Tag Archives: house

With my pants on…

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Financial Advisor: You had a good tax shelter in the house you sold. You’ll be fine for 2014, but this year you need to buy a house and get married or the tax man is going to fuck you with your pants on in 2015.

Jeff: Well, at least one of those two things might happen… but could I just buy two houses instead?

The timeline I worked out in my head didn’t have me buying a house in 2015, but given the choice between that and the IRS getting to take me out for a ride, I think I’d better start getting things in order and see if I can rejigger the plan a bit. Buying a house is its own special brand of pain and agony, but re-inflating my debt bubble a few months ahead of schedule sounds infinitely less painful in the long run than taking a short trip down the aisle.

The end of an error…

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Having gotten the final call from my realtor a few minutes ago I can state for the record that as of 5PM EDT today I am no longer a property owner in Memphis, Tennessee. I send the new owners good tidings and best wishes and hope that they have better luck with the place than I did over the last four years… but I’m super glad they didn’t call from the closing table wondering what I was going to do about a dripping gutter on the patio roof. Honest to God after the concessions I gave those two already I would have torpedoed the deal at closing just as a matter of principle. I’m glad that between their relator, mine, and the closing attorney they were able to talk them out of that particular course of action.

What I can tell you tonight with certainty is if there’s anything harder than selling a house long distance, it’s probably being an absentee landlord. Like grad school, though, I suppose it’s only a lot of work if you actually do it. God knows I did the work… an entirely new driveway, rerun sewer pipe from the house to the street, every painted surface inside and out redone, tile, backsplashes, tripled the size of the patio and roofed over the whole thing, and more work on the interior than I want to mention or even think about at this point. It’s all their egg to suck now.

Although I’m not quite out of the landlord business, the one that kept me awake at night is now a thing of the past. Let it stay there, ending the longest running and most expensive error of my life to date. Consider that lesson well learned.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. Meeting prep. My feelings about meetings are fairly well known and not at all surprising. As wonderful as the average meeting is, the time wasted just sitting in them isn’t the only thing that fuels my discontent. The real problem is everyone – and I mean everyone – seems to look for excuses to have a call a meeting. It’s like what alleged professions do to kill time when they’re bored or lonely. Add to that people’s natural tendency to take Mondays and Fridays off and most meetings stack up like cordwood on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The issue then becomes the inordinate amount of time a poor simple soul then needs to spend just to find and reserve an empty room that has all the required audio/visual bells and whistles. Getting that process done from start to finish usually takes two or three times as long as the meeting itself. To add insult to injury about 30% of the time once you’ve wasted half the day just getting the room itself, the crazy bastards that set up the meeting in the first place cancel it – or worse – they change the time, which leads directly into an endless cycle of wash, rinse, and repeat. The whole thing is maddening.

2. It could be worse. People who comment “it could be worse” as a response when situations go bad clearly miss the point. Of course it could be worse. You can always hit rock bottom and then start digging. Just because you can, however, doesn’t mean you should. Just because it’s not as bad as the worst possible scenario doesn’t mean it’s good and it sure as hell not something to be chipper about. Asshat.

3. Bad investments. I bought a house in December 2007. A month later the bottom fell out of the real estate market… and then proceeded to keep falling for the next four years before leveling off. You might have heard something about it on the news for the better part of the last decade. It’s only been in the last year that there’s been any progress towards clawing back a little of that value. It’s too little, too late. Even with the barking dog neighbors on one side and the regularly evicted neighbors on the other, I liked my house. I wish I could have boxed it up and moved it north with me. Instead it’s just sitting down there being a bad investment, bleeding me a few hundred dollars at a time. As much as I hate to admit the mistake – and making permanent the loss incurred – I’m ready to call it what it is, take my lumps, and move on expeditiously. What I lose in cash flow surely will be offset by the removal of the damed albatross from around my neck.

Light, gas, and water…

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With the potential future sale of Casa de Jeff de Cordova, one of the myriad of pain in the ass things to do is transfer the light, gas, and water service back into my name. That should be easy enough to settle with a phone call to the intrepid people at Memphis, Light Gas, and Water except of course that nothing that needs doing is ever actually easy.

mlgwlogo_aIt seems that the bill from the last month I lived in Memphis was never actually paid and has been sitting in their delinquent account file for the last 3+ years just waiting on the moment I would call to make it right. We’ll forget for a moment that I never actually received a bill for this amount and that as far as I can tell, no effort was made to send it to my forwarding address. I’ll take the burden of responsibility for that. Fine.

