Marge Ciccone has applied to you, the assistant manager at her trust company, for a three-year loan to buy a car. She wants $7000 at the current rate of 1% per month. She and her husband, Lou, have four children, aged 6 - 13. Lou earns $42,000 a year as an accountant for a factory. He is currently working on his Chartered Professional Accountant (CPA) designation and expects to finish in less than two years. Marge wants the car so that she can start working outside the home again, after being out of the labour force for almost 10 years. She can work as a commission sales person for a small food processing company that is just starting to expand. Up to now, it had concentrated on restaurants and caterers; now it wants to sell to small specialty food retailers in the Montreal (Quebec) area. Marge has worked in the food business as both a food store clerk and a sausage stuffer. She feels she understands the business well enough to sell successfully. In addition, she speaks French, Italian, and English fluently. She would sell to the proposed new target market. She talked to the two sales professionals who currently handle the restaurant clientele, and discovered they make "about $45 - 50,000" before automobile expenses, which they must pay themselves. They warned her that it would take at least a few months to make any reasonable level of sales, and several years to build up a good clientele with repeat business. Marge and Lou own their own house in a pleasant suburb of Montreal. Their mortgage payments are $848 per month. They pay property tax of about $2000 per year and $200 per month on another car loan that has two years to go. Lou's take-home pay is $30,000. They keep $3000 in a savings account for emergencies, and they have saved up another $3500, which Marge plans to use for the rest of the $10, 500 purchase price of the car. 

1. Would you grant Marge the loan? Why or why not? 

2. What advice would you give her?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

To determine whether to grant Marge the loan we need to assess her ability to repay it The loan amou... View the full answer