right solution for you and we’ll be the first people to tell you that not only ‘cause we’re honest but you need to seek a different route. And if you’re seeking a loan modification to postpone the foreclosure process, that will still buy you a little bit of time but it isn’t the massive time saver that it used to be even just a couple of months ago. Ok so your bank expects you to be able to ease and fill your gas tanks so they’re not going to approve a loan mod in that amount. And now to number two: if you’re putting off taking action, I would encourage you to visit our website http://60minuteloanmodification.com and visit the Done for You Program. If you go to Done for You, if that doesn’t work, try get it done.
Mike Rockwood: Laughs.
Ryan Rockwood: Both of them work.
Mike Rockwood: You’re in charge of this stuff.
Ryan Rockwood: No, I’m just a mouthpiece but anyway, the idea is there are two elements to the loan modification application that everyone absolutely gets hung up on and it’s basically why you pay loan modification firms $3,000 to $5,000 to do it. One is the hardship letter. It’s a killer. If you ever had a college English paper that you put off for three months until the last night, you know how hard it is to get around something like this. Number two is actually putting down the budget, getting everything in order ‘cause it is horrifying to look at it all and so on. So we actually do that with you on the phone. It’s really incredibly cheap and kind of getting broke doing it so we probably will be raising our prices soon. It’s only $150.
Mike Rockwood: In fact, you’d better act now.
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah, because the value is just so intense and additionally, what we’ve been doing for free but we better just stop it ‘cause this guy is just spending so much time on the phone and not getting paid for it. He’s actually calling the bank with people because I don’t know about you but that’s the last thing I want to do. I haven’t started a conversation yet. It’s really nice to have someone holding your hand even if you could probably do it yourself but the reality is you’re not going to do it today, ok?
Mike Rockwood: You know, Ryan, a lot of the reasons like my doing that with them is because by the end of our Done for You calls –so we’ve been on the phone for about an hour or more and we’ve worked up their budget and Ryan has talked through their hardship letter. They’re getting very comfortable with their situation and what their position is going to be in negotiating with the bank. So then, what a lot of people do is we get off the phone and they’ll wait days before they get the lender and they forget some of the details number one, and it just takes a while for them to get the confidence build up to take the actions so I really like making that offer at the end of the Done for You Teleconference. I’ll just offer to get on the phone right now. Let’s just dial the lender and you know, it always takes between 10 and sometimes 30 or 40 minutes to get through but then, while it’s fresh in their memory go ahead and make that pre-application call. It’s just a relief to people and yeah, admittedly it takes a lot longer than we had budgeted for our program and we will have to change the pricing on that eventually but gosh, people appreciate it and virtually everybody has been opting for that actually. Because once you’ve made that first initial call and you’ve heard me talk to the lender on your behalf, you’re that much more comfortable. You’re very comfortable then after that, picking up the ball and running with it.
Ryan Rockwood: Ok so I got the website right. It’s http://60minuteloanmodification.com/doneforyou. That is a PDF. It will download or display, however your browser’s set up and it will tell you about the program and all the pros and cons and if you don’t know whether or not you want that, you can read through that. Now, to purchase it you go to Get It Done. So Done for You to learn about it; Get It Done to buy it. All right, now on with this call. As a brief introduction, this is Tuesday night, right? And that is our Everyone Teleconference. Thursday night we have a Members Only Teleconference and the idea here is we’ll take any questions because so many of the general questions apply to absolutely everyone that even if you don’t your specific question answered you might get two or three other questions answered that you need through hearing other people’s exploits. The other thing is that you can email us at questions@60minuteloanmodification.com. We will take live calls and you can enter the chat on our website. The other thing I wanted to mention just by way of some background is that if you don’t know, my father and I are real estate professionals and when the market took a nosedive, so did our income and so we rapidly learned how to modify our own loans and soon other people’s. You can read all about our exploits. It’s well documented on the website and basically, our idea was to publish our findings in a self-held book, a do-it-yourself kit. And I think we’re the first one out there to do it and really the most complete program and the idea was it’s going to solve everyone’s problem. Buy the kit, get a loan mod, you’re happy. In the process we learned that there are still some people who want us to do it for them or someone to do it for them so we did expand to offering those services but the main service that we encourage everyone to do, the main service that we talk about in these calls is the do-it-yourself program, ok? So that’s a little bit of background. We’ll just jump right into it. Today’s call is about DTI versus HTI and if you’re just getting into the loan modification world, you’re probably confused as heck by all that or if you’re like me, you’re still confused by all of it. So let’s talk about recent changes – what to do with your bank that has their own formula that doesn’t seem to agree with yours; also, what to do if the bank will not reveal their formula to you. Ok and with that I’ll briefly turn it over to my father, Mike Rockwood. Now, Dad, before we start I do want you to check out the screen here. I feel like I’m in the middle and I wish you were so let’s see if you can like move over here a little bit so people aren’t looking at me the whole time.
