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Mortgage expert David Reed invites Walletpop readers to ask him questions about real estate financing. Leave your questions in the comment section of this post.

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Isn't it time you started reaping the benefits of your local congressman's clout? Not yet ready to ask for a letter of recommendation for West Point? Have no fear because if you are the bearer of student loans and your loan company is shafting you, your congressman may be the key to a happy ending.

Getting some satisfaction with the help of your congressman or woman is so easy anybody can do it. Granted, like all problems and lending issues, it helps if you are in the right and have been paying your lender what the terms state. But this strategy may work even if you are close to being handed off to a collection agency.

As a little background: My wife had all of her student loans through Sallie Mae, affectionately referred to around our house as the devil. Several of these private loans which Ms. Mae was holding on to were pulling in 13.25% interest! We had included some of these loans in an initial federal consolidation which never worked out. Apparently the incoming fax line at Sallie Mae was hooked right up to a paper shredder because they never received our requests to consolidate. We tried again to consolidate my wife's private loans with Wells Fargo, who, just like our federal consolidator, never received a response from Sallie Mae. Fed up with the problems we were having, I did what any rational person would, I called my local news stations call for action. This is where I found out I could contact my congressman to get some satisfaction.

The first thing I did was reacquaint myself with my local congressman, Jim Jordan and I found out that he had a local office in my town. You can find your representative online at house.gov, the results should include information for his or her Washington office and links to the local offices they maintain. I chose to contact my local office in order to maximize the chance that the staffer would feel the need to help me out, being local and all.

I called up the local office and was transferred to the "top" local staffer who listened to my whole story including many lies we were told by Sallie Mae about the consolidation process. After expressing his astonishment he took down my info and shipped me out some forms to allow Jim Jordan to act on my behalf and a questionnaire about our loans and experience. My wife and I promptly returned the packet to our case worker, who let us know that we should hear back soon.

This is where it gets fun and exciting, soon after we began the process, Sallie Mae assigned us a representative who provided a direct line for the consolidation information to be routed through. We quickly began working with Wells Fargo to get our loans consolidated and anytime we ran into trouble our Sallie Mae caseworker would work directly with Wells Fargo to figure it out. In the end we got all of the private loans away from Sallie Mae and saved close to $300 in monthly payments and countless more over the life of our loan.

If you are having trouble with a difficult student loan lender then just follow the easy steps below:

1. Find your congressman/woman.
2. Call their local office.
3. Return the release paperwork and loan details
4. Wait...
5. Profit Resolve your problem with executive customer service for your lender.

You may be surprised how much clout your local representative has with student loan lenders and the federal student aid ombudsman. Once you put these parties into play you'll likely find that the ball gets rolling much quicker with your current lender. This approach to resolution works best if you are in good standing with the involved lenders, stay tuned for more information on dealing with student loans.

Josh Smith is currently the holder of student loan debt which had been confused for a home mortgage by experienced bankers. He has been to hell and back with Sallie Mae and thus learned a significant deal about the student loan industry. If you have specific loan questions or requests for additional student loan topics please leave a comment below.

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Mortgage expert David Reed invites Walletpop readers to ask him questions about real estate financing. Leave your questions in the comment section of this post.

Q: I am 54. I currently have a 15-yr mtg. 10 yrs left as of this month. Should I consider refinancing to a 30 yr and using the 700+- to invest else where? 5 yrs to have enough equity in house vs. vs 45k in cash to invest in 5 yrs-
thanks. -Steve

A: Two things I noticed: Your current note is five years old, meaning you obtained your current mortgage in 2003 when 15 year rates were in the 4's. Second, in ten years you'll be close to retirement age. Without knowing anything else about your financial picture and assuming you're going to retire in that house, I would hold off from refinancing into a 30 yr mortgage, you'll be paying on that note until you're 84.

If you continue to pay off your current note and retire mortgage free that's like giving yourself an automatic "raise" when you retire. Instead, consider an equity loan on your current property and invest that. That's my take.

