If you’re having a hard time paying your rent, it would be great if an angel came along to help out. But it’s probably wiser to look for more grounded assistance when rental cost burdens become pressing.

The housing angel does occasionally pay a visit. Take the case of Ashanti Taylor, a Chicago mother of three evicted from her apartment after the city declared it uninhabitable. To make things worse, Ashanti was given her eviction notice just four days after the birth of her youngest son.

Even though she has managed to find a temporary job with the U.S. Postal Service, Ashanti was forced to move in with her mother, sleeping on the couch while her kids slept on the floor. After being laid off from her previous job, Ashanti had to sell off possessions like her car and jewelry to make ends meet.

Ashanti’s story -- a tale of frequent setbacks while trying to surmount a history of domestic abuse -- came to prominence after she told it on the “Steve Harvey” show. Harvey not only listened sympathetically, he arranged to have her rent paid for a year through Pangea Real Estate, a local apartment management company, and the nonprofit group Make Room.

That’s an example of the angelic solution -- possible, but rare. For more down-to-earth help, it’s better to turn to nonprofit groups or Uncle Sam.

Back in the day, a rule of thumb was to spend no more than a quarter of your monthly income on housing. But that has gone the way of the 5-cent cigar and the penny parking meter. According to a fact sheet from Make Room, nearly half of all renters spend 30 percent of their earnings on rent. And over a quarter of renters spend more than half their incomes on rent. The groups most affected by housing cost burdens include families with children, seniors, disabled renters and veterans.

Based in Washington, D.C., Make Room is sponsored by the nonprofit Enterprise, and partners with the MacArthur and Ford Foundations and the CohnReznick accounting firm. The group says it “is exposing the human suffering and societal costs of the rental housing crisis and advocating for bold solutions that will end housing insecurity.”

Last fall the group participated in a campaign to send 1 million messages to Congress so lawmakers will focus on affordable housing.

Holding a rent party is a tried-and-true method of getting a little extra cash to pay the landlord, and Make Room offers a version of that kind of event: It recruits high-profile performers to do house parties to benefit hard-pressed renters. Recently, Grammy winner Timothy Bloom set up a guitar, keyboard and amp, and played for the friends and neighbors of the Montgomery family of Paterson, New Jersey.

It’s not a secret that renters have been under stress since the mortgage collapse a decade ago. With home sales in a tailspin, demand for rentals increased, and Econ 101 tells us that increased demand leads to higher prices.

The homeownership rate has dropped dramatically in recent years, and rental vacancies have decreased at the same time. The homeownership rate was 63.7 percent at the end of the fourth quarter of last year. At its peak in the first quarter of 2005, that number was 69.1 percent.

The national rental vacancy rate for the fourth quarter of 2016 was 6.9 percent, according to the Census Bureau. That’s down from 10.6 percent in the first quarter of 2010.

In addition to advocacy groups like Make Room, Uncle Sam occasionally comes to the rescue to ease things a bit for renters.

Recently, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., introduced a bill to extend a law that provides relief for renters whose landlords are being foreclosed on. Ellison’s legislation would permanently extend the Protecting Tenants at Foreclosure Act (PTFA), which was enacted in 2009.

PTFA was the only federal protection for renters living in foreclosed properties, according to housing advocates. But because foreclosures have abated, Congress allowed the law to lapse at the end of 2014.

The law provided most renters with the right to receive at least a 90-day notice before being required to move after foreclosure. Now, without that legal protection, tenants -- who often have no idea that their landlords are behind on mortgage payments -- can be evicted with just a few days’ notice in most states.

“PTFA provides critical protection to innocent renter families,” says National Housing Law Project executive director Shamus Roller. “PTFA is an important tool, especially now, given the significant national shortage of rental housing.”

PTFA offers critical protection for responsible renters, agrees Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty.

