Word: bond
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...There is certainly troubling anecdotal evidence that some of the girls set out to get pregnant together, though Mayor Kirk went to great lengths to deny any evidence of a "blood-oath bond." But other girls, like Lindsey Oliver, tell of a different kind of collaboration: "There was a group of girls already pregnant that decided they were going to help each other to finish school and raise their kids together," she told Good Morning America. Which raises the question: What if the "problem" in evidence at Gloucester High has more to do with the rejection of abortion than...
...peculiar energy in the characters portrayed by the great silent comedians. And there was a lot of it in Maxwell Smart, the doofus, inanely self-confident secret agent Don Adams played in Get Smart, the iconic 1960s television series in which Mel Brooks and Buck Henry started satirizing James Bond almost before he made his first smirking wisecrack to Miss Moneypenny. One dared wanly to hope that the loose, slightly impoverished air of that funny, curiously memorable little enterprise might somehow prevail in our era of more grandiose imagery...
...Walk Away Plan sounded pretty good to Paula Bond. A bookkeeper at a battered Florida construction company, she first heard about the plan on TV at 3 a.m., not long after her salary was cut in February by $100 a week and she realized she couldn't keep making her mortgage payments. Selling the house was hardly an option. Properties on her block were going for $135,000; two years ago, she'd paid $188,000. She had phoned her bank and tried to renegotiate the terms of her loan. "Every time I called," she says, "they gave me another...
...would like to avoid foreclosure too, since it can cost tens of thousands of dollars in legal and rehab fees to repossess and sell a house. "We wrote a beautiful distress letter together," says Helbert. "We told her story." He was eventually able to talk the bank into reducing Bond's interest rate enough to save her $460 a month. So far, Helbert has helped keep about a third of his clients from losing their homes. (It probably doesn't hurt that he has an employee whose main job is sitting on hold all day with lenders.) The other...
There's a problem, though, with Helbert's whole operation: a nonprofit housing counselor might have gotten Bond the same result without charging her hundreds of dollars. In fact, many of the flashiest benefits these new walk-away companies advertise are ones homeowners can procure on their own. Are you willing to pay someone to force the bank to stop harassing you with phone calls? O.K., but you can achieve the same result for the cost of a stamp by sending a letter citing the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, which says lenders can call only if they're taking...