Counseling agencies can aid with loan company issue

Where do I go if I feel like my mortgage company is treating me unfairly? “We suggest one main step, which is to contact a nonprofit, HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development) approved counseling agency or legal service office,” said Kevin Stein, associate director of the California Reinvestment Coalition.

“These people haven’t been dealing with just one situation; unfortunately, they’ve been dealing with many cases,” he said.

“They know the rules and may have contacts at the mortgage provider.”

You can find a list of housing counseling agencies on HUD’s website. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau also has a list of HUD-approved counselors. The annual percentage rate of a loan basically tells you how much a loan really costs, including fees and fluctuations in interest rate.

For fixed-rate mortgages, the APR is fairly straightforward.

The fees you paid to take out the loan are added to the interest expense, spread out over the number of years of the loan.

This increases the real cost of your loan, which is why the APR of a fixedrate loan is higher than the actual interest rate.

For adjustable-rate mortgages or ARMs, however, another factor comes into play.

In calculating the APR for adjustable rate mortgages, lenders must take future interest-rate adjustments into consideration. There’s one problem. Nobody knows what those future adjustments will be.

-Bankrate.com