Credit Cards Guide

If you’ve fallen behind on your mortgage, or know you can’t continue making payments much longer, you can still avoid foreclosure. You need to take action right away. The longer you wait to resolve your mortgage problem, the more likely that you will lose your home.

When considering your options for avoiding foreclosure, try to decide based on what makes the most sense from a pure dollars and cents perspective. If you let your emotions cloud your thinking, you may make a bad decision.

These 11 options can keep you out of foreclosure:

• Refinance your mortgage. When you refinance your mortgage, you get a new mortgage with terms that are more affordable than your current loan, and you use the proceeds from the new loan to pay off your existing mortgage. Shop around for the most attractive refinancing offer.

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In The Wall Street Journal’s annual survey of 200 big companies with revenue over $4 billion, median total direct CEO compensation declined slightly — 0.9% to $6.95 million, mainly because of smaller equity awards and corporate belt-tightening. But plenty of CEOs still scored big paydays.

Here’s a list of the top ten by total direct compensation, which includes salary, annual incentives and long term incentives. For the full CEO pay report, including the list of 200 CEOs.

1. Ray Irani, Occidental Petroleum Corp. Mr. Irani was awarded total direct compensation of $52.2 million, up from $49.9 million in 2008. Neither figure includes $96.5 million that Mr. Irani gained last year through exercising stock options and vesting of restricted stock. Mr. I

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