Use the proceeds to rent a very small place and try very hard to get another job. Cut down costs to the bone asap.
If your mother has been working there for 20 years she should be entitled to some severance package.
Do not borrow money or otherwise increase the debt to plug the hole, that way lies madness.
The rest is too vague to be able to give you any actionable advice or even options.
> She could sell the house at 5% below market
that should make the sale go through quickly.
> Use the proceeds to rent a very small place
and try very hard to get another job.
Cut down costs to the bone asap.
> If your mother has been working there for
20 years she should be entitled to some
severance package.
Did I say that he, the company owner, is also a relative of ours? You can imagine how twisted the whole situation is.
That's a cool idea. On of the easiest that comes to mind would be chopping Photoshop files for Wordpress themes or HTML/CSS templates - it might seem somewhat daunting but if you gave her a starting point she would basically just have to cut and paste into the right parts a lot of the time. Even though there are tons of people already doing it I suspect that finding and partnering with a good designer would still be quite profitable. Depending on her English skills, another option would be getting into SEO - there's still a lot of room for growth in that market and the technical requirements can sometimes be fairly minimal. Copywriting might be an applicable related field, whether in her native language or by offering translation services from English to her native language (obviously depends on her English reading and what her native language is).
she's a financial director [I dunno what they call this position] in the biggest company in the city
A more industrious option might be to try leveraging your combined experience. There are endless opportunities for providing very basic and extremely niche enterprise apps which pay pretty nicely. She may have some ideas in this regard related to her job, either for an application that would make a common task easier or that would just compete with a complicated app. One of my favourite models is to compete with a complicated ancient piece of enterprise software by reducing the feature set and offering it for cheaper. The trick is to keep things extremely simple.