You bought a big house a few years ago. He was so excited to achieve his dream of home ownership.

Today, the dream has turned into a nightmare and he is now facing foreclosure. How can this be avoided?

Steps you can take to avoid foreclosure and save your home:

Defaulting on your home loan is very different from defaulting on your credit card bills.

Your house is a secured debt. This means that when you stop paying, the lender will repossess the house. Mortgage’s trial.

Early in the default process, you can still bounce back from the brink if you haven’t been more than one or two monthly payments behind and the lender hasn’t spent too much trying to get you back online.

As the foreclosure process progresses, the size of the delinquent debt owed and the bank legal fees that customers typically pay increase.

Borrowers, who try to ignore their financial problems and the phone calls from their lenders, are likely to lose their homes.

About 40 percent of people who are behind on their house payments never contact the lender. This is a big mistake.

Understand that the foreclosure process is a well-oiled machine. Let’s say your payment is due on the 1st. Once the 16th arrives and you still haven’t paid, the bank starts watching you closely and the machine starts working.

Once this gets to 90-100 days, you are being charged legal fees on top of your mortgage payments, and you are in real danger of losing the house.

However, taking your house is the LAST thing the lender wants to do, no matter how much equity you have.

Banks are in the business of lending money. They are not in the business of selling real estate.

Foreclosure is expensive, burdensome and stressful. Nobody wants that to happen. They want to get their loan back on track. That is the goal.

How do you stop it then and get it back on track?

1) Take seriously the decision to stop it. Put your pride on hold and don’t be ashamed. Talk to the lender about all the options.

2) As soon as you know you’re going to be late on your first payment, contact the lender. Communication and honesty are appreciated and will be rewarded with understanding.

3) Never ignore phone calls or letters from the lender. Ignoring it makes it worse and speeds up the process. If you don’t tell them about the problem, they’ll just assume you don’t care and be more aggressive in their take-home strategy.

4) Stay positive. Your situation is not hopeless. Lenders deal with cases like yours every day. You are not alone. No matter how angry he sounds at you, don’t take it personally. There are proven collection methods and they are going to use them on you.

5) Be honest about what you can do and be willing to sacrifice. They will not accept a payment plan where you pay $100 per month of what you have in arrears. You are going to have to show them that you are committed to keeping your home. It may hurt financially, but if you want to keep your home, you’ll make the sacrifice.

6) Do not overpromise or underdeliver. Deliver what was promised with any payment plan. If you promise an extra $500 per month until they hit it, you better deliver. Failure to deliver on your promised deal will result in no more deals.

If you do all of this, you will probably end up stopping the foreclosure.

Here are some of the options you have to try to save your home or your credit:

You can request full restitution of your mortgage by updating your missed payments in a lump sum on a specific date.

You can get a forbearance agreement where you are allowed to delay payments for a short period with the understanding that another option will be used later to update the account.

You can find a payment plan, while the lender may allow you to catch up by adding a portion of the past due amount to a certain number of monthly payments until your account is current.

You can apply for a mortgage modification where you can make your regular payment now, but you can’t catch up on the amount you owe. In this case, the lender may agree to modify your mortgage.

One solution is to add the past due amount to your existing loan, financing it over the long term. This is a very popular method.

Modification may also be possible if you no longer have the ability to make payments at the previous level. The lender can modify your mortgage to extend the life of your loan.

For example, if you have 25 years left on your loan, they can extend it to 28 years to help.

You may want to sell the house to save your credit. If catching up isn’t an option, and you tell the lender that he’s selling it, he might agree to stay the foreclosure to give you some time to try to sell his house.

If none of that works…

If you can afford your normal monthly mortgage payment, but are unable to pay the past due amount and legal fees because the lender proposes a relatively strict repayment plan, you may want to consider filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy.

This temporarily stops the foreclosure process. The mortgage lender may need to agree to a more borrower-friendly repayment plan, such as one that allows five years to pay off the past due amount instead of one or two.

If you just need a little extra time to sell your home, consider refinancing through a “hard money” loan.

Although they have very high rates and fees, the loans, usually from individuals, can give people the extra months they need to find buyers. Most banks will be more than happy to accept cash no matter how close the foreclosure sale is. If a relative steps in with $10,000 to bring in the current loan, a borrower can usually just hand it over to the lender and go back to business as usual.

You must understand that late mortgage payments are very serious. Although they want to work it out with you, the lender won’t let you just negotiate a payment plan to bring it up to date with a file review.

Plan to share with them all the details of your current financial situation, including income and expenses.

Open communication and following through on any agreement you reach is the key to saving your home from foreclosure.