Mike Rockwood: While I’m talking?
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah. Ok. I’ll kind of come over to the edge a little bit.
Mike Rockwood: Ok, everybody, so what we always do on these calls is give about a 10 or 15-minute kind of tutorial on some aspects of loan modification or any other foreclosure workout option. The Foreclosure Doctor has really evolved these Tuesday night calls. It really evolved to include all topics having to do with foreclosure. We kind of started in the loan mod business, though, so we tend to be heavy on loan mod questions and loan mod answers so we often get back to that and then many of the workout solutions, you need to supply the lender with your financials and those financials include numbers that they will use for running some ratios to determine if you are qualified for a loan modification and the most critical are the ones that you need to know are DTI and HTI. Those are your housing expenses – the HTI and your debts – your DTI as a percent of your gross income. Now there are all kinds of confusion out there because a lot of people use the terms incorrectly. Even some of the banks use them incorrectly but I’m going to run through a way to understand them and so that you can completely understand them and understand how they’ll be used against you or for you.
Now before I jump right into this little tutorial, I wanted to just kind of confirm something that a couple of teleconferences ago, we had a session about getting past no and I don’t know, we must have touched a nerve because it seems like everyday since then we’ve had at least one client come to us just because they had gotten totally stumped. And it’s been interesting over the last week to come up with half a dozen other reasons why people are getting stumped. I thought of a few more since our teleconference and you can always see those video conferences, teleconferences, streaming on the website if you want to go back and see them. I think this was last Thursday – Getting Past No. But anyway, we came up with four reasons why people were getting told no. well, in the last couple of days I’ve been able to add a couple more. One of them is working with a client from Sta. Monica. I realized that there’s some confusion about his loan because for whatever reason Wamu put it in the name of his company and who knows the reason? I’m sure there was some reason back in 2005 to do that. He was after all a builder and investor and so I’m sure there was some financial reason and who knows? There may even have been some fraud involved on the part of his broker.
However, it’s a residential loan and he’s the one responsible for it and I realized after working with him and then working with his lender who is now Chase and the Chase people just get all wrapped around the axle. They have to keep putting us on hold and going talking to a supervisor about it. I think it’s laughable because you realize how poorly trained these people are. They can’t take any kind of curb ball. They can’t cope with anything that’s single bit off center. So I realized this week that any kind of confusion can get you a no answer because they really want to give us a no answer when in fact the right answer is, “You need to apply for a modification.” He had applied for help and had been funneled into the collection department. Now you got to keep in mind the collection department can help you, all right. They’ll help you right into the poor house. Their goal is one thing and one thing only – to get money from you. That’s how they’re measured. That’s how they’re rewarded. That’s how they’re trained and they keep defaulting to when can you expect that you can make at least a partial payment?