Now, these many years later, here I am attempting to make good on my public debt. In speaking to the customer service agent, I’m told that the only way to pay a bill in the delinquent file is to present myself at the offices of Memphis, Light Gas, and Water to genuflect and hand unto them cash, a money order, or a cashiers check for the princely sum of $110.87. No payment by phone. No payment online. Only hand delivery at the office will do with no possibility of exception for those who may now live 850 miles away from that charmed city on the banks of Old Muddy.

I’m trying to get myself right with these guys. All I want to do is give them money. You’d think they might make it easier on a guy than forcing him into a convoluted process that involves overnighting a cashiers check to a realtor he’s never met in person and hoping that she’s able to do the leg work on his behalf. The alternative is a one day round trip flight to Memphis wherein I will spend $1000 in order to pay a $100 debt.

Even sitting here in the comfort of my own rental kitchen, I can’t manage to avoid the utter asshattery of what is clearly demonstrating itself to be one of the world’s foremost bureaucratic organizations. And God knows as a cog in Uncle’s great machine I’m in a position to recognize both asshattery and bureaucracy when I see it.

Default and disfunction…

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Watching the nightly news or reading the newspaper headlines is something of a lesson in dysfunction. If the two major political parties that have run the country for the last 100 odd years can’t come to grips with the fact that the thought of the US Government defaulting on its debt should be unthinkable, perhaps it’s time to consider the value of having either of those parties around. The men who founded this republic literally risked their lives just by signing a document proclaiming themselves free from Great Britain. Today’s politicians, both Republican and Democrat, are so entrenched in ideology and in playing to their base that they seem willing to let the ship of state sink with all flags flying and their hands around each other’s throat. So much for heroics. So much for for their obligation to the republic they were elected to serve.

I’m not a mathematician, but the formula seems obvious. For the staggering debt this country labors under to come down, spending must decrease and revenue must increase. Yes, some social programs will go away and that will hurt some people. Yes, some taxes will go up and that will hurt some people also. It’s going to be painful for many of us to adjust to a world more austere than then one we think we’re entitled to. It was painful for our grandparents, too, when they went though the “economic adjustment” of the Great Depression, but they emerged from it and worse to be recognized as our greatest generation.

Where are our great leaders today? Where’s our FDR with his Hundred Days? Where’s this generation’s Reagan standing toe-to-toe with the Soviet Union? Where’s our Kennedy calling on men to reach the moon? Where’s our Nixon opening China? Maybe such men don’t even exist anymore. Today’s politicians aren’t fit to carry the water for those giants of the 20th century and shouldn’t be in the same history books with the leaders of our distant past like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

This current crisis doesn’t have to end in catastrophe, but only if the men and women we’ve elected start behaving more like statesmen and less like common street thugs. How optimistic are you?

Tenancy…

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The transition from homeowner to tenent hasn’t been what I would call smooth. As a homeowner, I probably established what most would consider slightly exagerated expectations for service and reliability. When things broke, they went to the top of my list of things to fix, I either went to Lowe’s for the appropriate equipment and supplies or called in the trades to get the job done. As a tenant, obviously the process is a little different. I call the property manager and leave a voicemail. I wait a day. Then I call again and follow up with an email. Then I wait a day. Then I call again and usually manage to talk to him on this third attempt where he says “oh yeah, I’m working on that. I’ll be over tomorrow.” And then we wait some more.

As it stands as of this morning, I’m waiting on six different things to happen: 1) The former tenant’s junked Ford Expedition is still sitting in the driveway. That was supposed to be moved out sometime around June 6th; 2) The 19 inch television sitting on the deck that the property manager says he wants to take to his hunting camp. It’s been rained on three times in the last two weeks. Yeah, that will probably still be sitting there a month from now; 3) The wire dog run was supposed to go at the same time he picked up the Expedition; 4) The garbage disposal went out early this week. He still hasn’t acknowledged the messages I’ve sent about that; and 5) The $100 washing machine that he said had been rebuilt will do everything a washing machine is supposed to do… except drain the water once the tub is filled. I left a voicemail about that yesterday, but when I drove by the manager’s place on my way to the laundromat yesterday afternoon his truck and boat were gone, so there’s not much chance he was paying attention to that; 6) The moldy wall has been nicely cut and hauled away – but that leaves the small matter of having a large part of the basement I can’t do anything with until, you know, it has actual walls again.

