Coffee heat rising

Foreclosed: Postscript

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Rumor has it that Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum has already been auctioned off. A neighbor called one of the numbers on his FSBO sign and was told the house just sold for $192,500.

If that’s true, it’s a disaster for me:just before the bubble started to inflate,I bought my home for $232,000. If Dave’s pigsty sold for any such price, it means my house is now worth less than I paid for it.

On the other hand, why do I doubt this story? Let me count the ways:

  • No real For Sale sign ever went up.
  • No “Foreclosed” stickers ever appeared on the doors or windows.
  • No “Auction” sign was posted.
  • Dave has been out of the place for less than a week.
  • Houses in the neighborhood, even deeply discounted for-sale-by-lender houses, have sat on the market for weeks and months without moving; it’s unlikely Dave’s would have sold in less than a week.
  • As anxious as banks are to unload distressed properties, it’s unlikely that they’d let it go for $65,000 less than a similarly trashed house went for just a couple of weeks ago.

No. This story smacks of disinformation.

Well, we’ll find out soon enough. The place is not habitable as it is, so if someone bought it, we’ll soon see workmen swarming around. With any luck, maybe a speculator will clean it up and resell it at the market price (which still exists, after all).

My estimate for clean-up and updating: about $60,000. Thirty thou’ on the lowest end; sixty thou if you wanted to do a decent job of it.

  • Clean garbage and weeds off lot: $800
  • Disassemble and haul junk storage structures, the large, dangerously decrepit wooden children’s climbing set, and other large pieces of junk: $800
  • New air conditioner: $5,600
  • Reroof: $5,000
  • Replaster large pool and replace decrepit, probably broken pool equipment: $10,000
  • Scrape and paint exterior: $1,500
  • Paint interior: $2,000
  • Recarpet: $3,000
  • Stovetop: $800
  • Refrigerator: $1200
  • Dishwasher: $500
  • Cleaning service: $200 (no one in her right mind would clean out the sty for less than that!)

There’s the bare minimum: about $30,900. That would make the place rentable, but not for much. Now let’s make the place saleable for a decent price:

  • Wall oven: $1,200 (viewed through the haze of a filthy window, the oven looks relatively new and might stay if it’s functional and can be cleaned)
  • New cabinetry and countertops: $15,000

Welcome, MSN Smart Spending Readers!

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I’m very flattered to have a post featured on MSN’s money blog, Smart Spending. Welcome to all you readers who have come here from that site. Please make yourself at home. The pages listed on the left describe how and why Funny about Money came to be.

The blog originated on iWeb last December, but as it got larger I decided to migrate to WordPress. That move is still a work in progress: every archived post has to be individually copied & pasted, a time-consuming project. So check back occasionally to see if any “new old” material has come up.

I hope you enjoy Funny and will subscribe on your RSS feeder. —vh

Foreclosing on the neighbors

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In an odd way, the foreclosure of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum amounts to a kind of foreclosure for the neighbors, too. There’s the obvious effect that when the lender unloads Dave’s house at a bargain-basement price, our property values will drop into the basement, too. Actually, they were already headed for the basement: now they’ll just ride on down to the sub-basement without getting off the elevator.

But there’s a much larger effect: Dave has been financially distressed since he divorced a year or so ago, and his emotional depression has shown in a sharp increase in his native slovenliness. He never was into anything that might be called “pride of ownership,” but over the past year, his normally trashy lot has become a real eyesore. Also, as it develops, Dave has been cultivating a public health hazard.

SDXB came by this morning, and out of curiosity we visited the abandoned house. Both gates into the backyard, from the front and from the alley, are unlocked and easy to open. The backyard is chuckablock full of debris, old chemicals, bottles of pool acid, old batteries, and stuff highly hazardous to kids. We have, for example, these fine gasoline cans, located behind an open tool shed replete with bottles of old insecticides.

Mighty nice, eh? How would you like your kids to get into this stuff?

Ah, yes. Then we have the issue of the swimming pool. The pool has been drained; evidently has stood empty for quite some time. Though it’s enclosed within a wrought-iron fence, it’s easy to enter: the fencing ends at a screened porch whose two exterior doors have been ripped off, creating a nice corridor through which the curious may pass without obstruction.

