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INVESTMENT PROPERTY LOAN MODIFICATION
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Ryan: Hello, every one and welcome to the call. This is the 60 Minute Loan Modification Insider’s Secrets Teleconference series. I’m Ryan Rockwood. As usual I’m joined by my father and business partner, Mike Rockwood, on today’s call.

Mike: Hello, everybody.

Ryan: We’re here to beat the bank and save your home and help you escape bad debt for ever. Tonight’s clients only call is about investment properties, but before we get into that a few quick announcements. Number one, if you have a number of investment properties that are in trouble financially it’s very possible that you need to consider short selling one or more of your properties. If so, it can make your other properties easier to modify so it’s important to establish a property priority list.

Announcement number two, we’ve had two clients recently get extremely fast modification. Greatly reduced rates for less then one year. Now while this sounds like a poor solution if you were to knock off $500 of your monthly payment today for the next six to eighteen months, that all adds up very quickly. Obviously I think any of us would like to have an $6000 in our pocket at the end of the year. I just say that because a lot of people just sit of the fence and think is this worth the effort? Should I submit a loan modification? It’s not going to be the final solution anyway.

These are the things that rattle around in your mind. They’re kind of the excuses for not taking action that people do. This person, for example, he’s going to have it for a year. Yes, the problem will still be there in a year and that point hopefully we’ll have some better solutions to deal with it. However, if not he’ll be in better shape than if he hits a brick wall today. So anyway, keep that in mind. On with today’s call – how to deal with investment properties. Investment properties. Well, I guess people like my dad–and I wanted to just wasn’t able to–and people like probably most of the people on this call suddenly find that they, after this last five to ten year run up, that they own a bunch of properties. It’s not unusual to have ten mortgages. Well you know you tell some one that and it sounds like you’re some kind of real estate mogul.

You know with the 80 / 20 financing and so on it’s very possible to rack up five mortgages in a heart beat as we did. As a lot of people on our call did. Now that those assets turned into a lead weight it’s kind of time to look around, to take stock of going forward or going backwards and try to figure out what needs to be thrown over and what we can hold onto and get out of the slump with. Basically, we have to stop the bleeding or at least slow it down a great deal. So with that in mind, let’s hear from Mike who wrote the 60 Minute Loan Modification.

Mike: Okay. Ryan want to give every body instructions as to how to send there questions in?

Ryan: Yeah. As we talk we all ways take calls at the end from clients and you can go ahead and speak up if that’s your nature. I’ll unmute the call. I can’t hear you now and you can also e-mail questions to questions@60minuteloanmodification.com. And with that in mind, whenever some thing strikes you, be sure to write it down immediately and shoot it in and we’ll deal with them all at once or as they come in and hopefully we can help you out. That’s questions@60minuteloanmodification.com. Thanks a lot.

Mike: All right. And I see we’ve got some questions coming in now. But let me get started talking about investment properties. Now about half of our clients have investment properties. All of the stimulus bill, all of the stimulus money is earmarked for loan modification and refinance encouragement support has to do with your primary residence so investors have been left out and have been defamed and kind of downtrodden and disregarded and I find it kind of funny actually because–and I called the people who kind of look down on us investors now, I call them smugglers because now they’re smug because they didn’t invest in real estate over the last six or eight years. And I just kind of think back on it and I just kind of think now, why wouldn’t have someone invested?

Ryan: Fear.

Mike: Well, yeah, that’s it exactly. Fear or lack of money. Whatever, but there was ten to twenty percent appreciation on an asset that the lender would give you a hundred and five percent of the value to purchase. It is by far the best tax advantaged investment on the planet so I just found it comical. I mean at any other time we say the people who do that, who get out there and make those investments are the capitalists. They’re the doers, the movers, the shakers and now because of the economy and the housing market turns down a little bit, so now we call them irresponsible? Give me a break.

Ryan: Well, it’s tough. The truth is we really shouldn’t even be talking about it, right? We should just move on with our lives.

