After being rejected for a loan modification, Carla Ghosn decided to build a website that would tell borrowers if they qualified for the government's Home Affordable Modification Program.
The site, www.mycaal.com, lets borrowers find out if they qualify by entering information on their loan and household income. For $98, it calculates the front-end and back-end debt-to-income ratios and does a loan mod analysis based on the Treasury Department's guidelines.
"I got frustrated with the process and I wanted to understand why I had been rejected," said Ghosn, a former sales manager at Marvell Semiconductor in Silicon Valley, who got input in creating the site from a former client, Jateen Parekh, a designer of Amazon's Kindle.
Ghosn said she was "totally unprepared" the first time she applied for a modification early last year. After analyzing the process, Ghosn applied again and was accepted. "The site tells you all the steps in the process," she said. "I wanted a company to help me, but I couldn't find one where you plug in your numbers and it tells you whether you are qualified or not."