So you got to understand who you’re talking to. You would have been talking to the collection department so I know we’re going to have success now that we’ve learned that and we’ve learned there’s some confusion about his loan and we’re going to get on to Chase’s loss mitigation department. They have all these fancy names for their department. I think their loss mitigation department is actually called their care department, something like that. They’re crazy about names and acronyms. Second case was a guy who actually owns 34 homes in Fresno, California and that guy wrote me and said, “Mike, I’m just striking out. What am I doing wrong? And so I encourage them to send me all his stuff and try to evaluate why he’s getting turned down for these loan mods and I realized it’s because he is presenting a confused story. So we reorganized his story to show clearly that his money, his income monthly was coming from his real estate business, being an investor, right? So once we set it up that way and structured it as a clear business that pays him a salary or has an owner’s draw. I know we’re going to meet with success because his DTI, HTI, his cash flow – everything is just right for a loan modification. So the bottom line is things have to be really clear for these people because they are people of the earth. They are simple people. They are poorly trained. They’re recently hired. I swear this gal that I had on the phone today was one of my clients, had been hired like within that hour because she had to put us on hold to answer every question and she asked us four times whether or not the client lived in a home. Gosh, that was frustrating.
And then one more thing about getting past no is I had a client today for whom? She’s prepared for this loan modification for at least two months in terms of clearing up her finances. She paid off a car loan. She short sold a house. This person was so determined to get a good modification and keep her home that’s up in Northern California and we had dialed it in, worked with her CPA to make sure everything was right. We called the lender and they told us, they pushed the button and told us, “No, you don’t qualify,” and this rep wasn’t real smart, this mitigation rep. He couldn’t tell us why we didn’t qualify so we got off the phone and I just counseled this gal. I said, “Susan, we’re going to call back tomorrow. We’re going to get the right answer.” So sometimes getting past no just means hanging up, getting off the phone and asking a different person. Remember, I’ve always said about what do you do when you know you’re right and the lender says you’re wrong? Well, the first thing you do is you ask someone else at the lender and I say you do that five times. So I will honestly call back five days in a row to get a different negotiator or a different rep and I’ll ask the same information if I know I’m right and finally somebody will agree with me. If they don’t on the fifth day, I ask to talk to a supervisor and very often they’ll get me through to a supervisor. If they don’t, I get the supervisor to call me back.
Ryan Rockwood: Did they ever actually call you back?
Mike Rockwood: You know what, occasionally they do; maybe half the time. And then lastly, if that doesn’t work and you know you’re right, then you have to write a qualified written request and submit it along the lines that we’re always counseling you about in terms of submitting qualified written requests. So you have to be persistent. You really have to have a lot of guts. So let’s get on to the topic to today’s T-chat and it’s DTI and HTI and these are ratios. You have to get comfortable with ratios and some of you folks who are not math comfortable have to just know that it’s one number as a percent of the other. The DTI is your debts as a percent of your income; DTI – debt to income. That’s all it is.
Ryan Rockwood: What does the question persist? What is the debt?
Mike Rockwood: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: Why does that persist? Because we had a woman that we were working with today.
Mike Rockwood: Oh, boy, she didn’t get it. Yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: I’m no math genius for sure but electricity for me is definitely not a debt.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: But we know there are some grey areas. What do you think that’s all about?
Mike Rockwood: Well, you’d have to be clear on several things. On your budget you have your income and below the line you have your debts and you have your costs of living. Now you debts can be defined number one, as anything that shows up on your credit report or number two, anything that you have received and you are now making payments on. So in other words your grocery bill next month, you haven’t received those groceries yet so that’s an expense, right? Your gasoline that you’re going to spend next month, you haven’t received it yet but your car, you’ve already received the car and you are paying on it. Your student loans, you have received the money, got an education and now you’re making your payments; so you have to clearly differentiate between debts and costs of living. Now a lot of the banks these days are, for your cost of living, is they’re offering you the opportunity just to take the statistical average. They’ll say, “Listen, before we start talking about your groceries and gas and rent and all that stuff—“ what are you laughing about? This is the truth [chuckles while baby laughs]. They will ask you. They’ll say, “Listen, people in your city typically spend $2,700 on costs of living.” How does that sound? Does that sound about what you spend? And in fact, this gal spent more like 2,000. So we said, “No, let’s go item by item and we’ll fill it out.” So we did that and didn’t qualify. So your costs of living are getting less and less significant because you’re starting to use more and more statistics. I got to say these lenders are evil. These lenders are bad. These lenders ripped us all off but I got to say the lenders are not stupid. They are in this whole process getting really smart about how to deal with us and so it’s up to us to get even smarter all the time.