”Without federal protections in place, many renters in foreclosed properties are vulnerable to summary eviction --and homelessness,” Foscarinis says. “In nearly half the states, these renters can be evicted with five days’ notice or less, through no fault of their own.”

The bill’s fate in Congress has yet to be decided.

-- Freelance writer Mark Fogarty contributed to this report.

A finding by J.D. Power that 21 percent of homebuyers regret their choice of a lender -- the dismayed first-time buyers were a shocking 27 percent -- is probably misplaced.

It’s far more likely that displeased purchasers were not happy with their particular loan officers, as opposed to the companies they work for. But it shouldn’t really matter who’s to blame for their unhappiness.

What is important, especially to future buyers, is that unhappy borrowers made an average of nine negative comments in the research firm’s annual mortgage satisfaction study.

That in itself is regrettable. But this significant minority might have been able to avoid many of their issues if they had been more careful in picking who they worked with for financing in the first place.

Whether dealing with a loan officer who works for a lender that actually fund its own loans, or a broker who works for himself and deals with more than one lender, you should expect him to be responsive, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the federal watchdog agency that grew out of the recent financial crisis.

If he’s not, suggests Sue Woodard of Vantage Productions, a Minnesota sales and marketing firm that supports professional development in the mortgage field, you should have no qualms about jettisoning him and going elsewhere.

If you are wedded to a particular company, ask for the manager and tell him you want to deal with someone else. But if you’re not, than “leave and leave quickly,” Woodard says. “There are too many good people out there willing to do it right, so run and run fast. It just frustrates me to death that on something so important, people don’t pick up and move on.”

Being responsive is a key trait. But according to a recent survey of some 800 companies by Insellerate, a provider of support services for the marketing and sale of mortgages, it took an average of 12 hours for loan officers to answer a client’s query. But that’s just among those who responded. A whopping 57 percent never responded at all, the survey found. And 60 percent of those who did respond failed to follow up with a second call.

Woodard says you should expect prompt responses to your requests for information “right out of the gate.” If there’s some kind of crisis, the reply should be immediate. Otherwise, 24 hours is acceptable.

You also should be provided with a clear analysis of the different loan options that are available, along with an understanding of how they impact you financially, both initially and over time. Even more importantly, you should expect that the choices be explained in a way you can understand.

Choosing a mortgage is possibly the biggest financial decision you will ever make, so if you ask for a simple explanation and you don’t get it, ask again and again until you are certain you understand.

It’s also wise to make sure what you choose is suitable to your lifestyle and financial picture. Many loan officers qualify people for the biggest mortgage they can afford. But while there’s nothing wrong with that, you may not be comfortable forking over that amount every month.

You want to match your monthly payment -- not just principal and interest, but also homeowner’s insurance, taxes and homeowners’ association fees -- to how much you can afford to pay. Stretching a bit, perhaps, but not to the point where you are living hand-to-mouth.

Loan officers can’t predict whether interest rates will rise or fall. But they should be able to tell you where the market has been going in recent weeks. More importantly, you should be given general advice on whether to lock in your rate, and when, or let the rate float with the market.

You also should be given a method to easily and quickly check on the status of your application. That is, where it stands with underwriting, what papers are needed and which ones are still missing. Better yet, says Woodward, your loan officer should update you regularly and routinely during the sometimes-lengthy process.

On the flip side, if you fail to send a piece of requested information, you should expect the officer to hound you for it, or at least be persistent in asking for exactly what the underwriters need to approve your loan.

“They aren’t trying to make your life miserable or harass you,” says Woodard. “But if they ask for six things and just one is missing, your application can’t move on.”

Finally, if you’ve chosen wisely and your loan closes, don’t expect your loan officer to go away. A good one will be in contact during the transaction. But a great one will stay in touch long after, asking for repeat business, referrals and letters of recommendation.

More and more builders are doing away with expensive model homes, instead using artists’ conceptions to show buyers the completed house’s exterior, along with detailed floor plans of the interior. In light of this trend, it has become incumbent upon would-be buyers to learn how to “read” what they are being shown.

