hope for homeowners program

FHA Secure is gone

Holden Lewis has a great mortgage blog with Bankrate that I just ran across.  He talks about the FHA Secure program and why we need to have the Hope for Homeowners program revised.  Visit Holden’s blog here:

FHA Secure was a program designed to let delinquent homeowners refinance out of ARMs and into FHA-insured fixed-rate mortgages. When the program began in the fall of 2007, officials said it could help as many as 240,000 delinquent homeowners through the end of 2009. But in FHA Secure’s 16 months of existence, just 4,037 people got FHA Secure loans. So the feds discontinued the program a year early.

FHA Secure is gone, but Hope for Homeowners is still around. H4H is designed to allow people to refinance into FHA-insured mortgages when otherwise their houses would be foreclosed upon. H4H loans have many restrictions — so many that, as of the end of 2008, just 370 people had applied for H4H loans, and not a single person got one. Barney Frank, chairman of the House banking committee, says he wants to revise H4H to make it useful.