Who wants to be me?

Well:

Having noticed the small discrepancy in the refinance paperwork, I called the mortgage company and they rewrote the paperwork and sent it to me by way of DHL. Who promptly lost it.

I don’t mean to imply that it disappeared in the system in some DHL terminal, I mean the local driver who dropped it off to what he swears was my house and “left it under the mat or the bushes at the front door”.

I have no mat and no bushes. My front door is behind the gate and NOT accessible from the street.

He delivered it on Friday (by the way, an interesting note: DHL does NOT do receipt signatures for home deliveries), I found out Monday morning when I called the mortgage company to see where they were in the paperwork creation.

Monday, I called DHL and was old the door-mat-bushes thing. Yesterday I called again and they said they would send the driver back to where ever he dropped the package off to retrieve it. At 4PM, I found a note on my gate asking for the package back as it was mis-delivered to me, and needed to be re-delivered to me instead.

So now, my 1)Name, 2)Address, 3) Social Security Number, 4)Annual Salary, 5) Value of my house, 6) Amount in the bank, 7) Employer’s Name and number and my wife’s same information are currently adrift “somewhere” in Phoenix. Anything you would need to know to successfully take my identity is conveniently located in a bright yellow envelope with the words MORTGAGE DOCUMENTS neatly typed on the front.

I also discovered that credit reporting agencies run about a month behind. This means that there is no way to be “pro-active”, I can only wait and allow someone to destroy my good name for a month and try to clean up afterwards.

DHL’s final thoughts on the matter? “Well then, the package is lost, isn’t it?”

red tape, double sticky sided

Well, we got the refinance paperwork back from the lender.  She wrote up the initial loan, the one we decided we couldn’t use, and then rewrote it for this new amount (little more than what we owe - but for a better percentage rate), mailed it to us, and then: …. quit.

 

That’s right, she left the company.  Well, I guess she’s still with the company, but she’s in a different division and moved to another state and ….

 

… and in the meantime, there’s an error on the paperwork.  There is an option to “escrow the property tax and insurance”.  This means that these expenses will be added monthly to the payment, but we’d rather not do that, preferring to pay like we have been for the last ten years or so.

 

They added it in anyway.

 

They did it wrong.

 

Property tax – 8 cents per month.  Insurance – 17 cents per month.  I wish!

 

I finally got a call this morning from the man who is taking our loan officer’s place.  He said that it was a “reminder” so that we would remember to budget for these expenses.  He did, however, admit that the “person who wrote it up”, did it wrong and there should be no expenses listed there.  He’s rewriting it again to remove the twenty-five cent charge and will ship it back out.

 

In the meantime, I got a call from the escrow company working with the bank.  They don’t have a letter from the original company who financed the house.  We dropped them when we got a MUCH better interest rate in 1997, and that original company is no longer in existence.  There is no mention of it on the credit report, there is no mention on the deed, but like a bad rash, it popped up after 10 years.

 

Sigh.  This is becoming a great pain.

Financial House of Cards

I was going to use the analogy of a burst balloon, even found a time-lapse photo of a balloon in the last millisecond of life to further illustrate my point, but that’s just not quite the right image.

 

Our plans didn’t burst in a single, spectacular explosion of hot air and little substance; rather they eroded over the course of five days.  It was more like a berm built up of solid rock and compressed earth that can only withstand the rush of water for so long before collapsing in on its self.

 

In this case it was a steady stream of financial reality.

 

By the time we allowed for the repayment of old loans (in order to afford the new loan), and the other things that we need to get first, there just wasn’t enough left to put into the house to make it worthwhile.

 

I called a couple of general contractors, and the going rate of construction is about $110.00 per square foot.  There wouldn’t have been enough to do nearly what we wanted, so it’s off the books for now.  I spent the last five days angrily trying to hold onto the dream that kept slipping through my fingers bit by bit.

 

Yesterday I went home and actively felt sorry for myself and wallowed in my own despair.  It worked pretty well, surprisingly, as today I seem to have let go of the anger and though I am still very disappointed, I am no longer behaving like a child in a grocery store who was told he can’t have the big box of chocolate.

 

On the brighter side, we are able to refinance at a full percentage lower interest rate, and get enough over to pay off these other loans.  Even with borrowing that much more, we’ll be paying the mortgage about half the amount we’re currently paying the mortgage and the other loans, so we can use that money on the house and  we’ll have enough to remodel the house if we do it slowly and don’t add on.

 

All of our changes (except possibly a patio) will be internal to the tiny little house we currently have.  I’m going to do about 99% of it myself, and farm out only what I have to.

