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No Longer Ready to Retire
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"Do you remember how bad the '80s were?" Jodie Lee asked her husband Friday evening, speaking of a time when interest rates were sky-high and seeking the balm of perspective as they sat in the bleachers at their youngest son's high school soccer game in Rockville.
Then she answered her own question: "If you had a 10 percent mortgage, you were doing great."
They've talked about their options: If things get worse, Jodie could go back to work. They could limit their youngest son's college choices to exclude high-priced private schools. The kids could take out student loans.
The son of Chinese immigrant restaurant owners who couldn't pay his tuition, Lee carried about $25,000 in debt coming out of dental school. "I'm not really big on that," he said. "But we'll do what we have to do."
-- Dan Morse
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For seven years, Eliot F. Battle, 52, a Harvard-trained dermatologist, has been beautifying the faces of the District's affluent and elite. And in each of those years, he said, his business -- a Botox, skin treatment and plastic surgery business -- has grown by 25 percent.
Ever since they opened Cultura Cosmetic Medical Spa in Northwest Washington -- a doctor's office with a spa environment and retail storefront that specializes in beautifying ethnic skin -- Battle and his partner have had ambitious plans to expand. This year, they had hoped to open offices in Atlanta, Chicago and New York.
Instead, as customers have begun to limit or increase the length of time between treatments, Battle has halted expansion plans and taken defensive measures to shore up existing business.
His firm has gone from being the darling of Wall Street, fielding calls from venture capitalists eager to throw down money to help them grow, to seeing operations such as theirs across the country go out of business.
"We're getting calls on a monthly basis from other med spas asking us if we can buy them out," he said. "We decided we need to buckle down our ship's hatches."
After last week, Battle said he will be grateful if his Wisconsin Avenue practice grows a modest 5 percent this year. He still plans to give his 24 employees a bonus. It will just be smaller.
-- V. Dion Haynes and William Wan
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