Floor plans, or the far more detailed drawings called blueprints, have a language all their own. With dozens of symbols and lines going hither and yon, they are your road map to exactly how the house you are considering will “live” once you are in it.

A plan tells you the house’s size, circulation pattern, room layout and the locations of doors, windows and stairs. Although it offers only a static two-dimensional view of the property, it reveals enough information so that a practiced eye can picture how the house works -- or doesn’t.

Typically, the rooms are labeled so it’s easy to see how they are supposed to function. But sometimes designers get a little too tricky -- labeling, for example, an extra bedroom as an office or den. Of course, turning what is essentially square footage inside four walls into something more special than a simple bedroom costs extra. But the plan rarely tells you that.

You would know that if you were touring a model home: You’d see that the room in question contained built-in bookcases and special lighting, and that those features were upgrades. But without a sample house to behold, prospects are left to visualize for themselves.

Here’s a very basic tutorial on how to read a floor plan.

Start at the front door. Sometimes difficult to find, especially on apartments that span an entire floor or share the floor with only one or two other units, the entry point allows you to “walk” into the house with your eyes. From there, you can see how you can move from room to room.

As you enter, try to get a feel for how the plan plays out. One important element to look for is a corridor that creates a view from the front of the house straight to the back. Now roam from room to room. In each room, look at the window and door placement. These key design elements can enhance or limit a room’s usefulness.

You should see figures in each room that tell you their size. Sometimes, the plan will say something like “12 by 12” or “10 by 10.” In other cases, a number is shown beside each wall.

When yours truly built his house 15 years ago, he found a plan he liked, but failed to pay attention to the little numbers. Now, he and his bride of nearly 34 years live in a house that is far too large for just two people. (We love the place -- the Missus vows to never leave -- but it is much bigger than we need.)

The moral here is to pay attention to the numbers. The house may be large overall, but each room may be small -- perhaps too small. If you can’t visualize the size of a room, go home, take out a tape measure and mark off the dimensions to get an idea of the actual space.

With blueprints, the architectural symbols would tell whether the windows are single- or double-hung, meaning they either open from the bottom up (single hung) or also open from the top down (double). Floor plans aren’t as detailed, so you’ll have to refer to the builder’s list of standard and upgraded features.

Pay attention to the window placement, as they affect both light and views. And make sure you understand how the doors open and close. Typically, a door is drawn as a straight line protruding out from the wall with an arc connecting that line to the wall. The arc indicates the direction the door opens. Make sure doors open in a way that minimizes floor space lost.

If a door is drawn as a line between two walls, it is a sliding door. If the line doesn’t reach to another wall, it is a pocket door that slides into the wall. Bi-fold doors are shown as two arcs that don’t connect; French doors are shown as two larger arcs that do connect.

In some cases, the builder will show furniture to help you imagine how the space might be furnished. But it won’t tell you the size of the furniture, so yours may be too big for the same wall. Of course, there’s no law saying you have to put your couch where the builder does.

The fireplace is another design feature to look for. It is shown as a rectangle sticking out from the wall. Fireplaces are great, but again, they take away from usable space because you can’t put furniture against them like you can a plain wall.

Drawn as a series of parallel lines with an arrow indicating their direction, stairs also eat up a significant amount of floor space. So look for their placement.

In the kitchen, the symbols are often self-explanatory. Ditto for the bathrooms. But pay attention to their placement and how they relate to each other. Again, it might be a good idea mark off these spaces when you go home to see how they work in real life.

The plan may or may not tell you the height of the ceilings, but many houses these days are built with extra-high, two-story ceilings. In these spaces, the lower floor will show a dashed line, while the upper floor will be labeled something like “open to below.”

Bear these floor plan-reading tips in mind, and you’ll be well on your way to making an informed decision.