Should we feel sorry for this family because of "their" bad choices?
View your credit file based on any of the UK credit reference agencies, or all three at once
LifeLock is the only Identity Theft Prevention Solution backed by a one-million dollar guarantee!Click here to get a 10% discount.
The American Dream turns into a debtor's nightmare
A sad, but common, tale starts with alleged predatory lending, intensifies with impossibly high payments and usually ends in foreclosure.
By Jennifer Delson and and Christopher Goffard, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
October 8, 2007
Soledad Aviles dreamed for years of owning a home, with a plot of land where he could grow corn and chiles as he did in his native Mexico. So he felt blessed last year when he learned he could buy a three-bedroom, single-story stucco house on West La Verne Avenue in Santa Ana.
Referred to a local loan broker by a trusted friend, he borrowed the entire purchase price of $615,000 from Washington Mutual at a high interest rate typical of sub-prime loans. The monthly payment, as he says he understood it, would be $3,600 -- steep for a glass cutter who made $9 an hour -- but Aviles counted on his wife and three of his six daughters, who also worked low-paying jobs, to contribute.
"We took out our pencils, figured out our take-home pay and figured out that if we all pitched in, it would work," said Aviles, 54, a stoop-shouldered, soft-spoken man with a sixth-grade education from Mexico.
Relying on the broker's word, he signed loan documents written in English, a language he neither speaks nor reads, Aviles said. He was shocked to learn afterward that the monthly payment would not be $3,600, but $4,800 -- a price that forced him to rent out bedrooms, the garage and an enclosed porch while he and his wife slept on the couch. He fed his family with food from friends and corn he grew.
More Related Questions and Answers ...
The loan information post by website user , we not guarantee correctness.