Understanding Your Options: Mortgage Refinance and Home-Equity Loans
Understanding Your Options: Mortgage Refinance and Home-Equity Loans is the first national curriculum on mortgage refinance and home-equity loans targeted to housing counselors. It can be used to help educate or counsel homeowners through an organized postpurchase homeownership education and counseling curriculum about their options for refinancing an existing mortgage or borrowing money secured by the equity in their home.
Mortgage refinancings boomed in 2002 and 2003. During this period, lower-income homeowners were significantly less likely than higher-income homeowners to seek refinances of their mortgages, even though their mortgages rates were above current levels — sometimes by several percentage points. Many of these homeowners lacked the knowledge of when and how to refinance, and also lacked the savings to pay for related fees. As long as homeowners in underserved communities are locked into unnecessarily high-rate loans, they are losing wealth and assets relative to other populations and communities.
During and since the refinance boom, home-equity loans have also experienced explosive growth. With consumer spending outpacing income growth, and property values rising in many markets, homeowners have increasingly turned to home-equity lending as a substitute for consumer credit to finance new consumption or reduce outstanding consumer debt.
NeighborWorks America developed these materials to fill the void in nonprofit consumer education programs on mortgage refinance and home-equity loans. We recognize the important role refinance and equity loans can and do play for homeowners. This curriculum can be a useful tool for trainers and counselors to help lower-income households manage their home equity effectively and maximize their potential for building personal wealth.
Please note that this module is designed to serve as a national curriculum and does not account for regional differences. In order to increase the effectiveness of the curriculum, NeighborWorks America recommends that each housing counselor use this module as a base from which to tailor the content to fit local markets and conditions. Downloading these files will make it easier to add content to customize the curriculum for your particular mortgage market.
The curriculum is available below. Most files are available in PDF format. If you are unable to open the PDF files, please obtain Adobe Acrobat Reader. Files are organized by course session (opening session, sessions 1-8, and closing session).
Materials for Opening Session
Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
Section 4
Section 5
Section 6
Section 7
Section 8
Closing Session
These files may also be downloaded in their entirety by clicking on the links below.
