Long Beach CPA Loses Home with Business

By destroying her Long Beach home, Hurricane Sandy hit Alice Leybengrub both personally and professionally.

A certified public accountant, Leybengrub had her main office at her home, and business was going great in recent years. She took over a retired accountants practice and her practice nearly doubled. Even though Leybengrub has an assistant, as a small business owner she performs almost every role: from bookkeeper to cleanup crew to office manager. Throughout each year, she works many days and rarely takes time off. Sandy, though, has given her more days off than she expected or wants.

“This has definitely been one unplanned vacation from hell,” Leybengrub told Patch via email on Sunday. “Having to find a safe place for my three-year-old child and family, while also securing an off-site office simultaneously has been nothing short of a miracle.”

In her field, if you don’t work you don’t get paid, she said, and now more than ever she’ll need to earn her money since uncertainty reigns regarding insurance payouts and displacement funds in Sandy’s wake.

“So the faster i can get a place for my family and get my daughter back into day care, then the faster I can get back to work and earn a living for my family and our unforeseen financial needs,” she said.

For now, Leybengrub is staying temporarily with her husband and child at her family’s home in Brooklyn while she hunts for a temporary office on Long Island. Friends are trying to help her find a new place to stay on the island, with the hope that she can move in midweek.

All said, though, Leybengrub still deems herself one of the lucky ones. While Sandy’s surge flooded her home with two-feet of water, some of her neighbors watched their houses burn to the ground.

What has Leybengrub thought about during these trying times? She recalls that her family originally came to America from Eastern Europe and her grandmother would tell her horrible stories of her running for her life from the Nazis, leaving everything behind with no food or shelter. She recognizes that a devastating hurricane can’t compare to the Holocaust, but it nevertheless helps her to understand, even if ever so slightly, her grandmother’s desperation.

“I would never ever ever say that this was anything like it; just the fact that I had a tiny glimpse of how horrible it must have been for them because we never had to experience anything like that thankfully,” she said.

Looking forward, she knows the new year will be a difficult for her and her family. She’ll have to tell her daughter they can’t return home anytime soon. She has to reconstruct her home. And she anticipates battles with insurance companies. There’s also the issue of whether the city she loves can revive itself.

“I hope to one day soon see Long Beach restored to its former glory and be the paradise it once was,” she said.