Mike: It’s comical. I just think it’s comical. You wait another five years from now and we’ll be saying, listen, the people who fought through and still own property are going to again feel pretty smart. Give me a break were not going to become socialist. This is a capitalistic society, capitalistic economy and those that got the property are going to be better off. And the guys and the folks who can hang on during this difficult time and find a way to own property or find a way to keep their property are going to be better off.

I’ve got ten items here that I want to pass on to you about how clients with income property are getting good loan modifications. The first thing is an awful lot of them are seeing it as an opportunity to prioritize and cherry pick or cull through their properties. So in other words, the first step I always recommend is to think through which of the properties do you really want to come out of this thing owning. Because very often, if you have a lot of properties, very often that half of them are dogs anyways and you kind of regret having bought them. But once you make the purchase there’s some ego in there and you really fight to keep them. But if you really run the numbers on them, usually half of your properties are significantly less attractive long term then others and that usually has to do with location. Because it really is location, location, location. So I always recommend that the first thing we do is prioritize them and see which ones are the most important to you.

Now that’s helpful for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is your debt to income ratio overall may be so bad that you have to lose some of the worst ones in order to get them off your books because they’re real stinkers in terms of what they bring in and what you have to pay on them. So sometimes just taking fast action in terms of–I mean trying to give them away as deed in lieu or short selling them. You know, sometimes you can short sell in 45 days, 45 to 60 days if you hire someone that’s really good to do it, like us. So that important first to prioritize and think through. Now is it really important to hang to these properties? Are they, in fact, smart choices? And then lose those bad ones fast.

Ryan: That reminds me of something we were talking about with another client, I can’t recall who. But it’s kind of like the unofficial no application refinance. I don’t know but we got to develop a name for it. But it’s like basically, you know, when a lot of people say to us oh I put $50,000 into this property and now it’s gone. I don’t want to let it go. Well number one, the money’s already gone. Okay. You just have to do the math and figure out in ten years if you broke even how much would you lose, essentially. But regardless, what a lot of people we’ve been talking to are doing is kind of saying, you know what, I’ll just try and get that $50,000 out. I’ll stop paying my mortgage and we got one client who’s fifteen months into not paying a mortgage and imagine if you collect rent of three thousand the whole time. That’s another way that people around the country are basically, I don’t know they’re like qualifying themselves for a refinance. They’re basically refinancing their money out of the property.

Mike: They’re getting there money back out of it, right?

Ryan: And I don’t know. Fifteen months, that’s an extreme example. That’s a real one, but certainly six months is a piece of cake and nine if you can fart around a little bit, okay. So just something to keep in mind.

Mike: Now, Ryan, I want to pass on a related bit of information I learned from a client who has a Florida property. Now, if you have properties in some of the really hard hit areas like the inland empire of Southern California or Phoenix or many parts of Florida, you maybe in a situation where the bank actually is so overwhelmed that they can’t move very fast to foreclose, number one, and they can’t move very fast to evict. Number two. I heard a story earlier in the week about a client who lost his property after nine months of fiddle farting around the bank and he was pleased because he had recouped, just as you explained, Ryan. He had recouped about forty thousand dollars worth of payments because he was renting the property. So he recouped that in rent while he had stopped making his payment.

Ryan: I guess if you were even living in the house the same situation applies actually. You got to count your own mortgage.

Mike: Right. I mean deal with the ethics there on your own terms but here’s the next step. He said that he thought it was pretty interesting because when he lost the property he advised the renter, of course, that now he was no longer the landlord and that the bank owned the property and the tenant was smart enough to not pay his rent. And do you know it was eight months before the bank got smart enough to kick him out? And it really wasn’t a matter of being smart. It was really a matter of just getting around to it. So here this guy lived in the property for eight additional months with out paying rent. So I mean, you can take advantage of some of the totally in overwhelmed situation the banks find themselves in.

Ryan: Now that would be extraordinary. What if he had lived in that house and just stayed? Probably the same thing would have happened.

