Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

THE ECONOMY: SURVIVING THE RECESSION:

Their stories have evolved, for better and for worse

Elizabeth Safar

Tiffany Brown

As one who has been unemployed, Elizabeth Safar says she has empathy for the people she speaks with in her new job as a collection representative at Progressive Management Systems in Las Vegas.

Click to enlarge photo

Wally Grogitsky says his once-booming carpet cleaning business continues to slow as the recession deepens. He and his wife, Lisa, a nurse, are five months behind on their mortgage payments.

Last year, as the recession worsened, we introduced you to struggling Nevadans. They were the faces of the growing economic calamity. Among them: a financial adviser, a carpet cleaner, a hotel receptionist, a mechanic and his wife.

Here’s an update on their lives.

• • •

We met Jack Safar, the mechanic, in October, trying to peddle 10 DVDs for cash at a pawnshop.

His wife, Elizabeth, had lost her part-time job as a car insurance saleswoman, couldn’t get another job and didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits. They had $30 in savings, a $93 gas bill and $620 in monthly car payments that weren’t being paid.

To save money, they were prepared to put Pongo, their 3-year-old Dalmatian, up for adoption.

Sun readers offered to take in Pongo. One man bought the Safars two big bags of dog food, for Pongo and 7-year-old Yorkshire Pebbles.

Some readers questioned why the Safars weren’t giving up their $40-a-month DirecTV package.

After their story was published, Wendy Marcisofsky, who manages a collection agency, said she wanted to talk to Elizabeth — not about a payment plan, but to interview her for a possible job.

Marcisofsky, manager of Progressive Management Systems’ local office, saw in Elizabeth someone with a background in customer service needing an opportunity. Four days later, Elizabeth was hired — as a collection representative, of all things.

“I put myself in their shoes,” says Elizabeth, 38, of the empathy she extends people who are delinquent in their payments. “What I’m going through, they’re going through.”

The Safars are still behind on their car payments — Elizabeth is making $11 an hour — but their vehicles are no longer in danger of being repossessed.

And they kept Pongo.

• • •

In the past eight years, Wally Grogitsky got cancer, lost his mother, beat cancer, discovered that his then-business partner had been embezzling money from their carpet cleaning company and divorced his wife (whom he’s since remarried).

His life hasn’t always been so trying. His Certified Carpet Cleaning made $250,000 in 2000.

But in October, the 49-year-old was earning $1,000 a month net and had just let his one employee go. Carpet cleaning wasn’t a priority for homeowners. Expecting little government help, Grogitsky told us at the time: “I’m going to have to be my own light at the end of the tunnel.”

The Grogitskys’ situation has worsened.

Business has slowed even more, and expenses outweigh earnings.

The Grogitskys are five months behind on a home mortgage that is far more than what the house is now worth. If they can get $249,000 for it, they’re still $122,000 short of what they paid. They’ve moved out to make selling the house easier and are now renting a house.

Lisa Grogitsky, a 46-year-old nurse, has drained much of the 401(k). Wally sometimes cashes checks after completing a job just to gas up his truck, and one of their children, a college student in Reno, called recently to say her tires were bald.

Wally worries that financial woes are straining his marriage. Money problems partly prompted their divorce.

“We’re worried the light at the end of the tunnel is a train that’s gonna run us over,” he says.

• • •

Jeff Ballek, 48, expected to weather the economic storm. A financial adviser who says he foresaw the collapse, Ballek and his family moved here in 2005 from St. Paul, Minn., with a four-year savings reserve.

When a promised job didn’t pan out, he started his own financial company, knowing it would take three years to make it viable. Because of the economy, he’s a year behind schedule — and says he’s got only a year left in savings.

He and his wife make a combined $75,000, much of which is put back into his business. He still needs bridge loans to keep his business afloat.

Ballek can’t escape his tumult, not when he’s advising clients gripped by similar fears.

“If I’m not thinking about something with us — which is maybe 25 percent of the time — then I’m looking at someone else’s situation, which could happen to us,” he says. “It’s a vicious cycle.”

• • •

When the original MGM Grand opened in 1973, Maria Chenes was 18 years old and working as a front-desk clerk.

For most of the next 35 years, Chenes worked at hotels, including an 18-year stint at Harrah’s Entertainment. Harrah’s laid her off last summer. Her union notified her three times of jobs, but nothing panned out, she told us in October.

In December, Chenes decided to leave casinos, take her $1,000-a-month union pension and find something new. The 54-year-old was going through a divorce (and still is) and had no savings.

News of Chenes’ story reached the mother of one of her son’s former soccer teammates, who offered her a job as an office manager at a nonprofit agency. The salary is just pennies less than the $15 an hour Chenes earned at Harrah’s and the work is socially significant: Her employer helps low-income people and seniors with emergency home repairs.

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