My Family Story: How a Bank Waged War on Us

By Lurine M. Allotey

If you were among homeowners affected by the big banks decision to make your life miserable through foreclosure or other tactics during the 2009- - - -housing and financial crisis, you will see yourself in this fascinating story . This is a compelling account of a familys survival after a bank which serviced their mortgage declared war on them. In 2009 Americans were blindsided by an economic crisis which caught Wall Street, Main Street and Political leaders totally off guard. And many conscientious homeowners seemed to have paid the price for the bad decisions of a few. Some banks tried to make it appear that homeowners who experienced setbacks during this time were are all dead beats who took on mortgages they could not afford. However, this characterization is far from the truth, as you will read in My Family Story How A Bank Waged War on Us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Sep 25, 2012
• ISBN: 9781477264904

Lurine M. Allotey

Lurine Allotey is a first time author who has chosen to write about her family’s nightmarish experience with a mortgage company which occurred during the 2009 housing and financial crisis. This experience has left her highly frustrated and suspicious of the system. Ms. Allotey holds an MBA, but claims no expertise on the financial crisis. Her book is based solely on her experience in dealing with the bank. She has one son, and lives in East Stroudsburg, PA with her husband Frederick Allotey a CPA, and an adjunct professor of accounting. He also has a small accounting practice.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

The Early Days

We are people of modest means but have always been responsible. It appears that for some reason, we have been caught in every recession this country ever had. We were not around in the 1920s, but it seems as though we were caught in that one as well. It’s funny how that happens. We moved from the Bronx to Maryland in the early ’90s in search of a better way of life. In many ways, it was almost like we had moved to another country, because the difference in living conditions was like night and day.

We had lived off White Plains Road in the Bronx, and believe me when I tell you, no one would have mistaken where we lived for the Upper Eastside. No one was rushing to clean the street, and the train station sounded like it was just a foot away from our bedroom. In fact, when our son Jonathan was about two, he used to make a certain sound, and we could not figure out what sound he was mimicking. But one day Fred figured it out: it was the sound the train made before it came to a final stop and the doors were opened. The number two and five trains seemed to run on the minute, and that was the last sound we heard at night before falling asleep. We were that close to the train station. In fact, everything was that close, including the supermarket, the laundromats, the schools, and the drug dealers as well.

We lived in a four-story apartment building, and we would not dream of allowing Jonathan to go out to play alone. There was a boy, about seven years old, who would always hang around in the lobby of the building, and whenever I took Jonathan outside to ride his bicycle, the boy tried to intimidate him, even in my presence. The only time Jonathan was permitted to go outside was when either Fred or I took him out to the park. We could not allow him to play in front of our building alone. In first grade, someone frequently broke into his lunch box and stole a part of his lunch. He complained about it as soon as he arrived home, and I knew I had to do something about it. I remember going down to the school to speak with his teacher regarding the incident, and her only response was, There is nothing I can do to prevent anyone from stealing his lunch. This was a regular occurrence, but there was not much we could do to prevent it from happening.

That’s when we knew we had to move. We feared that something worse could happen in the future. This was only one of the many community issues we were facing at the time. Another disturbing incident that caused us to think twice was when someone stole Jonathan’s stroller, with all his beautiful blankets, from the lobby when he was a toddler. I took him upstairs, laid him in his bed, and returned to pick up his stroller, and in a matter of a moment, everything was stolen. This incident left a real feeling of vulnerability in my mind. It showed that despite the fact that we were behind at least two locked doors, we were still very much exposed to robbery and potentially great harm.

It was obvious that something needed to be done to create a safer environment for the residents, but we felt powerless to bring about the change that was needed. Each day the choice became clearer. If we could not help to create the change that was necessary, we needed to move on. But the question was, where would we move to? We had visited friends in Maryland and noticed a completely different living environment, and so we decided that we would relocate if we could find employment. After much maneuvering, we finally got there.

Little did we know that a recession was brewing. It was the 1992–1993 recession, which made it difficult for many Americans to find and keep employment. Fred had gone ahead and secured employment before we all moved down. It was not exactly his dream job, but he was willing to take whatever he could find to take care of his family. It was a difficult time for many people to find any type of work, so when I got there, I also took whatever I could find. We made the best of it. The 1992 recession was mild in comparison to what we are currently experiencing, but this is certainly not the type of experience anyone wish to repeat. However, the lessons learned from the past proved to be invaluable for present and future survival.

The 1992 recession was not only bad for us but also did not help President George H. W. Bush get re-elected either. I remember when a young woman asked the president at a town hall meeting if he was personally affected by the recession and the high deficit. He did not answer the question in a way that was satisfactory to her and obviously many other Americans. Despite the fact that he was a hero to many Americans, especially because of the way he had conducted the Gulf War in an attempt to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait that was not enough to get him re-elected. We all know that a recession is the greatest enemy for an incumbent president.

It was a rough time for us and many other families in America, but we did our best to find work and keep ourselves afloat. After a while, however, it was obvious that things were not working out for us in Maryland, and so we decided it was time to head back to the Northeast. We packed up our bags and headed back on the road we had travelled two years earlier. Fred got his old job back at the CPA firm, and we decided to move to Connecticut instead of going back to New York.

