One year ago today: December 12, 2018, the actual decision.
Five years ago today: December 12, 2014, tastes like pita pizza.
Nine years ago today: December 12, 2010, Kolb Nature Center
Random years ago today: December 12, 1996, my 26 year-old erosion theory.
Who likes paperwork? I do, so I wont ask a show of hands. I had things to do but instead I took the afternoon off and helped Agt. R catch up on his paperwork. The guy is no better at keeping records, but I seem to have got him in the habit of making his weekly mortgage deposits. He hasn’t deeloped the knack of which papers and letter [mail] are important. I assign him that as homework so he knows how costly it is to go looking for misfiled documents. I left him on his own since August. As long as he makes those deposits, I can keep him on course. But I can’t touch the tough fact that if he does not increase his payments, he is into the house payments until he turns 81. He is gaining less than $50 per month in equity off a payment almost eight times that.
That’s why today’s picture above the fold is the tail end of a mortgage chart that ends in 2052. These are his actual figures. This represents what happens to people’s lives when they borrow money. They are no longer free to make any wise decisions they are otherwise capable of. This spreadsheet is my handiwork, I do not trust commercial software in such cases. I’ve been programming these formulas for 39 years, starting with Visicalc and before that with a calculator, before that by hand. This was the business I tried to start in 1984 but no bank managers could understand what I was creating. I know whoever ran the numbers on this latest mortgage doesn’t have a clear grasp of annual percentage rate. Later, I’ll look and speak up only if it is in our favor.
To complicate matters, the mortgage was reassigned in June while I was away. The payments have been made because he knows the holy terror that will crash upon him otherwise, the lender is a known foreclosure mill. But he cannot react to any new deadlines or even a late fee without it throwing his whole finances off kilter.. Sure enough, I arrive to find he is being billed for an extra $1,049.00. He saw it but felt as helpless as most people against their mortgage “provider”. Not me. Tomorrow we find out what the deal is with that. I’m sure there’s an explanation, the problem is those people are not providing it. On this $48,000 mortgage, the amount paid including escrow is $175,000 over the maximum 33 years legal for a personal loan.
Because I can, I’m going to insist from this point onward that he don’t just hand me his bank statements, but that he mark them first. I call it ‘notarizing’, I want a circle around the date, the period covered, the beginning and ending balances, and his initials beside each check as confirmation he wrote it. There are no problems, except that he is not reading his own statements. It does not help that credit union statements are notoriously bad.
[Author's note: be aware that most of America's "wealth" is based on real estate, a concept inherited from England, an island nation where every square inch is owned and taxed by somebody not you. There is another looming real estate crisis because there are no jobs left in America that pay enough for the average person to buy the average house. They must borrow money which is valueless, and create the value by paying it back with interest. It's a deadly embrace that will eventually burn itself out.]
Houseboat, southern India.
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Remember this from last year? Around this time, I attended the concert at Sacred Heart and this was the wall with special effects. I was at that time only learning to produce gifs and lamented I could not display the movement. Knowing this at the time, I was not too careful with the camera work. The scene changes in a rainbow of colors but that didn’t pick up too well. Here is the loop showing the laser dots, I can’t remember if they are stars or snowflakes or just there. Hope you like it.
I’m going to give you another example of how sub-education works at the millennial level. What is sub-education, somebody yelled. It’s a word I created to define the system where people are taught that knowing where to look something up is the same as spending years training your brain to think. The hitch is, of course, that what they are looking up is usually as contaminated as their own thinking. Result? Truth by majority rule. It involves my phone minutes. I get 450 minutes per month, after which I cannot make outgoing calls for around a week, and after that, no incoming either. I have that window to top up my account.
However, majority rules that Mexico, Canada and at times Hawaii and Alaska are not in North America. So I put an extra $10 in my account as reserve for times I have to call there. Also, I often pay two months in advance. So there can be up to $50 in that account not part of the monthly plan payment. But guess what? No matter how many times it happens, when my minutes run out, they dip into that reserve at up to 15 cents per minute. As it happened, I got stuck on hold by the bank for 222 minutes. That cost me dearly. No matter how many times I disable that feature, the millennial phone eventually goes back to doing that. I’ve lost around $300 over the years from that.
I have a theory on that. The education system of today does not adequately teach that there was life before computers. Hence, every shave-head that comes along thinks every problem is new and has a software solution. They never learn that the problem is likely ancient and has been solved before. Rather than look back in time for that solution, they try, in their own limited ways, to program an app. The result is dozens of apps that sort of work, but none that solves the problem. This is why the US nuclear launch codes were kept on 9” floppy disks until the recent and scary move to Chinese chips. The DoD is also staffed by millennials these days who fancy they are clever enough that the IoT hackers can never infiltrate their software.
ADDENDUM
Another quirk of mortgage repossession outfits, I think. It’s not my industry, so I’ll make the assumption they don’t like City Hall. Why? Because if they intend to repo a property, they have an interest in making sure there are no property tax liens and such attached. Over time, they would learn which bills to pay to protect the clear title they are after. My problem with that is it leaves the guy paying the mortgage out of the loop. It appears as a fee tacked on to the monthly statement. I went over the fine print and all that shows is “Corp Adv Disb”. Fifteen bucks here and there, it adds up.
So today I attempt to find out what it is for, and whether the fees are disputable. I predict an uphill fight with the bureaucrats, but unless there is a law saying it must be paid, we won’t agree. And if there is a law, I want a breakdown of each fee in advance and in writing. In plain English writing.
Ha, my old band, the five-piece, has another new bass player. I follow because I warned them that would happen. You see, they hide the fact they did not intend to play out regularly even if the work was there. The main obstacle was the lead player’s job at a studio where he worked permanent nights. He would not play a gig unless it paid more than taking the shift off. The drummer was the mouthpiece of that band and considering the barrier that exist with the guitar, he had nerve telling me I was not a serious musician.
Last, after a 16 year interlude, I’ve received an Xmas card in the mail. I will display it alone, not like some on a string with all the cards collected over time. One card, and it came with gifts. A box of markers, a bar of soap, and a Doctors Without Borders, a Mercator projection of the world, with Greenland twice the size of Europe.
