No Interest Mortage

I had to lead large groups of homeowners (HOs) this week so I thought I would write about them. You see as the weather gets warmer the productivity of our HOs decreases. This is most likely due to their physical condition. It may also have to do with the alcohol I think I smelled on the breath of one of them this week. Probably 75% of the HOs are overweight with the bulk of those near the obese threshold. We won’t go into the reasons for this as that would involve lots of generalizations and many paragraphs. However, part of the Habitat program is to have the homeowner work on the houses for a minimum of 300 hours. Since most all HOs must have a full-time job, many only come out to earn hours working on houses once per week. You can do the math and see that it could take many weeks at that rate to finish. So they will be working in weather conditions year round. I don’t believe that our administrative staff screens potential HOs for actual ability to do work but instead just makes them sign off that they are aware that they have to work 300 hours. Part of the problem is that if they did conduct such a screen we probably couldn’t get enough HOs to fill our houses. Through the winter you would occasionally have to get on the HOs to stop hanging out on the porch and get back to work but now that the temperature is up it is happening much more frequently. I mean they only really work 6 hours a day and get credit for 8 because we count registration time in the morning and lunch.

So the big financial incentive for the HOs to get into the program is that they get to pay for the house at cost over a 25 year no interest mortgage. The price of the houses aren’t really that much cheaper than you could probably get from a contractor. I think our current houses are going for about $100k. Maybe a fully contracted house would cost $120k. Remember these houses are new but they are still in the hood. So I finally got around to calculating the savings over 25 years for a no interest loan for $100k. The result was about $93k in interest savings. Then I divided that by 300 hours to come up with an hourly wage of $311. That is net wage. If I used 6 hour days obviously the number would be much larger. I’ve decided that the next time I lead a group of mostly HOs I’m going to cite these numbers and let them know that I expect them earn that incredible hourly wage. But the more I think about it, people in society who actually earn that kind of money usually don’t work particularly hard because they just make other people do their work and they play golf with clients. So maybe are our HOs are just acting like the average $400 per hour person.

I am heading to the airport in about an hour to catch a plane to Dallas with all my Americorps co-workers. We will be building houses for the next 6 days with other Americorps members from around the country. I think the building will be fun but I’m not looking forward to bunkrooms with 18 people per room. I didn’t sleep too well when we went to camp at the beginning of the year in Georgia. I will be well over the 80% of hours complete mark after this week. I’m anticipating very little ability to contact people in the outside world so don’t expect any emails or phone calls this week.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the Mothers out there.