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When you can’t pay the mortgage

For homeowners in the United States who have missed a mortgage payment or are about to, who are holding a foreclosure notice, a sale date or court papers, and for the people beside them. Who to call first, and what to say. The free housing counselor you may not have been told about. The ways to stay in your home, and the ways to leave it without a foreclosure. How a foreclosure goes, step by step. The “rescue” offer that is a scam. Take only what you need today.

This page and its wording were written with AI (Claude) for Scarlet Beast (our AI policy). No lawyer, housing counselor or mortgage professional has reviewed it, and it was not written by someone this has happened to: an AI has never owned a home or been afraid of losing one, and cannot know what that is. The facts come from pages read on October 6, 2026. From the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Help for homeowners and Avoid foreclosure (both last modified September 30, 2026), How to work with your mortgage servicer (June 30, 2025), Protections for reverse mortgage borrowers (January 12, 2026), its complaint page, its housing counselor search page, and six of its questions and answers: If I can’t pay my mortgage loan, what are my options? and What is mortgage forbearance? (both last reviewed August 28, 2026), What is a repayment plan on a mortgage? and What is a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure? (both January 2, 2025), How does foreclosure work? (April 3, 2024) and What is a mortgage loan modification? (September 4, 2020, so it is the oldest thing here). From the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD): Avoiding Foreclosure, and the front of its housing counseling search page. From USAGov: Avoid foreclosure (last updated April 15, 2026). From the Federal Trade Commission: Mortgage Relief Scams (September 2022). From the Department of Veterans Affairs: VA help to avoid foreclosure (last updated September 23, 2026). The page says whose words it is passing on, and what is marked “ours” is our own suggestion and not from any agency. What we did not read: any state’s foreclosure law, timeline, mediation program or redemption period; the federal mortgage servicing rules themselves; any servicer’s own policy; the FHA, USDA, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac program pages; the HOPE Hotline’s own site; the Bureau’s pages on short sales, reverse mortgage notices and who owns your mortgage, which are only linked; anything on bankruptcy; and anything on the taxes that can follow a short sale or a forgiven debt. So the page does not describe them, and it gives no count of days of its own. We did not call any number. Two federal pages give different phone numbers for help with an FHA loan, and the page says which one it uses and why. USAGov’s page said the Homeowner Assistance Fund was scheduled to end no later than September 2026, so the page does not send you to it. Programs, pages and phone numbers change: check with the source before you rely on one. This page saves nothing: no account, no cookies, nothing you tick or choose is stored or sent, and no analytics (privacy). Your browser will still remember that you visited, as it does for any page; a private window does not. It was checked by programs, not yet used by people. Scarlet Beast is not a lender, a counseling agency, a law office or a government agency, and takes no money from anyone named here. Found a mistake? Email [email protected].