Mike: Yeah. That would be like 19 months with no rent. Okay, now here’s a bit of information I want to pass along. You remember, of course, that the government does not subsidize loan modification efforts on part of a lender for rental properties but put yourself in the shoes of one of these investors. You see that there’s a rational way forward. A rational, mathematically sound way of rewriting these loans in order to keep them current. Almost all of the investors ultimately will modify on rental properties. It takes a lot more negotiating power to get them to do so. At first they will refuse, and then, what I always recommend is that we exhaust all are other options I always put the properties up for sale and get them on the MLS right away. So that if I want to try to exorcise a offer to offer the property as deed in lieu, I will already have the three months on the market. And you can go ahead and put it on the market. Get it listed at a relatively high price, so at least it’s on the market, technically, although you don’t have to fool around with a lot of looky loos and a lot of buyers. Because–.

Ryan: Well, you don’t technically have to show it. The disadvantage, though, would be we could do that because you know were licensed to sell homes and we have a certain objective in mind but it is going to be quiet a challenge for who’s listening to this to get the big hair lady who’s name and face is on the bus bench near by to cooperate with them in regards to not showing the house, for example.

Mike: If I’m working short sells, I can explain it to people in Florida and Georgia and in Ohio and Michigan, you know what I mean? I think that’s the keys. You have to be working with an expert who understands all your options.

Ryan: Well, if it’s not you too, if you’re not the agent, which probably most people aren’t, you can’t expect some one to do it for free either. So don’t be stupid. You can’t call someone up and say hey I want you to list my house at a high price so that it’ll never sell. You’ve got to develop some sort of fair compensation plan because there’s a lot to it. I don’t know what there is, but it seams to me to make a lot of sense if someone could pay us, not us exactly, someone could pay someone, I don’t know like some kind of monthly membership fee to stall foreclosure at any–

Mike: Remember, Ryan, that there are plenty of brokers who for $500 will put your “for sale by owner” home on the locale MLS. So those are the guys you have to look if you haven’t got any personal relationships with people who you’re working with.

Ryan: That’s a good point. But a lot of people feel kind of frightened to do that, you know? If you didn’t know, you’re like, well, who’s going to call me? It would make sense to have some regular monthly fee to have someone just pull out all the stops.

Mike: All right, so what you’re hearing from me, then, is that I very often on investment properties I start multiple foreclosure work out options at the same time. So very often I will prepare to request a deed in lieu and you know what? That’s usually just a paper tiger. They don’t want a deed in lieu. Keep in mind that when you deed the property to them in a deed in lieu contract, they don’t get relieved from the second mortgage or for any mechanic’s liens, any tax liens. They don’t get released from any other liens, number one. And number two, they don’t like to take property deed in lieu because actually there’s a lot of legal implications to taking on property and going through the short sell process or the foreclosure process gets a lot of experts involved. You know what I mean? They get a inspector out there. They get a local realtor. They get a lot of people to look at the deal to tell them. you know. that there could be some environmental issues or legal issues or eviction issues or damage issues, etcetera. So deed in lieu is, a lot of times, just a ploy on my part. I ask for it and then they tell me what the requirements will be and it’s always it’s on the market at least three months. So I always start that early.

And then also requesting a short sale consideration, I think again is another–I use it as another phony threat. And I use it because I want them to realize I’m serious and that I’m going to go to the mat on this one and that they can’t make me afraid by reporting me to the credit bureau. Nah, nah, nah. And it is the truth that on rental properties you’re going to have to be more aggressive and it seams like all investors are willing to go lay down the mortgages in order to get a good modification. You rarely get an investor who wont go late. And when I have I’ve never satisfactorily negotiated a good modification for them.