So back to your debt to income ratio – DTI. Now when you cut it down a little finer, you think, “Ok, these are my debts. What do you mean by my debts?” Well, I mean the payments that you have to make on a debt so if you have a $2,000-visa credit card and you have to pay $25 a month, that’s the minimum they expect. That’s the only amount that you can include in your DTI. If you don’t and you say, “I normally pay $200 and you include that,” you’ll get bumped out when your loan mod goes to the underwriter so you don’t want to do that. You want to represent it accurately because they have access to it. So on all your debts, you take the minimum payment, add all your debts up, divide it by your gross income and that is your debt to income ratio. Debt to income ratios need to be under 70%. Anytime they get over 60%, I get a little nervous and I start working with clients to see if we can get them down. To be anywhere below 70% and above 39% is perfect for a loan modification. Now the reason I say above 39% is because the President’s Program that everybody has heard about and everybody’s trying to qualify for works on a 31% to 38% debt to income ratio and sometimes these terms are misused. They’re called debt to income ratio when they mean housing to income and the difference sometimes also is described as front end and back end DTI. The front end DTI is your HTI – your housing to income. Now get a load of this. The President’s Program figures that anybody who pays more than 31% of their gross income for their household on their first mortgage, they need assistance. So their modification program is geared to give assistance to people who are in that range so what you do to figure out to qualify is take your first mortgage-principal, interest, tax and insurance and homeowners’ association due, if you have any. You add all those up and then you divide that by your gross income. If that is less than 31%, you lose. In other words you don’t qualify for that Obama Program but I got to tell you, 98% of the applicants for loan modifications do not apply. It’s still very sparingly being used.
Ryan Rockwood: Do not qualify.
Mike Rockwood: Do not qualify, I’m sorry. It’s still being very selectively applied.
Ryan Rockwood: Hey, do you know what I learned on the phone with Countrywide today? –Is that they did not want us to comp PMI into that mix.
Mike Rockwood: Oh, ok.
Ryan Rockwood: So whatever.
Mike Rockwood: All right so if you have private mortgage insurance on that first mortgage, then you would not include that and that may be included in your payments so you have to be sure to [audio skips] for that. All right, so DTI, debt to income ratio, what other questions that people typically have about it? You use your minimum monthly. You always calculate it on your gross income. Now often, people say to me, “How do you know?” Often people will say to me, “I just got off the phone with my bank and they used my net income,” and you got to understand why that doesn’t matter. Some banks do. Almost all the standardized are using gross. Actually, everything has gotten more standard in the last six months but the reason that does not matter is because if you have a debt to income ratio, if you have worked with us and go off to talk to your lender and you have a debt to income ratio, calculate it on your gross income of less than 70%. Then when your bank takes it and calculates it on your net, most people paying 5 to 15% in taxes would equate to a 5 to 10% increase in your DTI so you’re going to be safe so in other words, it doesn’t matter if your debt to income ratio calculated on your net income is 75%, they’ll probably approve your loan modification.
Ryan Rockwood: Aren’t you saying that it doesn’t matter which number they use? They’re not going to be using the same percentages, correct?
Mike Rockwood: That’s correct.
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: So I mean the concern happens ‘cause I think well, it might be 65% but they want net then they’ll qualify you at 70 whatever, you know?
Mike Rockwood: Right.
Ryan Rockwood: I mean it’s only logical.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: So don’t get concerned about that. You just have to make sure that across the board your numbers work.
Mike Rockwood: Right. All right, through taking calls?
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah, how about HTI, did you talk about that?
Mike Rockwood: HTI?
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah.
Mike Rockwood: Oh, I’m sorry. I want to be clear, the back end DTI or HTI is that 31%. That is what the Obama people use to calculate whether or not you qualify for making home affordable. It used to be called HTI. Now it’s often called back end DTI. Sorry, front end DTI. I never use that term.
Ryan Rockwood: What about calculating that and you have other properties and you’re taking housing to income ratio? It’s only the first mortgage on your primary resident…
Mike Rockwood: Yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: ..and other stuff that goes with that.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah and obviously, you’re only trying to qualify for the Obama plan on your primary residence. That’s the only one that qualifies.