Real estate finance expert David Reed is president of CD REED Mortgage Bankers in Austin, TX and author of Mortgage Confidential: What You Need to Know That Your Lender Won't Tell You and Mortgages 101: Quick Answers to over 250 Critical Questions About Your Home Loan.

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Mortgage expert David Reed invites Walletpop readers to ask him questions about real estate financing. Leave your questions in the comment section of this post.

Q: David: I applied for a mortgage and got turned down because I didn't have enough income for the house I wanted. My loan officer suggested that I take out a part-time job to get me over the hump. I did get a part-time job but now the lender says they won't accept the part-time income after all. Who's right? The lender or the loan officer?

A: The lender. Unless you can show a two-year history of part-time employment a lender most likely won't use it. When a lender evaluates your loan application they want some sense of certainty your new part-time income is likely to continue well into the future to help you pay the mortgage. Without a history of part-time income, the lender won't be convinced of your intentions to work two jobs.

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Years ago, my littlest sister and I used to go on summer vacations together. Although we usually ended up with family on Cape Cod or friends in New York City, we would generally plan our routes around out-of-the-way places that we wanted to explore. One year, attracted by its weird name, we decided to visit Poughkeepsie. It was a bust.

The trip, though, was a lot of fun, and we discovered New York's amazing Hudson Valley. We returned a few times that summer and over the ensuing years, and have never failed to be awed by the amazing array of beautiful vistas, outstanding shopping, and wonderful little tourist attractions that lay just off the beaten path. Best of all, the area isn't a major travel destination, which means that it is still relatively inexpensive and not too crowded.

Hyde Park: Ella and I were never all that great at getting an early start, so we reached Poughkeepsie long after dark. We decided to bypass the city and continued to travel north on Route 9. When I saw a sign for Hyde Park, I thought it sounded familiar, so that's where we stopped for the night. The next morning, I walked out to discover that my motel was across the street from Springwood, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's mansion. My sister and I spent a leisurely morning wandering all over the place, checking out the Presidential library, the stables, and the extensive grounds.

Springwood isn't the only mansion in Hyde Park. There's also Eleanor Roosevelt's retreat, Val-Kill, and the Vanderbilt Mansion, both of which are only a few miles from Springwood. Val-Kill is intimate, while the Vanderbilt home is a huge, beautiful Beaux-Arts masterpiece, designed by McKim, Mead, and White. On the other hand, if mansions aren't your thing, you could always try visiting the Culinary Institute of America, which is also located in Hyde Park. In addition to an impressive bookstore, it has four amazing, incredibly well-priced gourmet restaurants.

Woodstock: Although Ella and I refrained from visiting the big field where the famous festival was once held, we couldn't resist the pull of Woodstock. The little town, located sixty miles from the site of the show, isn't really all that exciting, but it has a nice, mellow feel. There are some good bookstores (I particularly liked The Golden Notebook), a couple of homey restaurants, some decent boutiques, and a neat little open-air market. In fact, the only really weird thing about the place was the huge number of six-toed cats that we found. Overall, it was a fun, relaxed place to spend a couple of hours.

The World's Largest Kaleidoscope: Okay, I'll admit that I'm a sucker for cheesy tourist traps. While I'm at it, I also admit that I usually find myself disappointed by their substandard offerings. That having been said, I love the World's Largest Kaleidoscope. Located in Mount Tremper, it is pure, wonderful cheese. Essentially a huge silo outfitted with a kaleidoscope inside, the attraction is surrounded by a hippie-styled mini-mall, filled with scented candles, t-shirts, kaleidoscopes, and assorted other souvenirs. While the marketing is a little heavy-handed, the kaleidoscope itself is fun and somewhat disorienting, and the whole thing smacks of imagination and whimsy.

