Rent your home to help with mortgage payments.

More homeowners are renting out rooms to boarders in order to obtain help with their mortgage payments, which will help homeowners keep their homes. The extra cash is also providing much needed help with paying bills.

Modest but growing numbers of homeowners are turning to agencies nationwide like the St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center Homesharing Program in Baltimore, which will screen potential renters and boarders to find appropriate matches and help relieve homeowners with some of the fear of strangers.

Kirby Dunn, executive director of HomeShare Vermont, said they are seeing greater numbers of marginal people opening their doors to paying boarders. This will provide the homeowner a revenue stream that they can apply to their bills. This is but one of several hundred agencies and programs around the country that have been created since the 1980s to help elderly or disabled homeowners exchange spare rooms for both income as well as help around the house. But these programs are now being pressed to provide additional help and meet different needs.

"Historically," Dunn said, "the people who come to us, looking for boarders, have been homeowners looking for someone to provide services in the home. But now, money to provide extra help paying bills is the bigger issue for folks. There is absolutely an increase in people looking for a boarder to pay rent as a revenue stream."

Dunn said volume at the agency was up tremendously this year, with up to four times as many people using their services.

Renee Drell, who is the executive director of HomeSharing Inc., outside of Bridgewater, N.J., where home-shares rose 14 percent last year, has said that as heating costs, mortgage payments, and property taxes have all risen, homeowners are trying to obtain higher rents to share their homes, but unfortunately it is often more than seekers can afford.

But Dunn, of HomeShare Vermont, said homeowners should not look at home sharing as the last resort or as a financial Band-Aid. "When you look at the statistics on people who live alone, they tend to die younger and to be sicker. We have done surveys, and people say they are happier, eating and sleeping better, and they feel safer in their homes with someone else around.”