Video: Recession condemns ex-millionaire mum to living in a garden shed

JUST a year ago Anyta Crossley was a millionaire with a booming business - but now she has been reduced to living in a garden shed in Leeds.

Her life snowballed out of control during the recession when she lost her seven-bedroom detached home after she failed to keep up with mortgage repayments.

She lived a luxury lifestyle in a £450,000 home, drove a Humvee off-road vehicle and had assets of more than a million pounds.

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But the economic crash savaged her business and her home was sold for just a third of its worth and she went bust.

In the last few weeks she has been living in the shed at the bottom of her sister’s garden in Bramley, Leeds. Inside the shed, which she shares with her son Cameron, and two dogs, are two sofas and there is little room for further possessions. They have to use the toilet in her sister’s house.

Miss Crossley, said: “I used to live in a seven bedroom house. Now I am living in a shed.

“I was an entrepreneur with a busy gym. I had a big detached house and a cottage, a 1/4 acre garden and I drove a Hummer.

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“The gym was worth £600,000 at one point, the house £450,000. I was a millionaire on paper.

“I have worked so hard since I was 17, and been through so much. There are people out there milking the system and I am living in a shed.

“My house has been sold to a developer for just £160,000 and the gym is sitting empty. It just doesn’t make sense. I have never been so degraded as I have been in the last few months.”

Miss Crossley blames the banks for her woes, saying they failed to offer her help as the downturn crippled her.

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She ran First Step, in Stanningley, and lived in the Whitecote area of Leeds, but the recession destroyed her once successful business.

Her mortgage repayments more than tripled so her house was repossessed, and the previously successful business soon went under.

Miss Crossley had remortgaged the luxury property, which had a 28ft kitchen, and struggled with repayments especially when membership at the gym dwindled from 500 to 200 as people tightened their purse strings.

She offered her bank a business plan but was unable to stop the repossession.

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The desperate businesswoman and sons Jordan, 20, and Cameron, 18, who both helped run the gym, were forced to set up home above their business, after her home was repossessed.

Miss Crossley who was made homeless when she was just 17 but managed to buy her own house at the age of 21, had been through a bitter divorce.

Financial disaster struck again when the gym was also repossessed in April this year - forcing her to set up home at her sister’s.

With no room in sister Denise’s terraced house, Anyta and Cameron had to set up home in the garden shed with their two dogs. Jordan has moved in with his girlfriend.

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Miss Crossley, who now receives £135 in income support fortnightly for her and her two sons, said: “When the weather is nice we can sit in my sister’s garden, but when it’s miserable we are holed up in the shed.”

Talking about the recession, Miss Crossley said: “It just makes no sense, we bailed the banks out but they won’t help us, the small businesses.

“In my case, I went to them with a plan and they refused to help me, I had a lot of equity but they just took my home and business. The gym is now lying derelict, I don’t see the point in that.

“All we want is a building, I’ve got all the gym equipment in storage, we can set up again and live above the gym again. Our members want us back, we owe it to them.”

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She added: “I don’t go on holidays, all the money I have ever had has gone back into the business or the house. I haven’t been officially declared bankrupt but I have nothing.”

She has now asked the financial ombudsman to review the processes which led her to lose her home.

Her first application for council housing was rejected but she has now finally been offered temporary accommodation.

A Leeds City Council spokeswoman said: “After reviewing Miss Crossley’s personal circumstances, we have made her an offer of self-contained temporary accommodation for herself, her two children aged 18 and 20 and her two dogs.

“We believe that this offer of accommodation will address Miss Crossley’s immediate housing needs and will continue to work with her to explore longer-term housing options.”

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