Q: Mark and Emily just walked through the house that they are going to buy through The HELP Program tomorrow. First off, Mark, tell me about your experience working with The HELP Program in getting a mortgage.

Mark: Well the biggest choice I guess, was finding the house and finding the one we liked and going from there was pretty easy, painless, real simple.

Q: When you tried to get a loan originally, tell me what they were offering you.
 
Emily: The interest rates were just insane. Doing it this way at least we can afford to do it now and feel confident in our house payments.

Q: Do you remember what the offer was specifically, the interest rates they were giving you?

Emily: One of them was an 8 ½ % and the other was almost a 12%. It was an 80/20 split. And then after we started getting closer and closer and after we had finally found a house we liked they kind of backed out and said no, we are going to change our minds and do a 25/75 and then it just made it real impossible to do it.

Q: How much money were they going to have you put down?

Mark: $6,000 down.

Q: So how did you hear about The HELP Program?

Emily: The internet actually. We were doing a rent-to-own search and found The HELP Program. We were like yeah, it's not going to work out and actually everything that said it was going to be done has been done in a very timely manner, it's been nice.

Q: What has been the best part about working with The HELP Program so far?

Mark: It's been pretty easy all around. It took a lot of headache out of. I know my first time home buying experience was kind of a mess. This has been really easy and painless.

Emily: I agree, I would do it again, it's been that easy.

Q: You have some friends that you had mentioned, tell us about that.

Emily: Well she was really excited because she is renting now and she thought she wasn't going to be able to get into a decent nice home for her and her kids and after seeing the house that we are going to buy and the program and what they offer she is feeling really confident in doing it now.

Q: How are you feeling in closing on the house either tomorrow or the next day?

Emily: Anxious, I can't wait. It's a bigger house than we ever dreamed to start basically a family with and it's going to be an experience in itself trying to clean it.

Q: What advice you would give to someone who's thinking about The HELP Program but not sure that they want to do it or not?

Mark: It's pretty easy, it beats the ____ dealing with realtors and you make a couple of phone calls and meet a couple times and then they find you a house and then you're pretty much done.

Emily: It takes the headache out of everything. Calling you and, we didn't have to do anything. All we had to do was say yes we liked this house and it was done. It was nice. The only part that we were sitting around hoping it was going to happen was if the builder was going to approve our offer. So it was a lot easier than I had envisioned in the beginning.