Sad Endings

So this week we learned that the mortgage company again denied the short sale on our house.  Why?  Because we have a "huge surplus" (their exact words) in our income.  I got this news from a Wells Fargo drone and my jaw dropped.  Huge surplus?  What were they talking about?  I tried to get more information, but the drone didn't have any.  All she could (or would) tell me was that the investors who held our mortgage had denied the short sale because of this surplus income.

"So rather than take the short sale and get a large chunk of money," I said, "you guys would rather foreclose and get nothing?"

"Yes," she said.

Upset, I hung up and called our realtor M---- to tell her what had happened.  I was wondering if there were more ways to fight it, but then M--- said, "I know what's going on."

The investors, she said, bought foreclosure insurance on our house.  If the house goes into foreclosure, the insurance company pays them an enormous amount of money, more than the house is worth.  Way more than a short sale.

"They get more money out of a foreclosure than a short sale," M--- said.  "They're lying about seeing a surplus.  They're just manufacturing excuses because they want to foreclose."

This, of course, is the exact practice that created and destroyed the housing bubble in the first place.  Mortgage companies encouraged people to buy houses they couldn't afford, bought foreclosure insurance on them, and sat back to wait for the inevitable.  Kala and I didn't buy a house we couldn't afford or have an adjustable rate mortgage, but we did have to sell the house due to divorce and job, and the effect was the same.  (And if the mortgage companies hadn't created a housing bubble, we would have been able to sell the house normally just fine.)  This practice should never have been legal, but it was, thanks to corporate lobbying.

What really bothers me is that I easily spent 40 or 50 hours on the phone with Wells Fargo trying to arrange the short sale.  I talked to brokers and drones, I wrote financial reports, I copied and faxed paperwork.  M--- did the same.  We had a BUYER who WANTED the house and who waited months for it, thinking she was set for it.  All this work and aggravation could have been avoided if Well Fargo had simply said, "Look, we aren't going to authorize a short sale ever because we stand to gain more from foreclosure." 

I wouldn't have been HAPPY about it, but M--- and I could have avoided hours and hours of work.

And yet there are still people who believe that corporations have people's best interests at heart, and we don't need regulation or unions?  Some people are stupid as chickens that walk into a lion's cage.

Today I rented a truck and drove down to the house in Ypsilanti with the boys and my mother-in-law following.  Kala had left behind some stuff because she couldn't be bothered to remove them, and there were other bits that we'd left in the house so it wouldn't be labeled "abandoned."

We loaded what we wanted into the truck, including a brand new refrigerator.  See, the fridge we had died mere weeks before the boys and I moved up to Ypsi and we bought a new one because we needed to ensure the house remained attractive for a buyer.  If we'd've known it didn't matter, we could've gotten Kala a dorm-sized one to last her instead of a full-sized thing.  No way was I leaving a brand new refrigerator there.  Sasha and I put it on the truck, and I'm going to put up a sale notice on Craig's List.

I kept having to stop myself from telling the boys not to track dirt and mud through the house.  It didn't matter anymore.  It didn't matter if we dinged or scratched the walls getting the last pieces of furniture out.  I thought about smashing mirrors and fixtures, but in the end I was too tired.

I felt sad and angry about the way this whole thing turned out.  The loss of the sale and the foreclosure and the divorce are all wrapped up into one giant package. 

I went into the basement and shut off the electricity and furnace.  I don't care if the pipes freeze--it's not my house.  It was like shutting off part of my past.  I stood in my empty office for a minute and remembered all the stories and novels I created there.
 

Table Rearrangements

When we got home with the truckload of stuff, we had to do some rearranging.  I'd brought home our old dining room table and the chairs.

When Kala got hired as a teacher aide, we bought a new dining room table and chairs.  They're bar height and look cool, but we very quickly discovered the table is extremely impractical.  The chairs are uncomfortable, and Maksim's feet don't even reach the rungs.  Plus the thing was overpriced and underconstructed.  In other words, it was cheaply made.  Two of the chairs partly broke within the first month.  I grew to hate the set fairly quickly, but we'd paid a fair amount for it (another thing I hated) and we kept using it.

Once we got to Wherever, the awful table went into the dining room.  The kitchen, however, has a breakfast nook in it.  At Ikea I bought a regular-height table and chairs and put it there.  (All hail Ikea, goddess of furnishing divorced men's apartments.)  It's a little small, but much cozier, and the boys and I eat all our meals there.  We rarely use the dining room table.

Kala resurrected the old, scarred dining room table to use for herself in the Ypsilanti house but didn't take it with her when she left for Arizona.  I moved it up here with all the other stuff and started rearranging.

I took the leaf out of the hated dining room table and banished it to the corner of the dining room.  Then I took Ikea table out of the kitchen and put it behind the love seat, at the dividing line between the living room and dining rooms.  (We actually have a great room, with a living room area and a dining room area set off from one another by the furniture.)  The old table I put into the kitchen.  It's a little bigger and easier to eat at.  Now we have a decorative table in the dining corner, a homework and game table near the living room, and a nice-sized eating table in the kitchen.

Of the kitchen table, Mackie said, "Yay! Now it's like we're at home."