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Yahoo! Finance hosted a CNNMoney article about delinquent borrowers.  You can click here for the original article: Where Delinquent Borrowers Go for Help.  A growing number of distressed homeowners are trying to access President Obama’s loan modification program, and it’s keeping foreclosure prevention counselers extra busy:

Whenever Alice Steinhardt walks into her office, her phone’s message light is red.

A foreclosure prevention counselor at Neighborhood Housing Services of New Haven, Steinhardt helps delinquent homeowners catch a break from their loan servicers. She usually gets more than a dozen calls a day, most from panicked homeowners, and a few from bank representatives she has been hounding on behalf of her clients.

“The only way to really keep up would be to live here at the job,” said Steinhardt, an artist by calling who has worked at NHS for seven years. “It’s unrelenting.”

Like Steinhardt, other housing counselors around the country are trying to cope with an avalanche of troubled borrowers looking for help.

It takes a long time to get a loan modification processed, and the demand hasn’t slacked off as the housing crisis enters its third year.  I breathe a sigh of relief when I hear about these tales of woe.  I paid off my mortgage several years ago, and my house is worth many multiples of my original purchase price.  So I can sleep at night.

And don’t get me wrong - I feel bad for the people that were genuinely hurt by the fallout from the economic crisis.  I never like to see good people lose their jobs, and we recently had a layoff where I work.  But the same people that rolled the dice and tried to make a fortune flipping houses are now getting their own personal bailout, courtesy of taxpayers like you and me.

And do you know what we have to look forward to next?  That’s right, higher taxes.  Somebody has to pay for all of these bailouts.  I can’t wait.  I wonder what my share will be?

They should offer mandatory personal finance training with any loan modification.  Maybe this will prevent people from getting in over their head on a bad loan.

Anybody out there have any first-hand experience with a loan modification?

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