My name is Shelly and I need assistance with legal fees. In 2015 my husband and I were closing our business of 17 years and preparing to move into the private sector for jobs. Our business was an online music store and it was no longer profitable. I was diagnosed with Lupus in December 2014 and in February 2015 we lost my husband’s father to Valley Fever, so it had been a really rough year. In early February 2015 we received a call from long time friends, asking us to move from Oregon to Arizona to start a new business endeavor with them. After 18 years of friendship we had no reason not to trust them.
Prior to moving we were promised a partnership in the company, a shareholder’s agreement would be completed before the move, a small salary, a home to live in rent free, a maid and a vehicle to use if we had to sell our Camaro to survive. We told them we had enough money in savings to survive about 6 months. They promised to move us at no cost and we were promised our own moving truck and movers to load it. We were told we would not have to worry about the money.
Needless to say things did not go the way they were supposed to. One week before the move I was informed that our friends’ 22 year old son would be living in the same house with us. We were not given an option. On moving day they arrived with three moving trucks that were loaded with their marine construction company’s equipment, which ended up damaging most of our furniture in the move. On the day we arrived in Arizona we were told to start calling the utility companies to have them put in our names, even though we had no income or any way to pay the utilities. We were promised a shareholder’s agreement before we moved, and we were not presented with any legal paperwork until after almost a year of living in Arizona and working toward opening the company. The salary that was promised was never paid. We were able to live in the home rent free, but the lease stated that we could only live there while working towards opening the company, yet the company was providing no salary to pay the utilities and if we had to get a job outside the company to pay the utilities we were not working towards opening the company and we would be homeless. It was a never ending nightmare.
In November, 7 months after moving to Arizona, I was forced to get a job to pay the bills. Our savings was gone, we sold every asset we owned, except for my jewelry, and we had no way to pay the most basic bills. There were weeks when we did not have food to eat. I found a job and was able to keep us afloat financially while my husband continued to work towards opening the company. At this point I was working two full time jobs. We finally received a shareholder’s agreement to review and sign in February 2016. We took the shareholder’s agreement to a business attorney, paying him $150 for a consultation. He told us to get out of the agreement as quickly as possible, because it was a very unfair agreement. He actually told us to run. He called it Detrimental Reliance and said that they had sweated us out to the point that we had nowhere to go and it forced us to stay in a bad situation because we had no way out. But where does one run when you have no money and no-one to help you? All of our family was in Oregon, and they were in no position to help us in any way. Under extreme duress, because we did not want to lose what little they were offering and end up with nothing at all, we signed the shareholder’s agreement on February 17, 2016. On May 30, 2016, while still working two jobs, I received a call from my “friend” telling me that I was basically terminated from the company because she could not work with me.
Around the beginning of May 2017 the owner of the company told my husband that he was not putting any more money into the company. He said that he had enough money saved to make it for two years, and that his family was not going to starve. He then took his wife to Mexico for a vacation. So finally after 2.5 years of trying to get this company open I threw my hands up in the air and told my husband it was time to go home. I had just lost my job and had received a severance package that would make it possible to get home to Oregon, so we called our best friends and asked if we could live with them. They said of course, and we moved home on May 18, 2017. We have about $300 to our name; we live in a small bedroom in our friend’s home and we are forced to keep our possessions in storage. We had to leave most of our furniture behind because we could not afford a moving truck big enough to move it. We are both looking for work.
Because of this nightmare, my credit is in the toilet. There were months that I had to choose to buy food or pay my credit cards, so I bought food. I went from a 720 score to 530 score. My profession is as a bookkeeper/general manager. Very few companies will hire a bookkeeper with that kind of credit score, so I am having a very hard time finding work. My husband is 54 years old and he is concerned that his age may hamper his ability to get hired. We are literally starting our lives over like we just got out of college, but we are 44 and 54. We should be stable and planning for retirement at this point. We are struggling so badly right now that we just need some justice. We are good people and our only error here was trusting people who would have crawled over the dead bodies of their children to make another dollar.
Please help us! The money will be used to retain an attorney and pay the legal fees associated with suing our “friends” for detrimental reliance.
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