Home Loans Cause Holiday Stress for West Virginia Family

Problems with sub-prime loans and home refinancing have created a lot of financial problems for many American families in the last few years. Our family is a victim. My fiancé is on disability, and I am having a hard enough time finding a decent-paying job here in West Virginia.

When we purchased our mobile home in Reedsville, we qualified for a home loan that would enable us to refinance the loan after two years for a new rate and time frame. Our original payment on this house was $325 a month and on our limited income of about $1200 per month combined, that was barely affordable.

As most people in our situation are relatively aware of with such a low income, we had to borrow money from one high rate lender to catch up the bills that we were letting fall behind. This of course meant that now we had multiple monthly loan payments due every month.

When our two-year mark came around on our mortgage and they sent us that friendly letter that they would love to offer us an easy refinance mortgage on our home, we jumped at the opportunity. We thought we were so much better off now because we only had the one loan payment to make each month.

However, there was a catch that we were not aware of ahead of time. You see, our interest rate at first was just about 6% on our home. Much to our surprise, when we got our first monthly statement on our refinanced mortgage bill our new interest rate was 14%! That was a huge increase in our monthly payment, almost as much as it was with the three separate loans.

This financial crunch really starts to be noticeable around Christmas time this year. With a four year old daughter and our newborn son due at any day, it's hard to listen to all the stories about what her friends are getting for Christmas and what she wants for herself.