All right. Now keep in mind that the lenders, in trying to move faster and faster, are standardizing a lot of their practices and they have pretty much across the board now gone to 75 percent of gross rents that there going to allow you to credit as income. The other 25 percent, we all know, goes towards vacancies, maintenance and repairs. And 25 percent is actually a little bit conservative. I know a lot of us investors don’t like to admit that we spend that much on those things. But we probably do and if your number is significantly less than that–if it’s 85 percent. If your loss or your expenses are only 15 percent of gross rents then you have to argue that with them. You’ll probably be successful up to about 85 percent of gross rents. So now what the lenders are doing, instead of what they use to do, which is ask you to keep all your rental properties separate from your personal, is they’re lumping all real estate owned together. Your home and all your rental properties. They allow to include on the income line 75 percent of your gross rents. In the debt area, they’re going to ask you to list all of the liens against the properties and the lowest monthly payment that you can make on all of those.

Now keep in mind that rental declines is a great hardship. They wont argue for a minute. But they might ask you to document it. I have had them ask to document it. And that’s usually easy enough to do, really, just with either check receipts or management company receipts. But rents have been declining across the country pretty steadily for about 18 months. So it shouldn’t be too hard to show. And most of your declines will come from vacancies. I bet you have an extra ten percent in vacancies in the last twelve months than you normally would have.

Now also wanted to point out the delays are definitely longer then on primary residences, so expect to have to go a 120 days or longer. An awful lot of them that I’m working on, in fact, go to charge off. That is, they go to a 180 without making a payment on their second mortgage and that one gets charged off and you all know what that means nothing. That’s just an accounting practice that the lender has to go through. But they’ll continue to try and collect and it still shows on your credit report and, in fact, the charge off itself shows so that’s an additional ding on your credit. And I just wanted to encourage all of you that in fact with income property I’m finding that we can get what we want. It just takes longer. But we are getting good modifications.

Ryan: You know what’s a good idea? This just kind of popped into my head. When you’re an investor and you’ve got these properties, you both have to manage the bank expectations and the renter’s expectations. So a few things just from our own experience that really, really make things difficult for landlords. If the tenant finds out that you are not paying the mortgage they get intensely concerned as they feel that they then have a right often not to pay you.

Mike: Good point.

Ryan: This is great. I’ve never actually thought of this, but here’s how you head that off. Whenever I go to a house and I’m knocking on the door and discover that it’s a investment, it’s a renter, if push comes to shove, if I can’t find that owner easily I am more then delighted to share the public financial information with the renter and the same is going to be true if they approximately a 100 people contact some one in the process of NODON, notice of default on. So expect that that’s going to happen. Don’t even try to avoid that. So here’s some ideas for you. First of all, go down and verify that your tax records are correct and make sure your mailing address is not the site address. That’ll help you with about 80 percent of solicitations and then add a real good, live, phone number to the tax record. I say that just because you have a renter. If it’s your own home, forget it. Take the number off. But because you have that renter your going to have to manage expectations even if it is just saying, no, it’s a investment strategy. Well, I’m taken care of. Thanks, bye. Please take me off your list.

Mike: Ryan, that’s really good input.

Ryan: Here’s another idea. Call the tenant in advance and just say, I just wanted to ask, are you getting any mail for me? No. Now that’s an opportunity to say well, I’m applying for a loan modification. Oh really, what’s that? Well, I’m hoping I can get my interest rates reduced. Oh, that’s cool. And then you go on to say I might actually have to miss a few payments in order to get it, so don’t be alarmed if someone comes to the door knocking just be sure to give them my information. It’s a normal part of the process and I’ll keep you updated about that.

Mike: That’s exactly it and when they hear loan modification–honestly there’s been so much in the press about it. People are just getting familiar with it and comfortable with it. That is my recommendation, that last one I gave. Those are good ideas too, but it’s good to be proactive. Then you just don’t have any problems.

Ryan: That’ll save you because what the renter will end up doing then is getting the information, then they’ll spend time confirming the information. Then they’ll get worried and call you about the information. Then they’ll feel compelled to check up on the information and you suddenly have a huge headache on your hands. So what would be so much better is if you could have one phone conversation upfront and then not talk to them for the next six months quite happily. So that’s a nice little goal.

