This is an article I did for The Voice, the newspaper of Seattle social service agency Neighborhood House. The article tells the story of the Nguyen family, who were able to buy a home with the help of the Homeownership Program at the International District Housing Alliance (IDHA), where I was their counselor. The story … Continue reading »
Posted in March 2012 …
Don’t Freak Out About Your Credit Score
Credit scores are a useful tool, and certainly have an important role to play in the granting and pricing of loans and credit. But sometimes, getting new credit isn’t really the goal. For people whose primary objective, at least in the short-term, is to pay down debt or even just to get through the month … Continue reading »
Taxonomy of Low-Income People and Finance
I recently spoke at an Osgoode Hall LLM course on Banking and Law, talking about how low-income people interact with banks. This was my own observations, not presenting research or hard data. (For those interested, some research has looked at low-income people’s access to bank accounts, a measure on which Canada scores remarkably high. An overview … Continue reading »