Ryan Rockwood: Were we talking, though, about today the webinar was gross housing?
Mike Rockwood: Oh, no, that.
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah that was an anomaly that we still haven’t figured what went on.
Ryan Rockwood: Ok.
Mike Rockwood: All right, so I’ll be open now to take any of your questions about HTI or DTI. Of course the questions need not be0 limited to loan modifications or these financial ratios.
Ryan Rockwood: Let’s try callers on the phone first.
Mike Rockwood: Oh, ok.
Ryan Rockwood: ‘Cause we always give them short shrift.
Mike Rockwood: Unemployment is on the rise. Commercial real estate is imploding. The credit card industry is imploding. There is absolutely nothing except Wall Street to be optimistic about the global economy so there’s no reason to think that and Tom I know you are local. I actually know who Tom is. There’s nothing reasonable in thinking that real estate rates are going to stabilize anytime soon. Certainly, they are not going to be on incline any time soon. Virtually every economist says that we will hit a low point and then we will stay low for quite some time especially the employment problem that we’ve got. That’s going to be with us for years, like lots of years; like five years or more, until we figure out a better deployment of all of our people. So my first argument with you, Tom, would be are you sure you want to fight to keep that thing? I would only say fight to keep it if you think in fact you can get rid of that second. You know that you can just lose the second entirely and you maybe can in the future. You know, we just have to go through the numbers with you Tom and figure out if you can hit that target because listeners, I want you to remember, there is too much income and there’s too little income to qualify for a loan modification and it’s no big mystery. We can help you. You can figure it out very accurately to know whether or not you’re going to qualify. There should never be any question.
Ryan Rockwood: Once again, we’re joined by my three-year old today so bear with us.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah, he’s trying to be helpful and everything. Can you say sixty-minute loan mod?
Ryan Rockwood: Luke, Mom’s going to pick you up any minute. Ok, let’s try our caller again.
Mike Rockwood: Just like I told you earlier in the call, I told you that one story about the lady from Northern California who we were absolutely certain would qualify and we were told no. That’s like that with you as well – DTI at 65, HTI at 39% and if you had no cash left over at the end of the month, you absolutely should have qualified. Another factor could be you have a loan that is too good. Let’s say you have a 5.5% fixed rate loan, then you’d get rejected. You can also get rejected because your investor, the person who now owns your loan might not be doing any modifications and you know what? If they didn’t have tarp funds, that’s their right. Kind of dumb because you’re just going to default on it or at least you should but that can be the case so I don’t know specifically but I’m going to advise you just like I advised Susan up north, let’s ask five days in a row; then we’ll ask a supervisor and then we will write a qualified written request to get an answer because what you need to know is specifically did I not qualify? And that’s not too much to ask. I mean, come on, do I need more income? Do I have too much debt? Do I have too much cash left over? Is my investor not cooperating? What’s going on here? I’ve got a right to know. It’s my house on the line. So I would just encourage you, be tough. You’re going to get the right answer eventually. You’re going to come to understand exactly what happened. All right, you got some questions?
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah. I’m sorry we don’t get to air the callers because our speaker phone is—
Mike Rockwood: Sorry, callers.
Ryan Rockwood: If you’re on the phone and you’re not by computer and you want us to—hey, you know what we said about you can only be up here if you don’t squirm ‘cause there are people watching? Ok so if you’re on the phone and you’ve got a question, please don’t give up. Please email it to us tonight to questions@60minuteloanmodification.com and we will 100% guarantee you to email back to you by noon tomorrow. Ok so questions@60minuteloanmodification.com and again, I apologize about the teleconference line. On Thursday we’ll have that lift. Also, I wanted to mention, Dad, that you talked to these folks here, about a call that they can go back and see and while some of them are available, all of them aren’t and we’re not like getting them for people right now because we don’t have a system. Also, Thursday nights calls for clients only. Anyway, we did have a listener write in saying, “Is my mortgage included in my debt or are we talking outside of it regarding the debt income?