Mike: I’d like to share a reality check and it’s kind of medicine that we all should take on some of these rental properties. A lot of times in counseling folks in the tax liability of a short sale or a deed in lieu or just letting the home go back. You know, mailing in the keys and let it go through foreclosure. I do a little reality check with people when they get a little bit upset about the fact that they may have a tax liability. And you have a much greater liability on income property then on your own property, because as we all know we have all been exempted from any forgiven debts tax liability by virtue of the 2007 law. It was MFDRA – it extends through 2012 and it gives you on your personal residence forgiven debt it gives you tax exemption on any forgiven debt.

Ryan: I didn’t know that it did not include investment properties.

Mike: It does not include investment properties so you have to be a little more wiley on investment property and that’s why a lot of times with investors I counsel them about the three ways that most people are getting exempt from there tax. The first one is by virtue of that law. The second one is insolvency. With so many properties so upside down it’s usually a piece of cake to prove insolvency. Your CPA can help you prove it. There’s a form that the IRS has you fill out.

Ryan: It’s not bankruptcy. It’s kind of an accounting statement as apposed to a tax designation.

Mike: And believe me, an awful lot of you on the call are insolvent. I know that doesn’t sound good, but if you were to be totally liquidated right now, your liabilities would exceed your assets. So cover your assets. So that’s one way. And the third way is through bankruptcy.

Ryan: An insolvency is apparently, we have been told, we’re literally talking about a piece of cake. Your going to have to have your CPA do it.

Mike: Here’s what I wanted to say about the reality check. I walk people through it and it has a before and after check. There are two rows. One is before and one is after and it shows what you own right now. And let’s just make it up. It’s a $500,000 duplex in Pomona and it currently depreciating at one percent per month because property values are still declining in Pomona. And you owe $750,000 on this duplex. Now after the short sale or the deed and lieu or the foreclosure you will have no debt and you may be tax liable on that $250,000 that is forgiven.

Ryan: So what’s the max you would pay?

Mike: That would probably be–well, let’s just say $250,000 and let’s say you have nothing to offset it, which would be bizarre. In other words you have not put any into it to reduce your tax the basis of your property value so it would be very unlikely but let’s say you actually had to incur $250,000 worth of income that you couldn’t write off. You couldn’t reduce. So let’s just say that you would end up spending $37,000 at fifteen percent if you just sucked it up and paid that in taxes.

Ryan: Then you’re going to get out of it so if you’re looking at that I could either owe an extra $250,000 or $37,000 in worse case scenario.

Mike: Yeah. After I get rid of this headache, worse case scenario is I owe $37,000 but right now, I owe $750,000 on a $500,000 asset that’s declining by $50,000 a year.

Ryan: If you do It next year you might get another $50,000 out of it but that’s a good point. Taxes stink. We all got are taxes but don’t be an idiot. If someone had an option for today to erase $250,000 worth of debt for $37,000 you’d be quite an idiot or you’d have to be assured that your land is literally on oil or some thing for you to keep that land.

Mike: So the same financial smarts that got you into this thing should serve you now to realize some of these investments are stinkers and you should get out.

Ryan: And the other thing about federal taxes is also about I don’t know based on the number of people advertising on television, It must be fairly common to settle. They must settle those pretty commonly.

Mike: They might. I don’t know about that but honestly I’m not a tax wiz. But I have spent many years to get–but have a great tax guy but there is just no way that I end up paying $37,000. There’s just to oo many expenses.

Ryan: Well, here’s the thing. You’ve got to have an end game in mind. A lot of people call us and they say, well, I put $200,000 into it and now I’m $300,000 upside down and it’s a dog of a house. In some cases around here, even in California, these are hundred-year-old piece of junk homes with the bad layouts, small apartments. You’re going to attract riff-raff renters and you’re always going to have problems in terms of maintenance. You got to call it and I’m not saying run away. I’m saying develop a strategy and in this case the obvious strategy in my mind would be submit a loan modification.