 

The house of my dreams has become the house of my means, but I’m starting to think of it as a giant erector set.  Maybe if I get practiced on this place, I will be better at carpentry, plumbing, electric and so on for that glorious day in the far, far future when I have a real house.

 

So, although the plans have drastically changed, there is still allot of work to be done, and I’ll get some before, during, and after pictures on the off chance there there’s someone out there who might care to see them. 

 

If nothing else, it should provide you with a good laugh at the frustrating messes I can get myself into.  (Something at which I excel)

 

 

Hey, it's coming together, must be time to give up!

OK, well the good news is that we found a lender.  The mortgage people we have now have agreed to refinance the house at a full percent LOWER interest rate. The whole thing is approved and the paper work (they have no local branches) is on its way through DHL.  I sign, return, and, like Wiley E. Coyote, I stand by the mail box until my package from ACME comes from just off-camera.

 

Now I’m thinking maybe I don’t want to do this.  I suppose it could be cold feet, after all, it’s a big commitment, but the truth is that in order to afford the payments on this loan, I have to pay off two old loans – one of these is for the car.

 

Add to this some of the other expenses we need to cover and I don’t know if there’s going to be enough left to put into the house to do half of what we wanted.  Would it be better to wait five years when the other loans are done so as to have more available for the house?  On the other hand, I would actually be paying out less every month once the other two loans are paid off.

 

On the other hand, if I don’t I might not be able meet those other “necessary expenses” at all.

 

On the other hand, there are four fingers and a thumb.

 

Another glitch: while I was writing this, I found out that my designer’s mother may be dying of cancer, so he’s leaving next week to go to her, and his concentration is there (rightfully so!), and he won’t be able to take this on for a while.

 

I called a couple of contractors and found the price per square foot, and I’m probably going to get about half of the addition that I wanted.

 

This is just getting too complicated.

 

I need a nap.

 

Captain Stoic v.s. The Killer Bees

I’m going to step aside from the house improvements for this entry as there hasn’t been any progress anyway.

I had a thoroughly rotten day at work yesterday and was so tired from the events of the week, I was debating on whether or not I wanted to even go to the gym yesterday. I finally figured that I could go and do a little and if I didn’t want to do the full 40 Minutes on the elliptical, I’d just leave whenever I felt like going.

When I arrived at the gym, I got one of my favorite parking spaces: in the shade of the building and right against the side.

I noticed a few people running into the building like they were more than a little anxious to get started, but I really didn’t think much of it. I parked, grabbed my bag and got out of the truck.

I tend to walk rather slowly as a matter of habit and choice. When I need to put on some speed, or when I’m exercising, I’ll get moving, but typically - I saunter. Maybe I trundle. Lumber? Whatever.

As I ambulated down the side of the building, a man ran toward me, flapping his t-shirt and waving his arms like a madman. Before I could react, we’d both turned the corner and he’d pulled his shirt of and was whipping it around. It wasn’t until then I noticed the bees.

Wasps don’t much bother me – I find that if you ignore them, they’ll ignore you. Even Africanized bees, if given a wide enough berth generally won’t attack – the problem with them is that THEY decide what is a wide enough berth – not you.

Yes, these were Africanized bees – the killer bees from Mexico that we’d been warned about for thirty years. They are in Phoenix now, though the strain is diluted from interbreeding with the locals (or so I’m told, I have no personal knowledge of the courtship of bees), they’re still aggressive and rather short-tempered.

The man without the shirt was stung several times, there was another gentleman in the gym who was on the edge of panic and had been stung on the ear – as he made sure anyone nearby had heard.

I hadn’t been bothered until I got near the half naked man with the waving shirt. Even then they only swarmed me, I never got stung.

Several of the little buggers got into the lobby of the gym, a couple entering with two young women. One of the women stood stock-still, and these two bees buzzed her for a moment, grew bored and went other places.

*DING* so, in order to avoid the bees, one must be stoic? For me stoicism is practically a super-power. I decided to stay and workout (for the full time - ½hour on the weights, 40 Min on the elliptical), and at the end I trundled back to the truck through the diminished swarm at my casual lumbering pace.

I was indeed ignored by the little malevolent guided missiles.

I found out what suddenly enraged the bees enough to attack everyone within 100 yards. The gym had called an exterminator who had no training or experience with Africanized bees. This guy was probably ok to spray for termites, but I wouldn’t have trusted him that far.

The hive, by the way, is still in the wall – the very same wall where I had parked.

Figures: even angry bees avoid direct sun in Phoenix.

I may skip the gym today..........