Tips to lower anxiety as mortgage rates reset

When she contacted various refinancing programs, Jones found her credit was no longer good enough to qualify. Her lender wasn’t interested in negotiating because she had been managing to scrape together her monthly payments. One possibility, she thought, might be more financial aid for her son, a junior at Emmanuel College. But when she met with Busanovich, she found that getting more financial aid wasn’t the answer.

Emmanuel, it turned out, was already bending over backward for the Jones family, Busanovich told her. So Busanovich reviewed Jones’s numbers to help her develop a plan of action. The picture wasn’t pretty. A quick review of income and expenses showed that Jones was spending about $1,000 a month more than she was bringing in. Even if Jones trimmed her bare-bones budget by dumping the cable TV at $66 a month, she would still be in the red.
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