Mike Rockwood: Ok yeah, that’s included in your debt. Let me run through what’s included in your debts: your mortgage and that includes principal, interest, tax and insurance; homeowners’ association; your second mortgage; student loans; car loans; credit cards; any unsecured loan or secured loan that you have that shows up on your credit report and some banks consider child support to be a debt. And so what I always do with child support is I hedge my bets. I put it either in expenses or debt and then just prepare the client to be able to move it from one to the other and see the difference that it makes on your DTI and know the impact and you probably can argue with any bank about how they use it but it’s their policy, where they categorize child support. Ok? Who can I help? Is anybody on the line with a question?
Walter Clarks: Walter Clarks on the line. Can you hear me?
Mike Rockwood: I can hear you.
Walter Clarks: Ok, is this Mike?
Mike Rockwood: This is Mike. Yeah, this is Mike.
Walter Clarks: Ok, I have three loans that are in foreclosure with IndyMac Bank.
Mike Rockwood: Ok.
Walter Clarks: When that bank got taken over by the FDIC…
Mike Rockwood: Yeah.
Walter Clarks: …Two of those got taken over. I had maturity and without my permission they just put that into my savings.
Mike Rockwood: Oh, ok.
Walter Clarks: I tried to take it out. I lost this. They said it was not in. It was under the [inaudible 00:34:24].
Mike Rockwood: Oh, that’s right ok.
Mike Rockwood: Ok the caller’s talking about the IndyMac Bank. Can you start up again?
Walter Clarks: Yeah, basically I had lost a substantial amount of money by them playing games with it. [Inaudible 00:34:43]
Mike Rockwood: Yeah.
Walter Clarks: And I tried one modification on them.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah. I got to mute the caller and I apologize to everybody. I’m sorry, our audio on the teleconference is just not good enough. I couldn’t get clarity. I was listening to a caller talking about a problem with IndyMac having either taken money out of his savings or taken money from his credit line, reducing the credit line or something like that but I’m sorry. I just couldn’t get the call so we got to apologize. We’ll just not try to do the audio. It’s just not working.
Ryan Rockwood: Let’s have that guy email us.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah, email us if you can at questions@60minuteloanmodification.com.
Ryan Rockwood: Ok. We’ll keep going along with my good son, we’re preparing on the first and also on the heel lock interest only. Ok, this question is about shape. They do not want to negotiate an equity loan over leverage, also had investment unit that’s been vacant since March and eating up her savings. He had to pay the IRS. “What should I do?” I see. Ok.
Mike Rockwood: Ok so yeah, he really needs a review of his situation ‘cause he’s got several things going on and this is not uncommon these days because things have gotten kind of complex for a lot of people who were investors and have taken significant cuts in pay and have had trouble now for 15 or 18 months. So he’s got a large equity line. He’s over-mortgaged. The house is underwater and he also has an investment unit that’s been vacant since March and man, I tell you, I’ve been having terrible trouble with vacancies in the last six months and it’s eating up on savings. Oh, brother. And he in fact owes the IRS and of course you don’t want to mess with those people and so once they flap a lien on your property, that’s going to really complicate things for short sale and certainly for a loan modification. So I guess the only thing I can say is you have a complicated situation. It is not uncommon. We’ve lots of customers who have really complicated situations and all we can do is take each step with you so contact me at mike@60minuteloanmodification.com and we’ll get to work on it right away. And that’s all you can do. It’s eating an elephant and what tends to paralyze these people is the problem, it’s not like the gravity of any one part of it is so great but when you put it all together, it’s over-freaking-whelming and you just kind of zone out. And all of a sudden you become ineffective at solving any of it so it’s helpful to have a person like us help you dice up the problem, slice and dice and get to one problem at a time to find a solution and help you work towards it and then take the next problem and the next one and the next one. So I think you’re really smart to be reaching out for some help and I’d love to help you with it, ok? Got another one?
Ryan Rockwood: All right, let’s see. For you who are watching, little Luke is with us almost every single week.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: He’s right there coloring. This week he was excited. All right, I know we’ve had telephone callers, questions and bummed that we’re unable to get to them.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: But it looks like we’ve answered all the questions here.
Mike Rockwood: All the questions and on the chat.
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah.
