I have a mortgage loan in which I got behind, and I worked with my lender to enter into a modification program and I am now in the trial period. Now the servicing of my mortgage has been transferred in the new servicer who says I have to start all over again. What are my rights here?

When you get a loan from a bank to buy a home you basically enter into a contractual agreement to repay the money, which is evidenced by the promissory note, in which you agree to pay back the money over a period of time at a stated interest rate and at stated monthly payments of principal and interest. That promissory note is secured by a mortgage which is recorded at the Registry of Deeds. The basic contractual agreement is that if you do not make your payments or breach a provision of the mortgage, such as not keeping your house insured, then the lender can accelerate the balance due on the note, which means they can call a full amount due and, if you fail to pay, they can foreclose on your home. So the essential legal relationship between you and your lender is that of a contract. When the servicer gets involved, they are acting as the agent of the owner of the loan and they have a right to bind that the owner of the loan and modify the contractual agreement. Whatever agreements you make with a servicer at any given point in time are binding upon the owner of the loan. So even though the servicing on the loan might be transferred to another party, whatever agreements you made prior to the time of the transfer are still binding on the owner of the loan. Since whatever you did is a binding contract you can tell the new servicer that you want to insist upon the servicer honoring terms of the deal that you had made provided that the terms of your agreement are in writing. Whenever you deal with your servicer, it is very important for you to keep a good paper trail on conversations that you had, who you had them with, the date and any particulars. You should always try to e-mail or write to the person you dealt with as soon as you can so as to keep that paper trail intact. If the servicer refuses to honor the prior servicers deal, you can go to the Attorney General's office or to the Banking Commissioner's Office or to another government regulating agency which can assist you on insisting that the servicer honor the prior agreements.