I am off to therapy in a little while and have to get cleaned up and be presentable. I am very interested to see how this will go. The incision looks pretty good this morning, I am walking a little better and don’t feel like I need the crutches or the cane. Very liberating.
The problem I am encountering is with the morning story. I need to write each day, and so long as I am shackled to the day job (even as tenuously as this approach to it is) this is the only time available to be free-wheeling. The politics of the moment, though, the astonishing mendacity of the whole process, is getting me down.
I have several correspondents who are fairly doctrinaire right wing. As you know, I am a national security and fiscal hawk, and a social progressive. You can pretty much go right down the list- same-sex marriage, end the war on drugs, choice for women, blah blah blah, and I am there on the side of personal liberty. And having a gun in the bedside table.
I know that puts me halfway to Ron Paul territory, but so be it.
What is actually going on would be mildly amusing if there wasn’t something fundamentally wrong with what is going on. It isn’t the politics that is driving me crazy. The finance mess is what makes it all personal.
For almost my whole life I have been a check-to-check kind of guy. Meeting my obligations, barely, through my military career, and tucking a little aside when I could, only to see it all blow away in the wind with the divorce, with two kids in college.
I get it. Life is about choices. I made mine and I paid for them. Fair deal.
The current small windfall from the estate offered the opportunity to try to fix some structural problems with the real estate end of things as stumble- literally- toward retirement.
To that end, I have been trying to fix my two mortgages and take advantage of the Fed’s current historic low rates. You would think this would be fairly straightforward. I have had five basic mortgages at various times, and refinanced most of them, or taken equity loans against all them. All have been paid ahead of schedule, no missed payments, and never ever late.
I have been inundated with offers to re-fi my VA loan- I just got another one on the phone as I was typing. This appears to be the one lucrative aspect of lending these days, and there is relatively little required in the way of documentation. I got 100% financing on the farm- a good deal, even if I did not quite hit the bottom of the market, and I have had to keep throwing money at principal to keep it above water. The wrinkle was that it had to be my primary residence to qualify for the VA, and you have to have it that way for a minimum of two years.
The Condo then became a second residence, and it was really frustrating. I tried to re-fi the place at least twice, paying cash up front for appraisals that came back somewhere between irritating and depressing.
I actually managed to do so just after the magic two year ownership of the farm. I swapped the “primary residence” stipulation from Culpeper to Arlington and retired the crushing 6.1% interest rate that (with condo fee) resulted in paying around $3,000 a month for the little place.
It was crushing because the original purchase price was set near the top of the bubble. Those sorry criminal screw-ups in Congress, Fannie Mae and on Wall Street lined their pockets as the bubble swelled to bursting, and then re-lined them in the collapse while cynically eliminating their competition and elevating an admitted tax dodger from being Chair of the New York Fed to Secretary of the Treasury.
Not one of those son of a bitches have seen the inside of a jail cell, by the way. Increasingly, it looks like none of them ever will.
It doesn’t look so good over on this side of the fence. The collapse of the bubble has left an astonishing amount of personal wreckage. For a while there, I thought I would never be able to afford to buy a home again. I jumped at the chance to pay $375K for the condo, and then watched in horror as the 80% loan began to sink me underwater as the appraised price sank from the purchase, headed south below the loan amount, and finally last December to $288K. That was, I noted ruefully, a theft of 100% of the imaginary equity, but then of $65K cash out of my wallet. Not theoretical. Real no-shit money.
Oh well, what is a hundred grand between friends like me and Secretary Geithner? It was unpleasant, but I managed to get the condo thing under control, and then turn my attention back to the farm.
Now, of course the banks are now very picky about borrowers, and I suppose that is only fair, though it is disconcerting to see the astonishing amount of paperwork required to demonstrate that I can afford to pay much less per month on a loan in good standing.
I also had to come up with a big chunk of cash to pay down the outstanding balance to show an 80%-loan-to-balance ratio. I am OK with that, but I have provided something north of two hundred pages of documentation to show I can pay less per month. It boggles the mind.
My harried loan officer came back to me daily with demands for additional material: cancelled checks, bank statements, tax returns, trust documents and attestations of good intent. Oh well. The farm is a nice thing and it is worth it. You make your choices, and then meet your obligations, right?
In the meantime, the latest round of Fed rate reductions made re-financing the condo again make sense on a cost-benefit basis.
So I went ahead on two packages of two-hundred plus pages. Mind numbing. Intrusive. Insulting. The latest development yesterday was the delivery of the latest appraisal on the condo: the one in December 2011 was not current enough, so another was ordered and I paid for it.
Some asshole showed up the morning of the power outage to perform it- he may have been cranky, or something, but he was definitely an asshole. He rated the place at $255K, down $28K from the appraisal of last December.
I feel sorry for my loan officer. He is a harried commercial functionary being run ragged by the underwriters at Fannie Mae. Those are the people whose absurd Barnie Frank Loan policies got us in this mess to begin with. He said they could re-finance if I brought around $30 grand to re-fi the condo, and twice that to do the farm.
That is why this is personal. These pricks stole a hundred grand already from me just as if they produced a handgun or tunneled into my bank account in the dead of night. Now they want another hundred.
Personal? You bet. But this is robbery.
It is personal.
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com