Mike Rockwood: Ok let me run through. I’m trying to think of other topics that I want to make sure—I always like to make sure you guys are aware. Ok there’s been a lot of hubbub about upfront fees and even the lawyers are now ratting on one another about the high level of complaints about loan modification scams and the news this week is the legislation is coming to preclude everybody including attorneys from charging upfront fees on loan modifications just because the legislators are throwing in the towel and they’re just saying, “This is out of control. Our butts are on the line here. We got trouble,” so their legislation is proposed to ban all upfront fees for loan modification and that kind of plays into the product that we introduced recently which is a pay as you go loan modification. It’s a fully featured loan modification and we charge you three times whatever we save you and you pay only a small monthly fee that is administrative and it’s for the product and it’s for the reporting and meeting with you that we do. So that’s a great product and who knows? Maybe the lawyers are going to be forced to price like we do. Way to go, Rock. Hey, we should review our product real quickly. We have the do-it-yourself basic kit which on our website you’ll see as about $149.
We offer a very popular upgrade to the Done For You product where we help you do the application. We got to make it real clear. We don’t do your loan mod. We help you do the application. We get it done and we get it done in an hour to two hours on the phone and we email the important components to you and then you make the application. We also have a full featured product just like all of the attorneys do and just like all the loan mod companies do and our price on that is very competitive. It’s three times whatever we save you so if you saved $300, it’s a $900-fee. If you saved $2,000 a month, it’s $6,000-fee and we thought that was a pretty creative way to price it because that’s the best return on investment for you guys number one, and if you’ve been making those payments you can usually afford to make us those three payments in three equal payments and we allow that.
Ryan Rockwood: Ok in the next six months.
Mike Rockwood: In six months so we actually cut you even more slack.
Ryan Rockwood: The idea is you never actually pay more than you would have ever paid.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: It’s a no-brainer.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah.
Ryan Rockwood: Ok. Well, let’s wrap it up. I want to thank you, everyone, so much for bearing with our technical and—
Mike Rockwood: Familial.
Ryan Rockwood: Familial difficulties tonight. Who knows, maybe it was the most interesting ever. Maybe we’ll have like a landslide of orders.
Mike Rockwood: Yeah, people will want us to stop talking and Luke to start talking.
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah, we can do that. We’re here, Dad, because basically of the do-it-yourself model. That’s what we try to get everyone to do. So if at all possible, if you have the time, if you have the energy, do it yourself. Grab our kit. It’s inexpensive with a money-back guarantee and go for it, right? If you can’t, get your help some other way – whether it’s having us do it for you or having us do part of it; whatever it is. You’ve got to move forward on it. You’ve got to move forward on it this week.
Mike Rockwood: I’d also remind people about this book ‘cause it’s the Foreclosure Doctor column.
Ryan Rockwood: What are we going to remind them about it? ‘Cause we don’t have for them to buy it yet or anything like that.
Mike Rockwood: You got the site. It’s the freebies for the site.
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah.
Mike Rockwood: Ok.
Ryan Rockwood: Yeah. Ok next week you will see the contents of this exciting book. You probably noticed now but these calls are part of the tools and services we have to offer. If you need more help, we’re here to help you. If you want to schedule a private call with Mike, go to http://60minuteloanmodification.com. Talk with Mike or check one of our products at http://60minuteloanmodification.com/products.
Mike Rockwood: Now loan modification activity is through the roof and the good news is the activity now through the roof is that mods are being approved. We’ve had more mods approved in the last two months than in the previous six months so approval rating is way, way up because of these trial mods. A lot of them are trial mods but by and large the trial mods are becoming real mods so we really encourage you as you’re thinking about your workout options for foreclosure. Loan modification I think should be a part of everybody’s strategy even if long term you don’t intend to stay in the house, even if you know a year from now you need to short sale it; whatever. Loan modification’s free, virtually free. It’s cheap. It’s easy. It’s fast.
Ryan Rockwood: All right, thank you, everyone for joining us. Email is the quickest way to get a hold of us. The best email address, if you’re already a client is help@60minuteloanmodification.com. Thanks, all of you. Have a great night and good luck with those loan mods. Thanks.
