 Coastal Enterprises Incorporated has been tapped by the USDA to assist potential low- to moderate income home buyers with rural development loan applications. Tom talked with CEI's Director of Housing Resources Laura Bucksbaum and Housing Counselor Linda LeJoy about how the program can help navigate the red tape of government's application process. Laura, Linda, thank you for joining us. It's great to be here to talk about CEI in particular, a new initiative to get people into rural development program for buying their first home. But to start off with, can you talk a little bit about what CEI does for people with housing issues? Sure. We provide a lot of different kinds of housing services. We actually develop affordable rental housing and other affordable housing. But the counseling department, which is where Linda and I work, provides counseling to people who are facing foreclosure for people who are trying to buy a home for the first time or sometimes not even for the first time. We provide first time home buyer education and we now have a new relationship with the federal government, USDA, rural development to help people get into a whole people of low and moderate income by a home. And that's what we're really here to talk about today. We're pretty excited about that program. And what's that program like the program that rural development does to help first time home buyers? It's a fantastic program. And as Laura mentioned, it doesn't necessarily have to be a first time home buyer. Someone whose housing right now is inadequate, maybe too small or too big for their family. But it really, it helps the low to moderate income families by subsidizing the income according to the income and family size. And it goes by county, these income guidelines. Subsidizing the interest? Subsidizing the interest, yes. Thank you. So it can really make that payment affordable to families getting into a home. It also ensures that the home is safe and secure and sanitary by, I mean, they've got some pretty good inspection processes that go along. So the interest rate for this program, because it's subsidized by the federal government, can be as low as one percent. And the term can be for as long as 38 years. So that can, that depends on the family income and household size. But that can, as Linda said, make a housing payment really affordable for someone who may have thought in the past that they couldn't afford that. One of the things that we want to make sure is that people don't get in over their heads and that they don't, that they understand the responsibilities and expenses of buying a home. So part of what we can offer also is some budget counseling and making sure that people are thinking clearly about the home that they want to buy and how much they can afford and what those monthly costs are going to be like. When we first met, I was mentioning that I had been through a similar program under a different name, but it's the same sort of program to buy our home. But it was a fairly complicated process. You give help with that, don't you? Yes. Yeah, the application process can still be a little cumbersome. But we're there to help you out with that, making sure that you get all the documents in order and get the application filled out correctly and get it to RD and rural development. Do you find that a lot of people who come to you who have housing needs are unaware of this program and need to be educated? Yeah, definitely. We also provide first time home buyer classes and that's something that we talk about in the classes and I think many, many people are not aware of the program. Have you had a good response so far yet to this partnership that you've had with RD? It's a brand new partnership. That's why we're here. We want people to know that we're doing it. I've dealt with a couple of clients right now. We're working on some things and getting some things together, but yeah, like Laura said, it's very new. So we haven't had that first success story yet, but we're hoping through very soon. The program is not new, as you know. And we should say that people that are interested can go directly to the USDA rural development offices if they want to. They don't have to come through us. There are also some other agencies in the state that have this same arrangement that they could go to, but we think that we offer some real advantages to people. By the way, also our services are free. We should say that. We're not charging anybody to come to us and get this help. If people wanted more information, where can they go? You can go to our website, which is ceimain.org. You can call our main number, 8-8-2-7-5-5-2. And let the person who answers know that you're interested in home buyer counseling in general or rural development. We have two other counselors who can also provide this kind of counseling. Linda's really experienced in it. She's been doing it for a number of years. Great. Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you being here. Great. Thank you.