Once you’ve passed through the aluminum structure, where, by the way, you’ll find a heavy-duty battery charger with enough juice to flash off big sparks and give you (or the kiddies) one heck of a zap, you come to this:

And at the bottom of this concrete-lined hole in the ground you find a collection of lost toys marinating in a fine little mosquito-breeding Okeechobee Swamp:

It explains where all the nasty little biters have been coming from for the past several seasons: straight from casa David to su casa.

Maricopa County, where we have been dwelling cheek-by-jowl with Dave, has a growing problem with West Nile virus, a disease carried by mosquitoes. And as we know, mosquitoes breed joyfully in standing water. Every year more and more people come down with this ailment, and every year we read of several deaths related to it. The most vulnerable to serious complications are the elderly.

Dave’s next-door neighbors are in their nineties.

I am in my sixties; many of the locals who have died of this disease were between 60 and 65. The most recent death I’ve read about was of a man in his 80s. My house and yard have been overrun with mosquitoes for months. This, evidently, is where they’ve been coming from. My house is clear across the street—imagine what the mosquito swarms have been like for the old folks next door to Dave!

After you’ve enjoyed the scenic view, don’t miss Dave’s old battery collection on your way out:

Maybe an enterprising kid can get a little extra mileage out of one or more of them, using the handy-dandy battery charger left on the back porch.

And as we say good-bye to Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, we pass by the famous Weed Haystack, still gracing the front driveway as it has from time almost immemorial:

Dave's Weed Haystack

Always visible from the street and from front yards in all directions, this fine landmark remains as a symbol of everything Dave has done for his friends and neighbors in Royal Oaks.

Hm. Maybe I could sell guided tours.

Long before Dave’s lender foreclosed on him, Dave foreclosed on the neighbors. He foreclosed on our property values, on our safety, and on our health. I guess we have to say thank you to the irresponsible and unethical lenders who forked out $320,000 in loans against a property worth about half that and handed it over to a recently divorced man who hasn’t held a regular job in years. If they hadn’t sunk him over his head in debt, Dave and his pet mosquitoes would have stayed in that house forever.

Luddite Speaks: Deep-six gadgetry

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So there I was, a creature from the Cretaceous, hanging out with a much newer model in the Sprint store. And what a scene it was for these prehistoric eyes: mobile doo-dads from here to the horizon!

Friend wanted a Blackberry. She had inquired across the street at Best Buy, where she was advised that because of the contract she had with Sprint the coveted gadget would not cost her a couple hundred bucks but something over $700. So it was away to the Sprint store, therein to ask if anything could be done about the expensive mobile phone that worthy corporation had sold her a few months before, which was already showing signs of decrepitude.

While we waited for her to be told what a joke that idea was, we overheard two conversations.

One woman stood at the counter and argued, ad INFINITELY nauseam, about some problem she had encountered with Sprint’s service. Unclear exactly what it was, but whatever: Sprint was having nothing of any schemes to accommodate her. She argued forever, always assuring them that paying the exorbitant charge they were trying to rip from her was no problem, but the point was that they could do better. She was agreeable and polite and endlessly persistent.

All the time she was dickering with the sales staff, another woman talked into the store’s land line, trying to explain the injustice of some rip she had been unfairly charged, or so she said. The Sprintoid on the other end of the line wasn’t budging. She, like her counterpart at the front desk, had been talking at the time we entered, and both women argued their cases for a good half-hour while we stood there waiting for service. No cooperation to speak of was forthcoming.

The cost of the gadgets on display was astonishing. And they do some astonishing things: not only do they let you make an idiot of yourself by yakking while driving or while walking around in public, they connect to the Internet and function like tiny PCs. My friend wanted the Blackberry for a single reason: she wanted a mobile computer that would connect to Outlook, so she could carry her electronically inscribed calendar with her at all times. Ultimately she ended up paying around $260 for this privilege, purchased off the Web since Sprint was no more helpful than Best Buy had been. Add to that the cost of connecting to Sprint, and on and on.

Think of that. Two hunnert and sixty bucks for a calendar. Electronic tethers that guarantee you will never be alone, no matter where you go…

We might say “that will never let you be alone.”

Now that we’re admitting the economy is sinking into “recession” (possibly misspelled with an r instead of a d), at least some of us will need to take stock and consider what costs we can cut. The whole array of mobile gadgets, IMHO, offer rich pickings for those who would like to enrich themselves by spending less on unnecessary stuff.

Where is it written that we have to be “connected” at all times? Hey. We do not live in the Borg! Resistance is NOT futile!