Perhaps if it was mind I would stop paying. Stop paying. Submit a loan modification. Do a short sale with no showing. Basically with tenants in there you’ve got a year and a half probably in which to recoup money but that doesn’t mean you don’t do a loan modification. It’s kind of like you get in the shower, you’re going to have to use the soap. You’re going to have to shampoo and every day you have to do those things. All these things all need to be taken care of. You don’t say, well, I’m going to get up this morning but today I’m not going to take a shower but I’m going to brush my teeth. So anyway apply every opportunity. For goodness sakes, a loan modification is free. I mean even if you have someone doing it for you, a lot of people will pay us to do a loan modification and we charge $3,000. Just to stall it. I mean, if you think about anyone who’s going to pay you, they’ve got a $6,000 a month mortgage.

Mike: I want to say this upfront. This whole story about prioritizing and deciding about if you want to cherry pick has to do with stating your goals. That’s one thing I always do upfront, remember? Let’s state the goals. What is the goal here? Are we hanging on to this property? Are we cash maxing it are we trying to get ultimate cash out of it and we could care less if we lose it? What is our ultimate strategy?

Ryan: And the thing is you have to have–with a house that’s $250,000 over mortgaged you have to just say, hey, we all made some–the easy money, made everyone makes decisions that at best could be called marginal and at worst you know, 80 percent of them were ridiculous. So, you got–no matter, loan mod or no loan mod, should not affect your decision necessarily to hang on to the property. I guess I’m just repeating myself.

Mike: Okay, also I want it to be out there–second mortgages are dealing. And I recommend that you start negotiating at about 15 percent. If you have the hutzpa, if you have the nerve, if you have the attitude to take it right to the end of foreclosure and continue to–even take it to charge off. If you’re doing that and you’re wrestling them to the mat they are accepting buy outs. Fifteen to thirty percent is common and I would begin negotiations at 10 or 15 percent and see if you can’t just buy out those second mortgages. That can be part of your strategy too. I’ve got a couple of properties where it’s my strategy. I’ve just decided, you know what, I’m going to have a two percent interest only first mortgage and I’m going to have no second mortgage on this property or I’m not going to own it. So that’s what I’m negotiating and the banks just refuse to take the property and they are negotiating with me and I just might get it.

All right, so before we go to those questions I wanted to pass on a big of funny information I learned this week about Chase, WaMu Chase. You know, sometimes when you get a negotiator on the line for whatever reason, you hit it off with them and start chatting. Well, I was chatting with this guy at Chase and he was telling me what a hoot it is to work for that outfit. He said they’re just–he’s said it’s like a start up. It’s pretty exciting. He said they get, get a load of this. They get 100,000 faxes per day in his department. They have 155,000 loan modification applications in the queue that they’re currently working on. They get 40,000 applications per week.

This is one bank. And they’ve started this, he says they’ve put together this new series of departments to try finally to implement the President’s Making Homes Affordable program for clients who are not late and they put up this sham, this shell, months ago but now he says they’ve added a swat team to try to really kick start it. And that’s called the Imminent Default Department. And that is they hand off to this Imminent Default Department, the IDD team, they hand them clients who they think are getting to the point where they just might go late. And that team is charged with trying to pull out all the stops and get that modification processed in time so that they don’t go late because he said they are learning that once a homeowner goes late and realizes it’s not so terrible that they go later and later and they begin to cop an attitude. So it’s very important to chase for their own reasons to stop defaults. Now chase is the one that has that Way Forward department and the Care Team.

The Care Team is also a swat team that handles some of these 155,000 when the negotiator is just swamped and can’t get to asking the borrower for a clarification on something, he hands it to the care team. But anyway, I thought it was kind of interesting to hear the magnitude of the business that Chase is in, in the loan modification business and some of the teams that they’re building to try to, I think in many ways, just put up a phony front like they’re really paying attention to those guys cause where the money is in the guys who are late.

Ryan: Well, it probably goes other ways cause I’m sure they’re trying to unload those loans too so maybe it would behoove them to keep them current. I have this one question that is directed to you. John, are you out there regarding your email question?

Caller: Yes. Let me ask you question. I was talking to Mike the other day about this and he directed me how to do this. The question that is in my mind is this. Debts means the ones that are creditors, right? The rest is expenses.

