There are some in Washington who say we ought to artificially prop up home prices. You know, it sounds reasonable in a speech -- I guess -- but it's not going to help first-time home buyers, for example. A lot of people have been priced out of the market right now because of decisions made by others. The market is in the process of correcting itself; markets must have time to correct. Delaying that correction would only prolong the problem.
And so that's why we oppose those proposals, and I want to talk about what we're for. We're obviously for sending out over $150 billion into the marketplace in the form of checks that will be reaching the mailboxes by the second week of May. We're for that. We're also for helping a targeted group of homeowners, namely those who have made responsible buying decisions, avoid foreclosure with some help.
We've taken three key steps. First, we launched a new program at the Federal Housing Administration called FHA Secure. It's a program that's given FHA greater flexibility to offer refinancing for struggling homeowners with otherwise good credit. In other words, we're saying to people, we want to help you refinance your notes. Over the past six months this program has helped about 120,000 families stay in their homes by refinancing about $17 billion of mortgages, and by the end of the year we expect this program to have reached 300,000 families.
You know the issue like I do, though. I'm old enough to remember savings and loans, and remember who my savings and loan officer was, who loaned me my first money to buy a house. And had I got in a bind, I could have walked across the street in Midland, Texas, and say, I need a little help; can you help me readjust my note so I can stay in my house? There are no such things as that type of deal anymore. As a matter of fact, the paper -- you know, had this been a modern era, the paper that had -- you know, my paper, my mortgage, could be owned by somebody in a foreign country, which makes it hard to renegotiate the note.
So we're dealing in a difficult environment, to get the word to people, there's help for you to refinance your homes. And so Hank Paulson put together what's called the HOPE NOW Alliance to try to bring some reality to the situation, to focus our help on helping creditworthy people refinance -- rather than pass law that will make it harder for the market to adjust. This HOPE NOW Alliance is made up of industry -- is made up of investors and service managers and mortgage counselors and lenders. And they set industry-wide standards to streamline the process for refinancing and modifying certain mortgages.
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