Nothing bad will happen if our friends, business colleagues, and family members have to wait to yak with us until we get to a phone at our office or home.

Little that we do in our daily lives will be changed if we read our e-mails in an hour instead of right this minute, or if we tweet when we reach our desktop instead of off our cell phones.

And who knows? Maybe we could keep track of our appointments in a pocket-sized spiral-bound notebook, overpriced at Target if it sells for a buck and a quarter.

How much electronic junk do any of us really need? And why should we feel we have to carry this stuff around with us everywhere we go? And…more to the point: how much is it costing you?

Fellow frugalists! Cheapskates of the world! Arise and throw off your leashes! Ask yourself how much you really need mobile phones, mobile Outlook calendars, mobile games, mobile computers. Live free! And save a few bucks on principle.

😀

Qwest redux: How do these companies stay in business?

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Oh, God, I hate Qwest!!!!!

How in the name of heaven do these outfits stay in business? I thought the whole idea of breaking the Ma Bell monopoly was to bring us better service! Man. Talk about your unintended consequences.

Well, I do have to admit that Ma Bell’s service was bad. Awful. Though at least a human being answered the phone, it was the biggest pain to have to get on the phone and deal with those people. They were arrogant beyond description, because they didn’t have to treat you decently. You had no recourse. They were the only game in town.

Today you have no recourse, either. I called the Arizona Corporation Commission earlier in the present Qwest fiasco to urge that the company not be granted the rate hike it’s requesting, because the service it provides (or fails to provide) to customers does not justify increasing our bills. I was told that DSL services are completely unregulated. Period. There’s no regulation for DSL! And that, my chickadees, is why you get shafted every time you turn around if you have the temerity to buy in to one of these systems.

Yesterday I opened an envelope from Qworst, expecting the usual monthly statement.

No.

It was a nasty collection letter claiming my bank had bounced a payment for $155.46 (!!!!!) and announcing that Qwest is about to disconnect my phone.

Say what?

In the first place, this charge is incorrect. It includes about $100 for a modem that was never installed but instead was taken back to Qwest by the serviceman whose time was wasted while Qwest was engaged in wasting my time over the DSL flap. One of the endless series of customer disservice people I spoke with over the phone determined that this was an incorrect charge and, after learning that my bill is automatically paid, deleted the $155.46 charge, posted the real amount due (which was $55) to my American Express card, and arranged for regular billing to restart next month. She said no charge was due this month.

In the second place, had Qwest actually billed the credit union, any amount they chose to ask for would have been paid. My account contained $1,600 on the day the monthly charge goes through. Furthermore, because of the late, great PeopleSoft fiasco, in which My Beloved Employer’s newly outsourced payroll contractor took to failing to pay people’s salaries (oops!), I arranged for check-bouncing protection in the amount of a full month’s pay: $3,000. So, Qwest had access to $4,600 on the day its $155 bill was allegedly bounced.

Hm. Considering Qwest’s rampant incompetence, that’s a scary thought, isn’t it?

In the third place, had an automatic charge not gone through, the credit union would have informed me.

The speciousness of Qwest’s statement, then, was even more infuriating than its nasty tone.

So once again I had to get past Qwest’s enraging phone-answering robot, whose “voice” I would very much like NEVER to hear again.

Finally a human answers, a gent who identifies himself as “Brad.”

“Brad” says the bill was cut on the September 16 and I talked with “Amy,” the last Qwest human who deigned to speak with me, on the 23rd. While this may have been true, it skirted the fact that the credit union would have disgorged the $155 automatically had a charge been sent through on the billing date, around October 1. At first he thought maybe they had an incorrect bank routing number, but after some study, he couldn’t see why a bounced transaction notice would have been sent out at all.

He says one of the modems wasn’t credited because John, the dreadlocked but charming repairman, failed to provide a return authorization number. Thus the return didn’t register in the system.

“Brad” finds the $155.46 was deleted on 9/23 and then remarks, about what he’s seeing on the system, “This doesn’t make sense.” He says no late fee should have been issued.

He now adjusts the account and concludes that the account balance is 0 and nothing is owing this month.

I ask if the regular bill would be $86. Amazingly, to figure that out he has to manually add up all the charges. He says the regular bill will now be the same as it was before this time-wasting comedy of errors began.

Dollars to donuts, that isn’t the last we’ll hear of it.