It was always our aim to buy a house, and we wanted to work on that as soon as we were settled. Frankly, we were tired of apartment living and wanted Jonathan to have a house experience before he was too old to care about it. Fred and I had grown up living in single-family homes, and we could not get used to apartment-style living, which we found very impersonal. Most of our experiences living in apartment buildings were negative. Maryland was the only exception, because our neighbors were mindful, and the fact that we lived on the third floor which was the top floor, did not hurt either.

I cannot begin to explain how horrible some of our experiences were. In New York, water leaked from the apartment above into our closet and ruined much of our properties, including some of my clothes. When I went up to speak with our neighbor in order to investigate where the water was coming from, she cursed me out for good measure instead, Bronx style, if you know what I mean. We almost had to bribe the super in order to get him to look into the problem.

It was much better in our first apartment in Connecticut, because again we lived on the third floor, which was the top floor. But our first building caught fire when a neighbor who lived below fell asleep while cooking. No one was harmed in that unfortunate incident, but we had to move to another building in the same complex, and that’s when things got ugly. Our new neighbors were not much better than our former neighbors in the Bronx. They had six kids in their apartment at any given time. (I believe some of them were visiting on many occasions).They woke up early on weekends and played ball in the apartment over our heads the entire morning. They also ran around, jumped up and down, and shouted as loudly as they could for what seemed to be hours on end with absolutely no supervision. It was pure anarchy. We would resort to the old broomstick solution. This simply means we would use a broom stick and hit the ceiling in order to get them to settle down. It usually worked for about ten or fifteen minutes, and then the jumping would resume. Eventually we would just have to give up and go on doing whatever we had to do. Sleeping a bit later on weekends after a long work week was not on option in our apartment. And all this time we were thinking, We have got to get ourselves a house in order to put an end to the sleepless nights. We were always working toward that anyway. At one point, we dubbed each New Year the year of the house, because each year we thought that was going to be the year we did it.

More and more I was beginning to feel that the only way to get a good night’s sleep was for us to move into our own home. I felt in order to stay sane, that would need to happen soon. It wasn’t as though we were not working toward that end, because we certainly were. However, like all big ventures, this was going to take some time to achieve. We had certain criteria in mind, including where we wanted to live, among other things, so we really had to plan and save. In spite of the delay, we were focused; we were saving whatever money we had, including all of our tax refund each year in addition to whatever else we could save.

In the interim, a wonderful thing happened: the upstairs neighbors with the six kids moved out. Hurray! we said, but our joy was not long lasting. A new couple moved in, and instantly the same thing started again. It was replay times two, because the new neighbors were just as disturbing as the previous ones, but with a twist. The husband paced back and forth all night.

Mind you, we are practical people. We expect people who live above us to make some noise. But his pacing back and forth defied reasonable behavior. They had no children living with them; consequently, we expected to hear less noise. We expected them to make regular sounds, such as walking and talking, and the occasional banging of a nail or two on the wall or things dropping on the floor, or even a verbal altercation from time to time. That’s considered normal, everyday living for most of us, so why should we expect them to be any different? But we were not prepared for someone who walked aimlessly back on forth all night. The man was a pacer.

He walked back and forth almost throughout the entire night every night, and this is no exaggeration. It was almost like being in the twilight zone. And did I mention that his walk sounded like that of an elephant? That’s how heavy his feet were. Immediately we knew we had another problem on our hands. We eventually had to go upstairs one day to have a conversation with him regarding what we considered to be his unusual behavior. Of course, we did not tell him that was unusual behavior. We took great care in our approach to reason with him because of our experience with the previous neighbor, who was almost violent when we approached her regarding the same issue. She basically told us she had the right to do whatever she pleased in her own apartment, and if we were disturbed because of it, that was tough luck for us. She obviously believed only in her rights, but not the rights of others. It is always a challenge to resolve an issue with someone who takes that kind of approach to life.

The landlord’s agent was not interested in mediating the situation either, so we were left to handle it on our own. At one point the noise was so frequent and so loud that it became necessary to involve the local police.

Acknowledging this fact, we became a bit hesitant in dealing with this new neighbor. But we had no choice. It was necessary for us to bring it to his attention. We basically explained that we could not sleep at night because he was pacing back and forth throughout the entire night. We emphasized how much we would appreciate it if he made some adjustment. His response to us was more courteous than the former neighbor. He apologized and explained that he is a computer programmer, and when he got stuck writing a program code, the only thing that he could do to help himself think was to pace back and forth. He said he would try to be mindful of us below. We understood his dilemma, but explained to him that the floor was not insulated enough to absorb the noise and that the thumping sound was disturbing at such late hours of the night. We asked him if he would take that into consideration. He politely said he would, and the pacing stopped for approximately three weeks.

But as suspected, it started up again. I guess the poor fellow was either a genius or a madman. Whatever the case, we were losing sleep because of him. We continued to accelerate our savings in order to expedite the plan to purchase a house. At this time our family was using the delay to consider where we wanted to live. Connecticut is a very expensive state, and we knew in order for us to buy a house in a neighborhood that would appreciate over time, we would need a lot of money.

In spite of this fact, we had no immediate plan to leave the area. While we were trying to make this important decision, we decided to make a visit to Pennsylvania to see