When my fiancée and I bought a house in St Petersburg, Florida, in 2003, my business was strong. We had sales of between $4m and $6m, and we employed 22 people. We could easily afford our three-bedroom home. But in 2007, my business took a downturn. My company specialises in bio-hazardous waste removal: when a house is infested with nuisance wildlife – such as raccoons, possums or bats – a trapping company gets rid of the pests and we clean up the disease they leave behind. It can be anything from tuberculosis to anthrax. We relied on wildlife trappers to recommend us, but during the downturn people chose to save money and just live with raccoons in the attic.
I had to make nine people redundant, and we struggled on. But by 2008, we had started dipping below the point at which I could afford even to pay myself. I had 13 employees, a fiancée and her two young daughters, and I was feeling the pressure. I began to negotiate with the bank about my mortgage, and eventually a man at the end of a phone advised me to default on my repayments. That way, he said, my case would be handed over to a different department, and I could renegotiate. I was unsure about this, but I took the bank at their word. I stopped the next month’s payment and saved $1,800. I decided to use any spare money I had to advertise my business. It takes four or five months to be deemed officially in default, so I continued not paying my mortgage and using my spare cash to fund the advertising. Business was picking up.
We waited for a letter to say that our mortgage had been transferred to the loan modification department and that we could begin negotiating, but instead we got a letter saying that our house was to be repossessed. I called the bank and pointed out that their advice had been to stop paying. But it turned out that our mortgage had been sold on, and the new company didn’t want to negotiate the terms.