Blogs
Maintaining a good credit score can mean the difference between getting and not getting a loan needed for a home or car. More recently, maintaining a good credit score can also affect your ability to get the job or rent the apartment you want.
Here are five quick and easy ways to improve and maintain a healthy credit score:
1. Keep those cards open. A credit score is influenced by how much credit we have available to us, compared to how much we have used. Older credit is also weighed more...
7 weeks 4 days ago
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By Craig Welch
Sixteen homeowners in Hooksett, N.H. may be forced out of their homes soon, and under New Hampshire law, the owner of the property has every right to do it.
The owner of Park Place mobile home park is seeking approvals to build an apartment complex on the site, and in doing so will need all of the homes and homeowners to leave. Because the homeowners lease the land beneath their houses, they have no property rights, only a state law that says the landlord must give them 18...
7 weeks 4 days ago
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By Gary Faucher
You’ve heard it. I’ve heard it. …
“They won’t help.” “They want to spend money we don’t have.” “They never come to meetings.” “They think we’re the landlord.” On and on and on it goes.
When I hear this during a meeting at a resident-owned community, it always raises a question for me: Who are they? I quickly follow up with a “Wait a minute, they are we,” as in WE, the owners of the cooperative, and as in WE are all in this together.
Like it or not, disagreements occur in every...
8 weeks 3 days ago
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By Jennifer Hopkins
Our friends at CFED have just released “With the Stroke of a Pen: Two dozen low-cost, politically viable state policy ideas to increase financial security and opportunity in tough fiscal times.”
The report reminds that, even in tough fiscal times, state policymakers can choose to help households that are on the edge of financial security. CFED's proposals include many that are cost-neutral and that expand economic opportunity and help people build bright futures.
“With the...
8 weeks 4 days ago
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By Julie McConnell
I have written on several occasions about the importance of investing in early childhood education as a community development strategy, one documented and supported by some of the nation’s leading economists.
However, it also pays to state the obvious – as pointed out recently by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman asked in a November 19 commentary, “How About Better Parents?”
Friedman cites recent research that highlights the power of...
10 weeks 3 days ago
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By Mike LaFontaine
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco recently published an analysis, Addressing Widening Income Inequality through Community Development.
In addition to providing an excellent summary of the various factors that have led to the current disparity of incomes in America, the analysis was particularly relevant to me as a community developer because it framed the issue in more-global terms than usually presented.
Two quotations mentioned in the study nicely summarize the...
13 weeks 17 hours ago
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By Jennifer Hopkins
A borrower told me today that he loved me.
I first heard from this gentleman in the fall. He lives in a resident-owned community in central New Hampshire, and has a Cooperative Home Loan for his mortgage. His wife recently passed away, and the recession took a lot of his retirement income. He was struggling, so called to ask us if there was any way to reduce his loan payments.
He had made every payment on time since his loan started. In fact, he had made double payments for...
13 weeks 2 days ago
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By Angela Romeo
Martha Mowry is a 2011 Community Leadership graduate and cooperative living ambassador. I am inspired by her passion and love for resident-ownership.
By Martha Mowry
I have lived in my manufactured-housing park for 18 years. We converted to resident-ownership and became Exeter-Hampton Cooperative 12 years ago. For most of that time, I worked full-time and cared for a terminally ill husband, so I was not able to be active in the community.
I first became involved in the...
14 weeks 2 days ago
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By Sally Hatch
We’ve been writing about how the “market” for community investing (a.k.a. impact investing) has commanded much more attention in the past five years.
I just returned from the SRI in the Rockies conference, which used to have maybe two or three breakout sessions on community investing over a two-and-a-half-day period. This year there was an entire day’s worth of forums – plus an address from the head of the CDFI Fund (a program of the U.S. Treasury). Despite the conference's name...
14 weeks 2 days ago
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By Mike LaFontaine
Sometimes other people do as good a job of getting to the heart of what the Community Loan Fund does as we can.
That was the case with a recent blog post by Arnie Alpert, the American Friends Service Committee's New Hampshire Program Coordinator and a former board member here.
Concord’s Wall Street is Already Occupied clearly explains how our local, community-based work connects to crucial national issues like economic opportunity and the economy. Please take a look, and...
16 weeks 22 hours ago
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