From riches to rags – Life as the nouveau poor…

THE banks ... where do I start? Believe it or not, up until recently I thought they had treated us quite fairly, but I was just being naive.

When we first lost our businesses very early on in the recession, the mortgage was, our biggest concern. Where were we going to get €2,200 every month? We could manage it for a short period, but then what?

We had remortgaged our house to invest in my business which we had opened just before the Celtic Tiger evaporated. Our original mortgage wasn’t too high and our house was worth three times more than we owed, so we thought we were safe. Our timing was horrendous.