A rich heiress who grew up with a luxury life thanks to her dad’s fortune has now been left unable to access any of her money and can’t feed her children
A woman who grew up with a lavish lifestyle is now struggling to make ends meet and feed her family – despite inheriting a fortune from her dad’s estate.
Linda Perillo grew up with everything she could ever need and travelled so much as a child she thought going on a holiday every couple of weeks was just the way life worked.
Her father Mario ran tour operator Perillo Tours and Linda was surrounded in luxury, privately educated and with everything she could ever want. She describes her childhood as “a combination of twenty four carat gold and Italian dark chocolate covered in M&M’s”.
But now she says she’s in a “financial hardship hell” and deals with the embarassment of not being able to feed or dress her eight children properly.
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“We stayed in the best suites, had the best pizza and when my dad was doing business, my mom and I were out and about, usually shopping,” Linda, from New Jersey, says. Despite the riches, Linda was brought up with a strong work ethic. From the age of 14 she worked, first in shops, then holiday camps and eventually the local radio station.
“I had what I needed – good schools, a car – but my social life was not that of a debutante,” Linda, 58, says. “My friends and I were not party girls. We liked hanging with my parents and going out for dinner.
“Did I love clothes? Yes, I was a fashionista from early on.” But everything changed when her father died in 2003. Having already lost her mother to cancer, she became the heiress to the Perillo fortune, with trustees controlling all the money.
“There was a fortune I could not touch or even get a screenshot of unless someone else told me I could. I was told how much of it I could see or use and on what.” She’d never been taught to be frugal and admits she was not careful with money. And she had eight children.
“I gave money away to make others happy all the time,” she says. “She poured money into lessons, travel and experiences for her children. Like my mother groomed me, my kids needed to stand out and show privilege.”
She built a large home on land her father gifted her. “He was so proud and excited to give me a McMansion across the street from where I grew up,” she remembers.
But her dream home became a nightmare and the house became a money pit. She was taken advantage of by contractors and became lost in huge repair bills.
“I received twenty thousand a year for repairs on a house that needed twenty thousand a month to keep it alive.” Then, when her second marriage ended in October 2020 after nineteen years, she found herself in the red.
She was exhausted and terrified and struggling with huge tax bills she did not expect and struggled to keep up with payments to people who worked on the house and remembers one terrifying moment came when a young landscaper and his father arrived at her door demanding money.
“I wanted to vomit. I was paralysed with fear,” she remembers. And then her card started to be refused.
“I have eight kids, six of whom are still dependent, and I struggle daily with the embarrassment, the anxiety, and heartbreak of not being able to send my kids to school with proper clothes, lunch or supplies,” she says.
“It’s the withholding that causes the anxiety. Without therapy, I would have ended my life because I thought I was failing my kids.”
But Linda has kept going because she could not bear to let her children see her collapse. She dressed every day even when she could not afford new clothes.
There were moments when she was down to her last fifty dollars and still needed to buy a three hundred dollar textbook for school, so she pawned jewellery to keep them afloat.
“By 52, I was broke,” she says. Not simply short of money but worn down emotionally and physically. At her lowest she wrote a suicide letter, but she realised she couldn’t leave her children. “Financial hardship is hell, especially when you are providing for a family,” she says.
Ironically, she has money, she is just unable to access it because it is controlled by trustees. “I am a prisoner of my own money, controlled by institutions and strangers. It’s considered a ‘discretionary trust’. Simply put, if the trustees don’t like or cannot relate to your ‘ask’, without any reason given, you cannot have your money.
“Even the monthly distribution can be cut according to the agreement – not the will my father set forth – the agreement with the trustees, if I find employment. I receive a monthly distribution (about several thousand) which has been the same amount for almost five years, barely cutting it to take care of my family despite many attempts to sit down and change it.
“We have a decent home, owned by the trust, but we cannot fix it or decorate it. It is falling apart, and I have had no dishwasher since I moved in three years ago.
I do not qualify for welfare or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program because on paper, it looks like I have a lot of money. And I am not allowed to have a part time job, or the trust can cut off my distribution.”
Once dressing in luxury clothes and having regular beauty and hair appointments, Linda now shops at Shein. “I found great drugstore makeup instead of going to Sephora. I kept myself whole with little tweaks.”
Linda has found happiness, marrying contractor Patrick, who is younger than her, in January 2024 and has written a book about her experiences. “I am now a published author and stay-at-home mom. I am not where I wanted to be financially at this point. But I keep going through hope and prayer. I will keep fighting and working”, she adds.
Linda is author of Your Payment Method Has Been Declined is now available to purchase on Amazon.