Hudson: On the other end of the spectrum, the small, dignified town of Hudson is full of little antique shops, charming restaurants, and a museum dedicated to firefighting. Being of a somewhat perverse nature, my sister and I made sure to visit the famous Columbia Street, formerly Diamond Street. Although this now appears to be a sedate, respectable area, it once was among the most famous red-light districts in the world. The town was a well-known center of carnal vice in the 1920's and 1930's, but its role as a military staging center during World War II pushed it into a whole other realm. Seedy, scintillating tales of Diamond Street were swapped across the battlefields of Europe by nostalgic GIs, forever cementing it as a sort of khaki-colored wonderland. By the mid-1950's, however, the New York State Police had targeted the street and the brothels were shuttered.

I've only scratched the surface of the Hudson Valley. It is filled with beautiful small towns, bizarre sights, music festivals, and all sorts of other attractions. If you decide to go, I strongly encourage you to pick up the New York State Moon Handbook by Christiane Bird, a wonderful guide to the area. Most important of all, leave yourself plenty of time to enjoy the sights!

Bruce Watson is a freelance writer, blogger, and all-around cheapskate. He once traveled 20 miles out of his way just to pick up a t-shirt that read "Coxsackie, New York."

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A reader recently commented that she is sick of hearing financial gurus admonishing people to give up their lattes and save the money toward retirement, buying a house, kid's college fund, etc.

Lillian wrote that "Well if getting a Starbucks every day is the only real luxury I afford myself, I feel that I can afford to miss out on an extra $3,600 that takes five years to save."

I agree with her completely, but here's the thing: the only way to save money is to not spend some of the money that you earn. One of the best ways to reduce spending is to look for little things that slowly but surely drain your bank account but don't provide you with the value that you want for your money.

If spending $3500 a year on lattes is something you want to do -- and are willing to spend less on something else to do it -- go for it!

Think of the "latte factor", as David Bach calls it, as an example of a way that a lot of people spend money without realizing how quickly it adds up. In order to cut back on frivolous expenditures, it's good to look at how much they cost on an annualized basis: and then you can decide which ones you want to cut out. If lattes don't qualify as something you want to cut out, that's fine as long as you can find another way to save some money. $1.69 per bottle Vitamin Water perhaps?

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In order for multi-level marketing companies not to qualify as pyramid schemes, you have to believe that people participate to acquire products. Skeptics, including myself and WalletPop's Tracy Coenen, believe that in many cases, the products simply serve as cover for a scheme that is not different from a chain letter in any meaningful way.

The strength of multi-level marketing recruiting efforts in times of economic weakness and uncertainty seem to reinforce my belief that these "business opportunities" are little, and often nothing, more than endless chain recruitment schemes.

In 2002, Entrepreneur columnist Michael L. Sheffield responded to a reader who was worried that her network marketing business would suffer in step with the general economic malaise that was gripping the country at the time:

... If you're serious about your network marketing business, then, believe it or not, a recession could be the best thing that's happened to you in a while. Shaky economic times have historically produced a renewed awareness of the need to make more money. You'll find people who were previously uninterested in your business are suddenly looking for new financial opportunities. They want a business that doesn't require a lot of capital, allows them to establish their own hours and offers rewards that can grow faster than capital or labor requirements.

That's certainly logical. But the products that most network marketing companies sell -- expensive vitamins, cosmetics that cost far more than drugstore products, and $42 a bottle Tahitian Noni Juice -- would seem to be extremely vulnerable to an economic slowdown.

Mr. Sheffield doesn't even mention this, and it's easy to understand why: Network marketing success is not about selling products on their merits; it's about getting desperate people to buy products they can't afford in the hope of recruiting others to do the same so they can earn commissions. That's why it follows a completely different economic cycle than conventional product sales.

Mathematically, only a tiny percentage of people can succeed in a business that isn't based on selling something to people outside of the system. In biology, closed systems are generally not sustainable for a long period of time -- When evaluating a possible business opportunity, you should avoid closed systems like the plague.

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