Word: loan
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...Tomaso and Anna Longo took out a loan with the Banca di Roma to buy a two-bedroom house in the fashionable Prati section near the heart of Rome. The interest was a painful 12.5%, but the Longos had little alternative, since that was about the average rate on a home mortgage in those days. Anna, a civil servant, says that life became a matter of pinching lire. "We couldn't ever go away anywhere," she recalls. "We didn't even go out to the cinema...
...Then a miracle happened. Italy's efforts to join the euro led to a steep drop in interest rates. By April 1998 the market average for new loans had fallen below 8.3%. Tomaso, a lawyer, noticed that this appeared to render his Banca di Roma loan illegal under a 1996 anti-usury act. The law prohibits creditors from charging more than one-and-a-half times current rates. Tomaso went to the bank and asked to renegotiate; he first was turned down, and then the bank offered a deal with a hefty refinancing fee. But the Longos kept pushing...
Effective next school year, Harvard will give all scholarship recipients an extra $2,000 in need-based-assistance, reducing the amount students on aid contribute from loan or jobs from $5,150 per year...
...Professors have pointed to alternate models for financing the Allston project, including a loan system--in which faculties that benefited from the move would compensate those that did not after the move was made...
Many microcredit schemes encourage clients to set aside some of the extra income generated by the loan as savings. This can be used for medical bills or to pay school fees if the parents get sick. "Without the loans I would have had to look for another way to make money," says Florence Muriungi, 40, who sings in a Kampala jazz band and whose husband died of AIDS four years ago. Muriungi, who cares for eight children--five of her own and three her sister left when she too died of AIDS--uses the money to pay school fees...