About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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December 22, 2008
I’m still horribly embarrassed about the whole car situation. But I’m dealing with it, and this is what I did:
1. Called my dad and had him authorize me to call the financing company. Very very important: they were refusing to deal with me at all, even with his authorization, until it became clear that they would only get money from me.
2. Took down their phone number, account number, SSN, balance to bring the account current, charges for the towing company.
3. Spoke to the company asking them for the procedure to bring the account current or to pay it off entirely.
A) to bring the account current, the owner must:
i) fax verification of employment/income
ii) fax proof of residence
iii) fax three references, one of which must be a family member not living in the household, listed with names, phone numbers and relationship to owner.
iv) fax proof of insurance
v) send payment of the late balance including a $125 repossession fee via money order or wire from the bank: $1932
vi) pay the towing company ($140 for four business days, Fri-Mon)
B) to pay it off entirely, the owner must:
i) wire the payoff balance (good until 12/29): $5611
ii) wait for the paperwork to be processed and sent to the towing company, then make arrangements for pickup for the company. Also ($140 for four business days, Fri-Mon)
4) Apparently our local police department gets in on the deal and has to issue a release costing another $15 before the towing company in another city will release the car. (Of course, why not?)
Thoughts and other obstacles: the timing of this on a Friday works to the towing company’s advantage because they charge $35 for every day that the vehicle is in their lot.
Just because the financing company says that you have 20 days before the car is moved to the auction lot, doesn’t mean it’s true. If the company has a pickup of other vehicles scheduled before your 20 days are up – and that’s calendar days, folks, not business days – then they’ll take your vehicle as well. The financing company rep warned me of this when I asked her, “is there anything else, at all, you think I should know? I’ve never dealt with this before and want to make sure I cover my bases.”
The towing company only has specific hours for releasing towed vehicles, so if your paperwork and payments don’t hit the financing company, and their paperwork isn’t released and received by the towing company, during the specific window, you wait another day, and pay another $35. This company closes at 4 pm sharp, which is another great way for them to make money. Who gets out of work before 4 pm?
Finis: I’m going with Route A because I’m not ready to dig out over 5k worth of cash. I am dismayed at the prospect of not only NOT taking the truck off my balance sheet, but adding the responsibility of another vehicle, but right this moment, I don’t have a choice.
One quarter of the cost will clean out my auto maintenance fund, the rest of the money will come out of my expense fund. It’ll wreck my cushion, for the most part, but psychologically, I’d rather raid the cushion before the emergency fund. I might have to hit that with moving costs soon.
And lastly, I had a serious discussion with my dad. On Friday, upset, I told him that if this happened again, I was leaving and never looking back. I realized that wasn’t good enough, and told him on Saturday that I’m not waiting for it to happen again. He had to promise he would never lie to me or hide important things from me to “protect” me, when he’s really just protecting his wounded pride, or I was outta here, permanently. I can only pray that taking a hard stance will shake him enough to take me seriously, but I’m also serious. I’m not strong enough to continue living my life, looking over my shoulder, waiting for people to lie to me because my own family can’t do better than that. All or nothing, folks.
December 19, 2008
After another patted shoulder “don’t worry,” I literally bite my tongue. It’s the only way not to completely lose my good traditional training of not talking back to my elders. Or in this case, “raving at elder.”
Why, on the eve of a very important, very early, phone interview was I up, running outside barefoot over an hour before scheduled alarm? Hi, it’s still me here, still the girl who gets up only ten minutes before departure. That’d be because I woke to the sound of an unscheduled alarm. The car alarm.
I would have ignored it; I usually do as sleep is precious beyond words. Something stirred me to go see this time, though, to possibly do our neighbors the courtesy of silencing an errant alarm. What I saw, peeking out the blinds, however, was no errancy except that of a flurry of indistinguishable human activity. Startled, I raced outside barefoot to watch the family sedan driving away backwards. Towed.
Are there even words for the sheer fury that swamped me? I woke my dad hoping it was a mistake. Suspecting that it was not.
It wasn’t.
He hasn’t been able to keep up with the payments lately. What an innocent sounding statement until combined with the towed car.
I am positively furious and humiliated. Above all, betrayed. It wasn’t more than a month ago that I’d told him our communication was poor. I couldn’t trust their judgement and sensibility. He seemed surprised, he protested my characterization.
Well, surprise! I can’t.
This wasn’t a sudden, unexpected thing. (At least not for him.) This is what happens when you don’t pay, pay in time, and keep paying on time.
So what now? We’re down to my car. That’s it. It’s Friday morning, if I don’t throw cash at the situation, who knows how much, we’ll have to share my car for the weekend and I have a very full weekend. Heck, who knows, if I’ll have enough? Tow truck fees, plus whatever else. I don’t know. All I know is I’m losing more precious sleep because he can’t take care of business, can’t learn to tell me before something is about to become an exponentially larger pain in my ass so we can alleviate the situation. No, because “I can’t keep running to you.” No? But you think it’s right to wait until it’s a disaster before telling me that there are dark clouds in the sky?
Edit: Above written at 4 am.
Update: It turns out he’s over a thousand dollars behind. Deep breath.
It’s not that I can’t shake the money loose from somewhere. It’s that I have to because he won’t learn. That I have to tell my own dad that this is why I have trust issues, why I don’t think we have good communication, why I have to be anxious. That I told him months ago that my work situation was B.A.D. and last night that we’re all going to be laid off. That, in this lousy situation, he thinks it’s better to hide this situation and let it go into arrears!
“Why Mom is slowly losing her mind,” a part of my mind whispers disloyally, quietly, “this is why she’s losing her grip on reality. Living with him and letting him ‘handle it’ is, for her, to expect failure and disappointment. If it weren’t for me, would they be on the street in a matter of months? Weeks? How long would it be?”