The actual owner lives in Germany now, so once I dig up his address Monday  morning I’ll get a message off to him. I’ve tried being the good neighbor, but since that doesn’t seem to get results worth a tinker’s damn, I’ll have to start being the sonofabitch neighbor who beats on the letter of the lease. This should be fun.

Back to good…

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Since life is starting to take on some semblance of normalcy again, I thought it was probably time to get back to posting more than whatever passing through wandered into my head. I wasn’t able to get into the trials and tribulations of moving in the level of detail I had hoped to cover, but I think in the next few posts I’ll be able to come up with a nice summary. The fact is, I didn’t remember moving being this traumatic (or time consuming), though in fairness, the last moving from an apartment into a house doesn’t take much effort. Moving into a rental after being use to your own place is a whole different version of complicated… Especially when the place was not quite ready for prime time when you walked in the door. The Previous tenant’s junked out Expedition is still sitting in the driveway waiting to be hauled away. The gas company still hasn’t delivered bottled propane for cooking. And of course there’s always the basement mold issue. I’m doing my level best not to go ape shit crazy about these issues, but I know if either of my properties were ever turned over to a new tenant in the condition this place was in, there would be a property manager looking for a new client. It’s a piss poor business practice and tells me all I need to know about who I’m dealing with.

Thoroughly annoying as those issues are, It’s time to focus on actually going to work tomorrow. No, I haven’t forgotten that I actually came here for a new job… Though that’s sort of ancillary to being back on the East Coast. I haven’t had a “first day” since 2003 so it should be an interesting experience. I’m glad I in-processed last week. At least the agony of the paperwork drill is mostly out of the way.

This old house…

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So far since Monday, I’ve moved into a house that wasn’t completely painted, still had some of the previous tenant’s furniture in the basement, has a junked out Ford Expedition in the driveway, and now has a mold problem in the basement. Roll that into checking in with the new job and trying to sort out a tractor-trailer’s worth of stuff and it’s been trying. Don’t get me wrong, I’m completely grateful to be back in the fold, but a smoother transition would have been a real perk. It won’t seem like much in a few weeks, but just now it’s been a real pain in the ass.

Hunting…

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The house hunt was over before it began. A few weeks ago I spotted a place online (thanks Craigslist) and through the good graces of family in the area, was able to have it checked out in advance. It’s not palatial and is hard to compare to my own house that time and money were poured into, but it’s four walls, a roof, and enough fencing to keep the dogs contained. It’s in a subdivision sufficiently rural that i can see why they call it Ceciltucky. That, at least, was exactly what I was looking for after five years inside the Memphis city limits. In most respects the term “serviceable” comes to mind.

I’m not in love with the place, but it’ll make a good jumping off point for my reentry period. I’ll pick up the keys Sunday and hope that a truckload of stuff will follow shortly behind me. It will be nice to start seeing what the new normal looks like.

Sometimes…

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The worst part about blogging, aside from the unforgiving bouts of writers block, is the inevitable moments when there are a lot of things banging around between the ears, but not one that’s quite ready to be rereleased out into the blogosphere on it’s own. Nothing earth shattering – no news on the hiring freeze, no real leads yet outside DoD, but the faintest flicker of hope that after there’s an actual budget things might start moving again – though there will be no breath holding on that coming true.

Outside of that, it’s spring in West Tennessee. I’m ignoring house cleaning in favor of yard work, and that’s generally a good thing except for the coating of dust, dog hair, and pollen that seems to be collecting on everything inside. Maybe I’ll get around to dealing with that at some point. Or better yet, maybe I’ll get around to hiring a cleaning to come in and give the place a once over from time to time.

Not much of a post, right? Stream of consciousness is fun. Maybe next time I’ll be back to ranting and raving