The process of negotiating a workout for a mortgage you can no longer afford can be frightful. Plenty of friends and relatives are great at giving bad advice. So why is this all so stressful? Lots of reasons: it's a slow process, requiring extensive documentation, which you may be asked to submit repeatedly, to more than one place, and, during much of the process, aggressive collection attempts are still be made by other parts of the mortgage companies. Some things that will help you manage the stress are keeping these expectations, or expect the expected.

1. Even though you may be knee deep in the paperwork process of a loan modification or short sale brace yourself for your mortgage company to NOT let up on collection activity. Why? Because mortgage companies are usually huge organizations, spread across many locations, and don't expect one department communicates with another. Often, until a negotiator is assigned to your request for loan modification or short sale, mortgage collection activities may continue, often daily. Remember the people placing these calls are trained to make you feel bad. See the documentary Maxed Out and you may come to understand that it is not personal, it's not about you.

2. When collection calls come in, remember you everything you said is being recorded and, as they are required by federal law to inform you, any information you give can be used by them to attempt to collect a debt. So less is more. State to them polite, but firm voice that you are in a loan modification with loss mitigation department, date you started, remember to stay polite, but firm?," or say to you ("This may be reported to a credit bureau,"), remain polite, but firm. "That information is in my loan modification/loss mitigation application."." Or, "thank you for your time.This alerts them that your making them aware you are in loss mitigation process. Remember they are most likely following scripts, and your loss mitigation updates are not on their scripts, so they will be stressed, and may even hang up on you. Do NOT expect them to be friendly, sympathetic or understanding. It's not their job. Their job is to say whatever they think will bring money to bring your loan back up-to-date, or bring your loan "current" as they like to term it.

3. When loss mitigation staff call, understand they are at an all time high, nationwide, in paperwork. One real estate agent was told an office that used to get 20 applications a month, now gets 3500. That's a jolt for any company. So don't say anything that might land you at the bottom of the every heaping stacks of paper. Remember to always remain calm and polite with loss mitigations staff, no matter how many times they ask you to resubmit paperwork, even if you have a receipt that your documents arrived at their mortgage company weeks and weeks ago, even if you have the name of the company employee that signed for it. You may go ahead and let them know you did submit it but are delighted to provide another copy. If you financed the entire mortgage and have 2 loans, be prepared to ride the document merry-go-round. Most will ask you to use telefax as it is secure, email is not. Remember, if you get a name of a person, direct number hold on to that information because it's worth it's weight in gold. Get an actual email address and you'll probably hear game show style bells and buzzers going off in celebration.