I'm pretty proud of the title of this entry. My overwhelming urge was to put something fairly profane up there, and I scaled it back as much as I could stand it, despite the current near-terror in the pit of my stomach.
I don't like it when businesses take advantage of my lack of experience; particularly when it has to do with my finances. The more I think about my recent mortgage, the more upset I get.
My case of indigestion was prompted by my receipt of the first monthly statement, which requested a payment $100 higher than I remembered signing. Apparently this is because the monthly payment on my mortgage agreement is listed in two separate places, and no one bothered to add it up for me. In combination with the real estate taxes, our monthly housing costs just went from $688 (which I thought was bad enough already) to $1050, plus insurance.
This basically negates the fact that I just refinanced my van to lower the payments. This makes it impossible for us to eat, have gas, and function without both working two jobs. We're never going to get to see each other, and we're not going to be able to be there for Kirstin like we want to be. All of those great plans we have together are now FUCKED UP (I couldn't help it) until we can get out from under this mess.
I'm a little emotional right now, as you can probably tell. How, you ask, did we come to sign a mortgage with a ridiculous 15.2 PERCENT INTEREST RATE???? Well, gee. Let's see. First off, I didn't know enough to get written estimates on it in advance. That was mistake number one. Here's how I was lead to believe I was getting a low-cost loan with a reasonable interest rate:
1. The nice lady on the phone told me she didn't know what prime was that day, but she knew that her rate was reasonable; Michigan average, around 9 or 10 percent. Would that I had recorded that conversation. I trusted her. BIG mistake.
2. When I looked at the forms I had to fill out, they had the name of the mortgage company on them, but they also had the Fannie Mae logo on them. This led me to believe I was getting a subsidized loan, although no one ever told me so. The nice, happy lady on the phone was always very busy, and talked a lot, and I was sure she was taking good care of me.
3. When I asked whether I would need to pay any closing costs, the nice lady on the phone told me that the sellers in my old Land Contract would have to pay them. This was an outright lie, as I ended up with about $4,000 in costs, and the sellers didn't pay a damn dime.
Part of the reason I'd agreed to the land contract in the first place was that my realtor assured me a year ago that I wouldn't have to close all over again. All I would have to do is refinance my home, something people do all the time that doesn't have closing costs. So she turns out to have been taking advantage of me, too. Great, isn't it?
So why, you ask, did I sign onto such a ridiculous loan? I should have dodged out of it, I should have run away as fast as I could, without looking back, and found something far more reasonable. Why, why, why????
Well, gee. I wondered why it took so long for the mortgage company to process my paperwork. I contacted them at the end of May with a completed application. I informed them that I had a deadline of August 13 by which I had to buy out the Land Contract or it would be null and void, and I'd lose all the money I'd paid on my house to date and it would revert to the seller's name.
I gave them just enough rope to hang me with, because as it turns out, they managed to draw out the mortgage writing and underwriting process until AFTER my expiration date had passed and the sellers were harrassing me to pay it off.
Then, the mortgage company arranged the closing, and invited the original sellers to be there even though it turns out they DIDN'T NEED TO BE. Then the people I had dealt with (the nice lady on the phone) vanished, and a lawyer (who complained that he had only been given the paperwork a few moments before and didn't have a chance to read it) showed up with the papers for me to sign.
Then and only then was I presented with a disclosure stating the actual interest rate on this bastard of a mortgage. The shock of it made me see spots... but the sellers were there and had brought a copy of the Land Contract, and I knew if I didn't sign this mortgage today I stood a real chance of losing our house and the $11,000 I had sunk into it in the past year.
Then I was presented with a written estimate, backdated by a few weeks, of the closing costs, which apparently I should have received before, but didn't, because it was never sent. There was also a statement of my rights for information on this loan, that I signed even though I didn't agree that the lender had complied with it. The lawyer said I had to sign it to close the deal. So I did. I think in doing so I signed away my right to take these people to court for misleading me.
So here I am, having once again allowed some big company to take control of my life. I'll be working two jobs, so will Forest, and we won't be able to afford to have Christmas, much less a wedding and honeymoon this year.
Forest is talking with his bank today to see if there's anything he can do about it. I don't have lot of confidence. I was 'bankrupt as result of divorce' two years ago, and while I've come a long way since then, my credit rating still isn't that great. Despite the fact that I own a house, have never missed a payment since bankruptcy and have tripled my income in the past two years, I still have a big sign on my Equifax report that says "Fuck her! Fuck her hard and fast!!!"
Forest would be better off not marrying me. I'm a one-way-ticket to financial ruin. I'm never going to figure this out; someone is always going to be fucking me over, and I'm always going to be scrambling to try to make ends meet. Every day for the rest of my damn life I'm going to have to sit and stare at my bills and pinch pennies from Peter to pay Paul. The house I'm sacrificing my entire life to pay for is going to fall down around me because I won't have any money left at the end of all those bills to pay for its upkeep and repair.
I've been deluding myself. I'm never going to be able to afford to go back to school, never going to be able to take great long trips overseas and never going to scoot around Lake Michigan on a little sailboat. I'm going to spend the rest of my life working at the bottom of the IT payscale at MPHI, because people here are nice to me, and I'm afraid to get a job anywhere else because they might not like me, I might lose the job, and then I'd be bankrupt again because I have so much debt.
If I broke my neck and couldn't work for more than a month I'd be fucked too.
If they somehow lost my payroll information and I didn't get paid for a single WEEK I'd be fucked, too!
All that security I thought I had was a myth. I believed in myself and my ability to support myself and I was wrong. I have 97 cents in my savings account, do I think that's going to save my ass when I can't make my thousand dollar payment one month and the mortgage company forecloses on my house?
For fuck's sake, why can't I ever do anything right? I gave up a zillion dreams to become a teenage mom. I screwed up college, messed up my finances, struggled and scraped and starved and pinched for years. Then, by some miracle, someone gave me a chance and things started to look up. Then things started to look great. I was taking control of my life for the first time ever. Things started to make sense. I thought I could stand on my own two feet; I met Forest, and I started having dreams of the future again! This was going to be the 80-year-long happy ending on my fairy tale life; I was going to be a normal, happy, content person.
And in the last chapter, I blew it.