It’s going to cost at least $1300 just to catch up on the payments. They’re waiting for a manager to review the file on Monday before they release information on how to get the car, according to him. That’s unacceptable but I’m stuck at work now and can’t follow up on my own.
I’m so mad I could spit.
And after this bailout, then what? Do I scrape up the cash to pay off *yet another* car since he obviously can’t afford this monthly payment? Call in my personal loans to free up cash and pay off all possible debts that I’m aware of? Create a blank slate for him while I try to support two households? If I don’t, he’s going to keep on trying to make two ends that are too short meet without telling me when he’s run into a rough patch, until we incur extra stupid fees. If I do, will he learn? Or will this just happen again?
Job hunting wasn’t challenging enough?
Forever and a half ago, FB (who is no longer broke) of Fabulously Broke in the City, discussed storage and organizing extensively. One of the problems she and several of her readers, including me, encountered was a way to neatly store electronic debris such as cables, boxes, etc. Unfortunately, I can’t find the original post I’m thinking of. This is a substitute post/link from FB.
I, for one, can’t bear to throw away boxes that my gadgets came in, as though I’m ever going to gently place the item back in its original packaging. It’s been ten years since I had my first electronic doodad (a pager, remember those?) and I can’t recall a single time the item has been boxed up. In my packratty mind, there’s always the standard “but what if you move?” protest. What? Like I’m going to repack my cell phone if I decide to move to a new apartment? My iPod, perhaps? No.
Nevertheless, I keep the boxes. One might feasibly blame it on Apple for designing such sturdy, attractive boxes that a packrat cannot resist; one might blame it on an evil mind that thinks it’d be perfect to wrap a completely non-iPhone gift in the box for someone. Whatever. We’ve established that I’m crazy and have to keep all electronics-related paraphernelia. Given that fetish, I’ve finally arrived at a nearly-great solution.
I’ll admit it doesn’t meet the standard of being easy to see at a glance like you could if they were say, in Ziplocs and hanging on a sales rack. Not that you would do that anyway. You would have to access the storage unit to see what’s in there, but I still like it.
I don’t have cables that need storing right now, but the aforementioned Apple-branded boxes and packages are currently my problem, and I’d like your thoughts on the solution:
December 18, 2008
It’s too late now, but it occurred to me that for all of my agonizing over finding the best price and fit in a new laptop, I neglected to fully maximize possible cashback options.
I did use ebates.com for a 1% cashback rebate. (If anyone wants a referral, we each get $5.)
That’s about $7 back, if they include cashback on tax.
I did use my Citi card that offers 2% back on all purchases in Thank You points.
That’s 1466 Thank You points.
However, I did not think to use my Chase Cash Plus card at the grocery store for 5% cashback rewards. [“Wait, what?” you ask. I know, I’m getting there.]
If I had gone to Vons/Safeway, using my Chase card to purchase a $700 Best Buy gift card, I would have earned 3500 points. That’s the equivalent of $35 because 5000 points can be redeemed for $50 cash, instead of a piddling 1466 Thank You points which cash out at an average rate of 6000/12000 points for $50/$100 gift cards.
Hmph. I could have stopped by the grocery store on my way home from work on Monday and more than doubled my cashback, in actual cash. Careless, I tell you. Miss M, you can still benefit from my mistake!
The weather caused the cancellation of dinner with my friends last night, and delayed the delivery of my new gadget by a day. Rats!
I was so looking forward to opening up that box tonight, but it’s probably for the best that it won’t be delivered until tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that there are more productive things I should be doing tonight that don’t include endlessly playing with a pretty new computer.
I’m glad the weather’s back to bright skies, though still frigidly-cold, because my friends up in the desert have been snowed in since yesterday. She scared me when she told me about their driving home from dinner. They were sliding all over the road, and had to help dig out three neighbors when they finally arrived at her sister’s house, as well as the ambulance and the fire truck that got stuck in a drift. They had to dig out a fire truck. That’s just wrong. And weird. And for all of you cold weather dwellers out there laughing at me, laugh away. A foot of snow + SoCal drivers who forget how to drive in rain = freaks me out.
December 17, 2008
- Getting drafts of apps together on Gmail during my breaks. I think it’s best to do that while I’m fresher during the day and send off at night. We’ll see what pans out.
- Trivia: Do you know who wrote and sang Same Auld Lang Syne? I do! But wouldn’t without Google. That song always used to make me tear up as an adolescent. Now it just reminds me of being a kid. And sticks in my head for hours after hearing it. Also, why are Greensleeves and Canon in D (Pachelbel’s Canon) in the radio station’s Christmas music rotation?
- While Ctrl+T is good for me, Ctrl+Q almost always screws me up. Thank goodness for Auto-Save because shutting down the whole program in the middle of a document drives me nuts.
- I know money doesn’t “buy happiness” but there are days I wish I had oodles to give away where it could really help.
It just occurred to me that it’s Wednesday. Payday!
December 16, 2008
after tax and shipping.
I just bought this lovely thing which should be delivered in about a week:
A few specs:
15.4 inch screen
3 GB with capacity to upgrade to 4 GB
250 GB hard drive
4 USB ports
If I’d been willing to spend twice as much, I could have gotten a smaller screen size – 14.1 inches was my ideal, and a much lighter machine, but now’s not the time to be splurging that much.
I was swooning over the Lenovo U series — starting at 2.47 pounds? Yes, gorgeous, come along with me …… But I don’t have two thousand to spend on it.
Budgetary Note: That’s pretty much cleared out almost my entire gift/travel fund.
