re: 70% of homeowners in forbearance didn’t need the help

There are 3 options in general. At the end of forbearance you pay everything you missed at once. If not able to do that then the next option is to go on some sort of payment plan to payoff the missed payments. The last option is to tack on the missing months to the end of the loan. I suspect most people will choose option 3. If you truly needed to skip payments due to job loss etc... then you're probably not going to be able to pay 3-6 months of payments all at once while either starting a new job or coming back from being laid off. A payment plan might be tough as well.

Having said all of that the banks prefer you pay it back all at once and will push that first but the reality is that wont happen for most and if the banks were to make that the only option and a lot of people walked away from their homes the banks would be screwed because they would all of the sudden own tens of thousands of houses that they would end up unloading for a loss. It would be 2009-2013 all over again. No way they let that happen. The FED can't bailout the banks again. They'll tack on months thru mortgage modification to keep these people in their homes and be done with it. Collectively the amount of people in forbearance is too big to fail.