A home is often a family's most valuable possession. Preventing avoidable foreclosures helps keep families in their homes, preserves communities, and prevents avoidable loss. The "Making Home Affordable" plan provides responsible homeowners with support to obtain affordable refinancing or loan modifications to help them stay in their homes.

Contact a legitimate housing or financial counselor to help you work through your problems.

• To find a counselor, contact the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) at (800) 569-4287 or (877) 483-1515, or visit their Web site.
• Call (888) 995-HOPE, the Homeowner's HOPE Hotline, to reach a nonprofit, HUD-approved counselor through HOPE NOW, a cooperative effort of mortgage counselors and lenders to assist homeowners.
• Visit NeighborWorks America’s Web site.

Visit the “Making Home Affordable” program Web site for more information about the administration's program to assist troubled homeowners with refinancing or loan modifications.

Avoid Foreclosure Prevention Scams

If someone offers to negotiate a loan modification for you or to stop or delay foreclosure for a fee, carefully check his or her credentials, reputation, and experience; watch out for warning signs of a scam; and always maintain personal contact with your lender and mortgage servicer. Your mortgage lender can help you find real options to avoid foreclosure. It is important to contact your mortgage lender early to preserve all your options. There are legitimate consumer financial counseling agencies that can help you work with your lender. Read Consumer Advisory 2008-1 for more information on protecting yourself from foreclosure prevention scams.

Foreclosure Prevention Resource Directory

Mortgage foreclosure filings and seriously delinquent mortgages continue at historically elevated levels.  This results in high levels of economic stress for mortgage servicers, investors and borrowers, as well threatening the stability of the neighborhoods where foreclosures occur.  This resource directory is intended primarily as a resource for mortgage servicers working to reduce the incidence of foreclosures in their servicing portfolios, which will also benefit investors, borrowers and affected communities.  We hope the resource directory will also be useful for borrowers working to cure delinquent mortgages and the counseling organizations that work with these borrowers, as well as other entities interested in reducing foreclosures.

The contents of this resource directory are organized into the following categories:

• Foreclosure Prevention Overview
• Loan Modification and Refinance Programs
• Consumer Resources
• Policy, Legal and Regulatory Resources
• Speeches and Testimony
• Stabilization Strategies and Studies