What would it take for you to ask for help — not from a friend or a family member, but from a government program you once assumed was for someone else entirely?
That question sat at the center of every conversation I had with James Okonkwo over three meetings at a coffee shop near the Galleria in Houston, Texas. James is 41, broad-shouldered, and speaks with the particular precision of someone who has spent two decades calculating risk for a living. He is a petroleum engineer. He owns two rental properties and a four-bedroom home. He also, by late 2024, was quietly drowning.
James came to the United States from Lagos, Nigeria, at 19 years old. He enrolled at the University of Houston on a partial scholarship, worked nights at a shipping warehouse, and graduated with an engineering degree in 2006. The oil industry was generous to him. His salary tripled between 2012 and 2017. He bought a rental duplex in 2018, a second rental property in 2020, and upgraded his primary residence in 2022. By his own accounting, he owed approximately $1.2 million across three mortgages — a number he said with a kind of exhausted frankness when we first met.
A Salary That Built Everything — and a Market That Tested It
James told me the years between 2015 and 2022 felt like standing on an escalator that only moved upward. His base salary peaked at just over $148,000 annually, with project bonuses that sometimes pushed total compensation past $180,000. He described flying business class to Aberdeen, Scotland, for offshore consultations, renovating his rental properties with cash, and funding his children’s college savings accounts without looking twice at the balance.
“I never thought I was being reckless,” he said, leaning forward over his coffee. “In Nigeria, you acquire property when you can. Property is stability. That is what I was taught.” The philosophy made sense in rising markets. When oil prices softened through late 2023 and into 2024 — a trend tracked closely by the U.S. Energy Information Administration — his firm began reducing project hours across its contract engineering team. James’s billable hours fell by roughly 35 percent between October 2023 and March 2024.
His take-home income dropped to approximately $7,200 per month after taxes. His three mortgage payments combined came to $6,850 per month. After the $800 remittance to Lagos, utilities, groceries, and car payments, he had less than $200 left at the end of some months. He had not told his wife the full picture.
The Moment He Started Looking for Help
James described the breaking point as a Tuesday in April 2024. He had received a late payment notice on the duplex mortgage — the first in his life. He sat in his truck outside the coffee shop where we would later meet and Googled, for the first time, whether someone with three properties could qualify for any form of housing assistance.
“I felt like a fraud even searching,” he told me. “I have a master’s degree. I am an engineer. I thought those programs were for people who had nothing. I did not understand that having too much on paper and nothing in your account is its own kind of emergency.”
What James found that afternoon surprised him. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development funds a network of HUD-approved housing counseling agencies that provide free or low-cost advice to homeowners facing mortgage distress — including those with investment properties in some circumstances. These agencies are not lenders and do not make loan decisions; they help borrowers understand their options and communicate with servicers.
What HUD Counseling Actually Looked Like
James called a HUD-approved agency in Houston in late April 2024. He described the intake process as straightforward — a phone screening, then an in-person appointment about two weeks later. He brought three years of tax returns, all three mortgage statements, and a handwritten breakdown of his monthly expenses, including the Lagos remittances.
“The counselor — her name was Denise — she did not judge me at all,” James said. “She had seen worse. She had also seen people in my exact situation who waited too long and lost everything. She told me I still had options, but the window was closing.”
What the counselor laid out for James involved his primary residence specifically. His loan servicer participated in a mortgage forbearance program that allowed qualifying borrowers to temporarily pause or reduce payments for up to 12 months under certain hardship conditions. The program was not a forgiveness program — the deferred amounts would need to be repaid — but it would give James time to stabilize his income without triggering foreclosure proceedings on his home.
The investment properties were a different matter. Federal protections that had existed during the pandemic-era forbearance programs did not broadly extend to non-owner-occupied properties in 2024. The counselor was direct with James: his rental properties were his exposure, and his options there were limited to direct negotiation with his private servicers or, in a worst case, strategic sale.
The Disclosure He Had Been Avoiding
The piece of James’s story that stayed with me longest was not the mortgage numbers or the income drop. It was that he had been hiding the severity of the situation from his wife, Amara, for nearly eight months. She knew hours had been cut. She did not know about the late notice on the duplex. She did not know the savings account had fallen below $3,000.
“In my family, the man provides,” he told me quietly. “To tell your wife that you have failed — that felt impossible. Even though I know, intellectually, that it is not failure. It is circumstance.” He paused. “She found out anyway. She noticed the account balance one Sunday morning. She was not angry. That was the worst part. She was just frightened.”
That conversation with Amara in May 2024 was, by James’s account, the real turning point. Not the forbearance application, not the HUD counseling — the conversation he had been postponing for months.
Where Things Stand — and What James Would Tell Someone Else
When I spoke with James for the last time in February 2026, he had sold the smaller of the two rental properties in September 2025 for $312,000 — enough to eliminate that mortgage entirely and rebuild a modest emergency fund. His hours had been partially restored by mid-2025, bringing his take-home income back up to approximately $9,400 per month. He still sends $800 to Lagos every month. He does not regret that.
He does carry some regret about the properties. “I bought when I should have saved,” he said. “Not because owning property is wrong — I still believe in that — but because I was buying for status as much as for investment. I was proving something to myself that did not need proving.”
He still owns one rental property. He still lives in the four-bedroom home. The financial pressure has not fully resolved — the deferred forbearance amounts on his primary mortgage will need to be addressed through a repayment plan over the next several years. But the crisis, as he describes it, has passed.
According to the HUD housing counselor locator, there are over 1,500 approved counseling agencies operating across the United States, many of which offer services in multiple languages including Yoruba and Igbo — something James said he wished he had known sooner.
James Okonkwo is not a cautionary tale, exactly. He is still standing, still employed, still sending money home. But sitting across from him over those three meetings, I kept thinking about all the engineers, teachers, nurses, and contractors who make good salaries and carry heavy debts and assume that government assistance programs are for someone else — someone with less, someone more visibly struggling. The programs are imperfect, the eligibility rules are complicated, and the outcomes are never guaranteed. But the first step — picking up the phone — costs nothing at all.
Related: The Divorce Was Three Years Ago — He’s Still Paying Off $22K in Lawyer Fees and $1,600 a Month in Child Support
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