Change of Attitude, Change of Address

“I had a beautiful, five-bedroom house in Chicago,” Annie Wallace says. “As a single woman, did I need a five-bedroom house? No, but I bought it anyway.”

For Wallace, buying that house was the first in a series of poor financial decisions that quickly created a domino effect. Wallace lost the house, then lost her job, then fell behind on her bills.

“I turned to payday loans,” Wallace says. “That $200 I borrowed from payday lenders turned into $800 I had to pay back. So next I pulled out all of my retirement money – what poor decision are we on now? Four? Five? – and went through all of that.”

With her resources depleted, Wallace relocated to Memphis to stay with a friend, where she heard about HOPE.

“From day one, HOPE was awesome,” Wallace says. “They weren’t judgmental.  In fact, they treated me like Tina Turner or Beyonce from the first day I sashayed through the door. HOPE didn’t just want my business. They wanted to get to know me. They asked me what my goals were and I told them I wanted my own home and I needed to replace my 18-year-old car. They said, ‘Annie, here’s what we can do, but we suggest you do this first.’”

“This” was intense credit counseling with HOPE that helped Wallace avoid making the same expensive mistakes, followed by paying back a series of small loans that helped Wallace repair her shattered credit.

HOPE eventually wrote Wallace an auto loan and a mortgage loan – this time, for a modest, two-bedroom house Wallace says has “plenty of space.”

“I had a new car and a home through HOPE before I would have qualified to buy a weed whacker from Sears on credit. That is the evidence of what HOPE can do,” Wallace says. “And throughout this whole ordeal, HOPE reminded me not to give up on myself. I had lost my sense of self-worth. But HOPE reminded me that this was only a situation I was going through. I was growing and it was going to be better ahead.

“I have more than a partnership with HOPE,” Wallace continues. “I have a friendship. I’m a success story and now I can help the next person who is going through the same thing, all because of HOPE.”