Ryan: Yeah. That can be confusing. Debts literally are amounts you owe people. Not ongoing cost of living stuff.

Caller: In calculating DTI should we use the debt or the debt and expenses?

Mike: Just debt.

Ryan: That’s a very important distinction.

Caller: Okay. And as far as revenue, should we use the gross revenue or that 75 percent of the rental income and 85 percent of salary?

Mike: John, you don’t want to get hung up on which of those you use. You just want to be sure that the result is within guidelines. So if you use a percent of your net income–so if you take all of your debts and you calculate it as a percent of your net income it’s going to be quite high. Maybe as high as 75 percent but will still get you a loan modification. If you use your gross income and it’s over 65 percent then I would be alarmed. I would work on it and try to get it down.

So it doesn’t matter which way you do it because you know what? When the lender gets it they’re–depending on the program that they’re trying to get you to qualified for they’re going to use whatever calculations, whatever ratios are mandated by that program so they may even take just your first mortgage on just your primary residence as a percentage of your gross income. So if you just pay attention to whichever ones you use, just pay attention to the outcome and figure out if the outcome makes sense and with that ratio should you be able to go forward.

Caller: The maximum should be 70 percent?

Mike: Seventy five percent on a debt to income ratio of all your debts as a percent of your net income is about as high as you dare get. Otherwise you’re going to get bounced.

Caller: Okay. Seventy five percent net income to debt. And debt, but expense don’t calculate. But we put it in the worksheet, right?

Mike: That’s correct. Because at the end of the worksheet you want to see if you have money left at the end of the month. Because they’re going to want to make sure that you don’t have too much money and that you have enough.

Caller: Oh, okay. And as far as sending them the document, should we send the whole thing that we calculated?

Mike: What I always recommend is that you only send the first two columns. Because I don’t like to show them that I calculated debt to income ratio and I don’t like to show them–I always like to show them as little as possible and to dumb everything down. I give them the information they need but I don’t want them to know that I know what I’m doing.

Caller: Okay. All right. That sounds good. Thank you very much.

Mike: I’ve got one on my screen here from Mark who says he has three income properties. All of the first mortgages are with Wells Fargo bank. You must have had a broker friend who really made a lot of money on you over the years. The question is, can I modify all three at once? And the answer is–wouldn’t that be nice. I was successful in doing that one time. Not with three, but with two. So while it makes a ton of sense and I highly recommend that you try to do it, most often whenever I tried to get two loans modified at the same time or multiples I almost always get turned down. Lately I started two of them with Washington Mutual and it was 30 days before I realized that they hadn’t started on one of them and that they needed me to resubmit everything and that they insisted that I give them a month, another month, of checking accounts and savings accounts so it was really a hassle. So the answer is I would try really hard but I wouldn’t count on it.

Ryan: Thanks so much everyone for joining us tonight on the 60 Minute Loan Modification Insider’s Secrets Teleconference series. Thousands of people picked up one, two or even ten homes in the past five years and as a result we’re now in a situation where we’re over leveraged or underwater on properties. That’s exactly what we’ve been talking about all evenings. It’s sad but it’s true. And in order to come out on top here you have to remove your emotions, accept a loss of some kind and then do a triage to fix your situation as soon as possible. The good news is that if you bite the bullet right now it’s actually quite an opportunity to increase your net worth, perhaps more than you could have, in a run up in real estate prices had they gone that way.

Very few people could have increased their income as much as they can now by eliminating their debt. We’re a huge advocate of do it yourself loan modification, but that doesn’t mean you should do it alone. Short sales are also likely to be part of the modification equation and really anything that makes you less broke now and in the near future is worth exploring. We’re here to help and calls like these are hopefully easing you through what could be an emotional, trying process. We spend most of the day on the phone, so email is the quickest way to get a fast response to any and all questions. Please email us at help@60minuteloanmodification.com. Thanks for joining us and good night.

Mike: Thanks everyone. Good night.