The doctor and his wife
Just a few years ago, Dr. Ben Lewis and his wife, a teacher, were leading a very comfortable life. He had an active practice in the Denver area, and together they had a “six-figure income.” Then medical problems put Dr. Lewis out of commission for an extended period. “It was one of those things where everything happened at once. Trying to cover all of the bills that we had on one income was just impossible,” he said. “I thought I would get well.”
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The retired hospital lab assistant
Bessie Smith is 74, and she’s seen a lot in her lifetime. One searing image is of a smoky plume rising from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, just down the street from her home in her native Birmingham, Ala. That memory is as clear today as it was in 1963, the year it happened, she said. Bess faced more hard times, but she persevered, working her way up as a medical lab assistant at Presbyterian St. Luke’s Hospital in Denver and buying her own home near City Park. That home is gone now, taken from her because of a bad second mortgage.
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The Army wife
Valerie Thomas, 26, and her husband, a specialist in the Army stationed at Fort Carson, applied for a $300 payday loan in 2004 at ACE Lending to help them pay their off-post rent in an emergency situation. Interest and fees on that one-month loan was $80, for a total of $380. When she went to an ACE Lending office to pay it, Valerie was told that the debt had already been settled and that it had been debited from her TCF checking account. She later got a notice in the mail from ACE that the load had not been paid. But her bank said that, indeed, there had been a debit on her checking account to ACE. ACE Loans continued to say Valerie owed the money, plus interest and fees. Then came the shocking news: The bank found that it was in error, the loan had not been paid off.
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