If you are a homeowner facing financial difficulties, the thought of losing your home to the bank may be hard to consider. However, for many homeowners who purchased homes in the last few years, when increasingly permissive home loan guidelines radically altered the mortgage industry’s working definition of “affordability,” it may not be realistic to try to work out a plan to remain in a residence that is simply too expensive.

In these cases, the best way to avoid the legal costs and emotional trauma of going through a long, drawn-out foreclosure process may be arranging to sell the property. There are a number of different methods you can use to arrange a "stop foreclosure" sale.

The first step is to consider putting your home on the market as a traditional real estate listing, asking for the full value of the mortgage as the selling price. However, if you are “upside down” in your home loan and the amount you owe far outpaces the market value of the home, this could prove to be difficult.