Q. Will the Home Affordable Modification Program ensure that my mortgage payments will never exceed 31% of my gross income, or just for the first five years?

A. President Obama's Making Home Affordable foreclosure prevention program guarantees that your mortgage will cost no more than 31% of your current gross income for the first five years after your loan is modified.

Lenders will reduce your payments by lowering interest rates to as little as 2% for five years, extending the length of the loan to 40 years and allowing some of the debt to go interest-free.

In extreme cases, they might forgive some of the principal owed on the house, but that is entirely at the bank's discretion.

Your new interest rate will last five years. At that point, it will begin to rise, at a rate of no more than 1 percentage point per year, until it reaches the prevailing rate at the time of the modification -- around 5.5% right now.

So, let's say you received a reduced rate of 2% for five years. The interest rate would go up over the next four years until it reached 5.5%, even if the payments exceeded 31% of your gross income.

Here's where to learn more about how the Home Affordable Modification program works.