您正在看的时事英语是:美高负债家庭面临升息之苦。 uding the overtime he earns and the small payments she receives as assistant organist at her church. They have been married 17 years but they lived with her mother for the first 11, paying her rent. When they finally bought a house of their own in 1998, for $89,000, they had nothing saved for a down payment, and borrowed the entire amount through a 30-year mortgage. They also took out a second mortgage, for $30,000, which they invested in remodeling the home: aluminum siding, a new bathroom and a refinished living room with oak trimmed walls.

As interest rates fell, they refinanced both mortgages, locking in a 5.25 percent fixed interest rate for 30 years. Still, the remodeling continued, mainly on credit cards once the $30,000 was exhausted. Their three-bedroom house is now worth nearly $120,000, almost equal to the mortgage debt, Mrs. Diffenderfer estimates. That leaves the couple with no spare equity that can be extracted in cash through a bigger mortgage. Nor can they lower their $726-a-month mortgage payment. With mortgage rates already rising in anticipation of the Fed's increases, that once lucrative route for millions of consumers is closing.

The Diffenderfers have only their salaries to meet the rising cost of their variable rate credit card debt, although for a while Mrs. Diffenderfer managed to reduce the interest payments by switching the balances to new credit cards whenever she could get a lower rate. The interest rates on her cards now average just under 10 percent, partly through her efforts to find teaser discounts and partly because credit card companies dropped their rates several percentage points, a decline now likely to be reversed.

"There are adjustments we could make in our spending," Mrs. Diffenderfer said. "Eating out is one. We could put remodeling of our home on hold and give ourselves a breather. We contribute $125 a week to our church. We don't want to cut back on that but we would if our financial situation changed drastically. It would have to be pretty drastic."

Another notch up in home prices would give the Diffenderfers some relief; they could float a 4 to 5 percent home equity loan against the additional value of their home and use the loan to pay down credit card debt. Tens of millions of Americans have used this route to lower the interest cost of credit card debt. With homes appreciating more slowly, there is less collateral left to support home equity loans, and paying the outstanding balances will become more costly. They totaled $375 billion at the end of last year.Home prices are a big potential casualty of rising interest rates. Sales of new and existing homes surged in May, the government reported, as people apparently rushed to become homeowners before mortgage rates went any higher. The average 30-year mortgage is already up a percentage point