You're in trouble with your home loan. Your income has dropped. Your expenses have not. You've been dipping into your savings to make your payments, and they're almost gone. Your retirement account is all you have left. Can you get a mortgage modification? You check www.makinghomeaffordable.com and take the quiz on the site to see if you'd qualify for a mortgage modification. You do! Except that you don't. What the site doesn't tell you is that just because you are experiencing hardship doesn't mean that your loan servicer is going to modify your loan--the program is voluntary and lenders all have their own criteria for determining who gets a modification--and who doesn't.

I have managed to get copies of modification criteria from several lenders, and here are some of them:

* If you have assets that you can access, even if they're your retirement accounts, and they exceed two or three months of your mortgage payments, you will not be given a modification--until you have exhausted all of your resources.

* If your mortgage is less than or equal to 31% of your income, you will not be given a modification. Your lender doesn't care that you have huge medical bills or ran up too much credit card debt.

* If your lender has reason to believe that you are unlikely to default (for example if you still have equity in your home) it will probably not modify your loan.

So the ideal scenario for those who want a modification is this: You have no money, you are upside down on your mortgage, you can document a hardship like an illness or job loss, you must have sufficient income to make a modified payment (with your rate dropped to as low as 2%), and the lender would generate more cash flow by modifying your mortgage than by foreclosing.

Keep these in mind when completing you application for a mortgage modification. A mortgage calculator can help you determine if a modified payment (including property taxes, mortgage insurance, and homeowner's insurance) at a 2% interest rate (and up to a 40 year term if needed) is less than 31% of your gross monthly income.