So La Maya e-mails to report the latest astonishment: When La Bethulia sold the rental house she owned down near M’hijito’s house, she called the insurance company that issued policies on that house and on two other houses they own, one of them free and clear, and asked them to cancel the insurance on their former possession. Time passes.
La Maya gets a letter from the credit union, which owns the mortgage on their house here in town: they have no proof of hazard coverage from the insurer.
Bet you can see where this is going, eh?
She calls AAA Insurance and discovers that instead of canceling the policy on the rental, they canceled the policy on their residence! The house hasn’t been insured since last October!
Moving on… I decide to drop by Lowe’s while I’m cruising around. As I arrive at the right turn into the parking lot, I see an old guy walking along the sidewalk. He’s going to get to the mega-driveway into the vast parking lot before I do.
So of course I slow down and stop so he can walk cross the driveway, holding up traffic behind me.
He ambles across the blacktop. Gets about three-quarters of the way to the other side and…stops.
Looks like he’s going to turn around and go back.
No.
He circles around a couple of times like a dog getting ready to lie down.
Then he decides to walk into the parking lot, headed toward the Lowe’s entrance…right straight up the middle of the drive. Now he wanders around, blocking the entry, so there’s no way to get into the lot without running him down.
A serious temptation…
Speaking of La Bethulia’s rental house, I see by Trulia that the people who bought it last October did a modicum of fix-up — installed some Saltillo tiles and upgraded the stand-alone studio so it could in theory be used for a rental — and then sold it for exactly what they paid for it!
Why?
An acquaintance who earns his living as a financial adviser recently opined that you don’t pay taxes on Social Security. Well, no. Not if that’s all you’re living on. But if you have the kind of investment income his customers do and you take that advice to heart, you could be in for a surprise.
Whaddaya think? Do we live in a Monty Python show? Or is it a Kurt Vonnegut novel?
Well, the reported selling price doesn’t show concessions that are given during closing, so maybe the guy got cash back at closing when he bought the place to where he still could have come out ahead. Even so, it wouldn’t have been by much.
Well, that could be. When La B and La M bought the place, as I recall, they got a concession for roof repair. I think. Something along those lines.
Fixing that studio so that it could accommodate a renter — it already had a bathroom, so all that was needed would’ve been to install a counter with a sink and a stovetop and then put a refrigerator in there — should have hugely upped the value of that place. When my son was renting to a roommate inside the house, he was getting $300 a month, plus the roommate covered the utility bills. A separate studio large enough to accommodate a single adult or a parent with one child would rent for at least $500, which would go a long way toward defraying the mortgage. Rentals for the 1302-sf houses in the neighborhood are now about $1,000 a month, so in theory if you could buy the thing outright, you could have a nice source of cash flow.
Ack! I would have freaked out when I figured out that they cancelled the wrong policy! I hope it all works out for her…
She was pretty exercised.
They tried to blame it on her, but she was able to prove, easily, that the cancellation of the correct policy was requested. That knocked the customer disservice rep off right off her high horse.
“Hard to catch a falling knife”….an old saying in a down real estate market. Sounds to me like your friend’s buyers bought into the belief that the market has bottomed…invested and then saw that the market had not bottomed. This has been the most vicious market I have ever encountered and the rental market is not fairing any better. To be clear if a rental applicant tells me it’s raining….I go out side and look up. It’s that troubling…terrible credit….terrible rental history….and the blame is ALWAYS placed on someone else….
It was even worse than that, jestjack. The house was purchased to rent to a down-in-luck relative who…uhm, shall we say, demonstrated WHY she was down in her luck. It turned into an expensive and heart-breaking disaster. La B was grateful to be able to sell the house, after an expensive clean-up and repair bill, for what she paid. Now as to why the current owners are selling it for the same price: ?????