Filed under: Cards, Debt

Are you struggling with high interest payments and want to find out the best strategies to get out of debt? Are you afraid of losing your home? Do you want to know how you can improve your credit score? Post any questions you have below and I’ll answer as many as I have the ability to.

I’ll introduce you to debt payoff strategies to help you get out from a mountain of debt or recommend a source you should ask for help. Don’t just hide your head in the sand. Start to take charge of your financial future today!

Lita Epstein, MBA, has written more than 20 books on personal finance including “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Improving Your Credit Score” and “The 250 Questions You Should Ask to Avoid Foreclosure.

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software, AOL, web 2.0

AOL has picked up social networking site Bebo for a huge wad of cash. While we didn’t really see this coming, the move makes a lot of sense. AOL’s audiences tend to skew old (you know, except for the fine young folks who read AOL-owned blogs like Download Squad), while Bebo is large with the 13-24 set and has 40 million registered users.

While Bebo doesn’t have the name recognition of Facebook or MySpace in the US, it’s big in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand. And it does have a considerable US audience as well. Perhaps most importantly, regular users click on an average of 78 pages per day, showing a high level of user engagement.

[via paidContent]

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Filed under: Debt, Home, Saving

This is part of our series on strategies you can adopt to free yourself from burdensome debt.

What should you do if you can’t pay the mortgage? You’re not alone. Right now that’s happening to more than a million people.

People get in trouble financially for many different reasons. Your interest rate may be set to go higher and you can’t afford the new payment. Or you lost your job and can’t pay the mortgage. Or you’re facing surgery and don’t know if you’ll have enough money to pay the mortgage. These are the three most common reasons people give for not being able to make mortgage payments, but your reason may be different.

Whatever the reason, when you know you no longer can afford your mortgage payments, don’t go hide in the closet. The first thing you should do is call your mortgage servicer (whether it’s the bank you first took the loan through or a new bank that’s now collecting the payments) and let them know you’ve a problem and what the problem is. Many loan servicers will tell you they can’t do anything for you until you miss at least two payments or are more than 60 days late. If you can’t get help from your mortgage servicer, don’t give up seeking help and don’t wait until you’ve missed two payments. Begin working on finding a solution as soon as possible.

Today you’ve got lots of options for assistance. Four excellent resources include:

* The Center for Foreclosure Solutions at 888-995 HOPE (4873). The center is a collaboration of housing counselors, mortgage servicers, investors and other mortgage participants.

* If you can’t get help through them, the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America is another good place to seek help. They even have a 30-year mortgage program you may be able to use to get out of a higher interest rate mortgage.

* Another good resource is the Homeowner Crisis Resource Center, which is run by the National Foundation for Credit Counseling, an excellent source for finding help to get out of a debt problem.

* Or you can call a HUD approved Housing Counseling Agency at 800-569-4287. If you like, you can find one near you using the HUD website.

You might find that you don’t even want to open the mail you receive from your lender. Well, don’t give in to that temptation. The first notices you will receive will be critical information about how to prevent foreclosure. Later notices will focus on pending legal action. Failure to open the letters will not give you a defense in court.

Pull out your loan documents and read them to find out what they say regarding missing your payments and the actions your lender will take. You also may want to contact your state government housing office to find out what the foreclosure laws are for your say. Each state has different laws.

Think about assets you may have that you may be able to sell, or possibly a second job you can take. Let your lender know that you are willing to make sacrifices to keep your house. A lender is more willing to come up with a modification of your loan package if they know you’re serious about making it work.

Don’t seek the easy way out by paying fees to a foreclosure prevention company. An authorized HUD counselor will provide those services for free if you call them. Also, don’t sign any document appointing a firm to represent you and act on your behalf. These people are scam artists. You will be signing over your title to your property and become a renter in your home.

Lita Epstein has written more than 20 books including “The 250 Questions You Should Ask to Avoid Foreclosure.”

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Filed under: Cards, Debt

This is part of our series on strategies you can adopt to free yourself from burdensome debt.

There is no doubt that the hardest part about getting out of debt is finding the extra cash to do it with. Most of our posts here on WalletPop deal with different shades of that perplexing question — how to generate extra income, spend less money, find the cheapest credit cards — all towards the goal of reducing your punishing levels of debt.

But there is another, not quite so hard question about getting out of debt that we’ve only scratched the surface of so far on WalletPop. That is, once you’ve unlocked that extra cash and are in a position to start actually getting out of debt, what’s the ideal way to pay it off?

Simple answer: That depends on your goals. In this series we list common reasons people want to reduce their debt load and the best strategy for that goal.

The two main techniques for spending down debt, our blogger Lita Epstein has come up with are the ‘Snowball Effect’ and the ‘Round Robin.’ The snowball effect is ideal for people who are getting eaten alive by high interest charges on their credit card balances. The plan there’s to simply pay off your high interest credit cards first.

Things get more interesting with the round robin plan. That technique is ideal for people who are anticipating needing a large loan in the near future and want to improve their credit score in a hurry. The round robin technique advises you to pay off a chunk of each credit card in consecutive months until the balance on multiple cards (assuming you have them) is a small percentage of your total credit limit. That’s a great way to raise your credit score, Epstein advises.

From those two basic methods, we’ve come up Wit some other situations that call for different debt-elimination techniques.

- You want to repair relations with the friends and family members you’ve borrowed money from.

- You’re afraid of losing your home.

- You’re close to retirement and don’t want to leave your job with a heavy debt burden.

- You just got a big windfall and have a one-time opportunity to get out of debt.

Any of these fit your situation? Read on through the posts in this package. Do you have any additional questions for our credit and debt expert? Write to Lita Epstein and she’ll do her ideal to help you come up with a solution.

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