If Qworst paid me for the amount of my time it has wasted, it would owe me about $240. And interestingly, Qworst may not actually be the worst of them all. Go online and check out the reviews of just about any telecom company you choose. Sunday I was at the Sprint store with a friend, where I overheard two women engaged in endless discussion with the staff (one of them had been relegated to a phone—even going in person to the store doesn’t guarantee that you can speak to a human being face to face). Neither of them was getting much satisfaction, though one at least managed to stay calm. The other was furious, and pointed out in barely measured tones that something was wrong with the way Sprint was treating a loyal customer who had paid her bills on time for many a year. As though Sprint gives one thin damn about loyal customers, any more than Qwest does!

We have only our own stupidity to blame for this set of affairs. If “loyal customers” would wise up to the fact that none of us needs a Blackberry or a cell phone or any of this other junk, telecommunication companies would be reduced to having to treat us like human beings to get our business. But because, like the herd of morons telecom executives evidently believe us to be, we stampede to buy every gadget that comes on the market the instant it hits the stores, we get gouged for services and treated like cows.

We should be as ashamed of ourselves as the telecommunications executives and our defanged, castrated government regulators should be.
The Continuing Saga of Qworst
(Notice that this stupid stuff started in August!)

Back again—temporarily?
“We value your business”
Unbundled: Qwest strikes again
What happens when a live Qwest guy shows up
Tune in next week: same time, same place!

Foreclosed!

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Poor old Dave, proprietor of Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, is finally moved out, having spent a week and used the services of three male friends equipped with pickups, a flatbed, and SUVs to haul off his collected junk. He’s posted a do-it-yourself “For Sale” sign in the front yard (“Drastically reduced!”) and ridden off into the sunset, leaving his weed garden behind.

This afternoon some kinda seedy-looking guys climbed over the weed haystack in the driveway to ogle the peeling batten around the eaves. Evidently they were calculating what it would take to revive the decrepit house to its former glory…or at least to rentability. Early in the evening, a father came by in the wake of his toddler’s tricycle. Dad and son broke into the back yard through the side gate and disappeared into the weed jungle. The kid’s trike is gone now, so either they came out and went on their way or the cockroaches carried the hardware off.

Old Dave, as we learned, was foreclosed. My neighbor and I found that out when the notice was mistakenly slapped on her front door instead of Dave’s. He borrowed $320,000 against the place. Zillow values it at around $307,000. Even though it has a pool (soon to be a mosquito pond, no?) and a good-sized corner lot, there’s no chance it’ll fetch that much. Another foreclosure in similar condition around the corner sold for $268,000.

In a way, I’m sorry to see Dave go, despite the mess he lived in. The trashed condition of his property and his habit of parking a used-car-lotful of rolling stock on the front lawn affected the property value of houses all around him, and that was irritating. But at least Dave was quiet. I dread what’s going to end up in that dump next.

O.K. There’s a remote chance someone will buy the house for a song, fix it up, and live in it. More likely, though, some speculator will grab it out of foreclosure, throw a cheap coat of paint on the outside and some apartment-house carpets on the floors, and rent it out. This will add to the already thick population of rentals in the neighborhood. It will join the place that houses Biker Boob, a Hell’s Angel who roars up and down our residential street on his unmuffled Harley and who uses the garage to conduct a shade-tree mechanic’s operation, complete with LOUD heavy-duty shop equipment that he starts up at 7 a.m. every weekend and operates until after 11 at night, and the shack whose out-of-state owner rents to SEVEN unrelated adult men, all of whom park their cars on the front yard and none of whom is interested in hacking back the knee-high weeds on the property.

The other possibility is that the new owner will be yet another of those folks who buys on the cheap, thinking he’s found a bargain, without having a clue to what’s involved in maintaining a forty-year-old tract house. Once they get moved in and discover how much it costs and how much work is involved in taking care of one of these places, they just let it go to pot.

Either way, the result is the same: a run-down house on a run-down lot, dragging down property values in the our little six-square-block development. Add to this recurring phenomenon the City’s kind decision to rip out a whole row of houses to make way for the train tracks, and you can see if you want to move up but stay in town, you’re flat out of luck. There’s no way you can afford a comparable (or even a lesser) house in a better-maintained neighborhood that’s located in the central part of the city. The only way to get back into the middle class is to move way, way out into the sprawl on the outer fringes of the metropolitan area.

You, too, can drive two hours each way to work. You’ll love it. It’s the American way!