For example, if your mortgage is guaranteed by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae or insured by the Federal Housing Administration and you are looking to modify the loan, you should check out the government's Making Home Affordable and Home Affordable Refinance Programs.
If it isn't, you might have an opportunity to modify your mortgage through your lender if it participates in the public-private Hope Now program.
Or, if Congress eventually passes a plan to refinance through FHA those mortgages not guaranteed by Freddie or Fannie, as President Obama proposed in Tuesday's State of the Union address, the resulting program could provide a solution.
No matter who owns your mortgage, the company that services it might change several times during the life of the loan. This is normal and should not affect the terms and conditions of your original agreement.
Nor should you be angry or offended if the loan is resold. If you pay your mortgage on time every month, you're fine. It's nothing personal, just business.
These days, very few mortgages are kept in portfolio by the originating lender. Loans are sold to the secondary mortgage market, where they are packaged as securities typically bought by several investors.
The process is designed to quickly return the money to the lenders, at a profit, of course, so they can lend it to more homeowners.
"Mortgages are a commodity item nowadays, like eggs or lumber," said Holden Lewis, a columnist with Bankrate.com. "They are graded at the source, then packaged and sold.
"When the supermarket buys a truckload of eggs, the manager knows that all the eggs didn't come from one farm and that some of them already are cracked," Lewis said. "But the manager has a pretty good notion of the value of a truckload of eggs."
