the four figure shuffle

i guess the real moral to this story is “home improvements need to be to THE HOME, not the big-ass tv in the home”

or so i’ll gather…on to the story.

i used to have a bad habit of not paying my mortgage. it was going off a similar principle to what got me let go from my first commercial radio gig. at the time they had four part-time people; but i was only “part-time” on paper. i was working more hours on-air than the full-time folks were…but keeping me as “part-time” meant hourly, not salary, and no insurance. i was too young and green in the industry at the time to see this…but when they came in and saw the part-time staff budget was DOUBLE what it was supposed to be a commandment came down from the mountain top – cut the budget in half.

this could be done my letting me go, or by letting every other part-time person go. literally every other one…which would mean people with “full-time” gigs that had weekends off would now have to work a (as in singular) weekend shift. i was outta there within hours.

same concept with my mortgage – all my other bills, all combined, don’t come up to my mortgage payment – so when money was super tight i could cover it or everything but. if you’re a few weeks late on utilities or phone or direct tv they cut your ass off. it takes several months for them to take your house…it made survivalistic sense at the time. but all you have to do is close to losing it just once (twice in my case) and you don’t fuck around with it. not only have i not missed a payment since i re-financed back in 2009 but i haven’t even paid late…save for once.

now twice, i figure.

first time was just ’cause i guess i don’t read good – see, i get paid on the first. but somehow i got a month off, so now my mortgage accrues a late fee every month until i can pay twice ’cause i got just that little bit behind. my pay, for example, on july 1st was supposed to cover the june payment, which is in fact due between june first and june fifteenth. after the sixteenth it takes on a late fee, and then dings your credit if you pay after the last day of the month.

or more specifically if you pay after eight at night on the last day of the month. remember the holy hell i went through getting home on halloween from new orleans only to be stuck in the uber-slow parade that is trick-or-treaters? well, that got me home after eight, so when i paid on halloween it counted as a payment on november one.

that was my first time being late in almost two years. the second one was a bit more fucked up, and totally not my fault.

no, for real – totally not my fault.

i paid my mortgage on the twenty-sixth in june. this is a good thing. but then i went to the pawn shop and they had the perfect tv for my den…55″ lcd, 1080p, 120hz refresh – everything i wanted! and it’s the same toshiba series that used to be in my bedroom (and now is my computer monitor so i’m typing this bit on it, actually) so i know it’s got good picture. it was marked $750, but since i’m one of their regular customers they sold it to me for $650 and let me do the layaway thing for the summer where i only had to put $100 down on it. while i had that in cash, i needed the cash for the utility bill (they charge extra if you pay by card there) so i just handed them my check card and told them to put my $100 down payment on it.

then i heard “oh shit!”. not what you want to hear when they have your check card in their hand.

the new guy had hit an extra zero and run my card for $1,000.00!!! he did a “refund” on that purchase within thirty-nine seconds (i have the two receipts, that’s how i know the exact time) and then ran it for $100. the problem is, because he did a “refund” on the grand rather than a “void” it eventually (two days later) went in as a locked down charge, ‘causing the other big pending charge (my mortgage, which was paid less than an hour before all this but due to how they batch out showed it was several hours later) to get returned from my bank to my mortgage company as an unpaid item.

not. fucking. cool.

okay, so all of the above was written on the fourth of july before i went to a pool-b-que at tina & rodney’s place in round rock, which woulda sucked commute-wise except they’re just off the toll, which now has an 80mph speed limit, so that was kinda fun – the rest is being written on 7-11 (national convenience store day)

so i gripe at the bank about sending the mortgage payment back, but as the $1,000.00 didn’t drop off as a pending but rather locked down from everything THEY saw it was legit. i get that. i consider my bank at zero fault for this…but i still needed to pay the mortgage, so they put a “temp credit” in my account of $1,000.00 to cover me. i called my mortgage company to have them get everything right, but they hadn’t seen the item come back yet – according to all they saw in their system my june payment was made and all was good.

well, fuck.

so they told me to “sit tight” until they saw it come back, ’cause until they did there was nothing i could do. which really made sense and really sucked all at the same time. as i type that, i realize quite a bit of my life can be described that way – really makes sense, and really sucks all at the same time. let’s move on.

two days later the credit from the pawn shop hit – this was the weekend BEFORE july fourth, and the bank didn’t take their credit back. in fact, it no longer showed “pending” – it was locked down funds for me. so now i had two grand and hadn’t paid my mortgage and my mortgage company didn’t seem to care.

these are “the salad days” of this story, to put it in “raising arizona” terms.

so i let fourth of july week come and go and all i did about this was right the first chunk of this bit. on saturday i got mail from my mortgage company (showing they had received the payment back and now needed my june payment (which would forever show as paid late on a credit report even though, in good faith, i hadn’t paid late…well, not THAT late) and one from my bank (over ten days after they gave me the credit) stating that they had given me this credit, and i had full access to the funds while they “conducted their investigation” (wtf?) and if they needed it back they would let me know.

huh?

so i paid my mortgage online on sunday for the june payment and it hit my bank account today (7/11) and all appears to be good. i accrued a $36 fee from the mortgage company and since the pawn shop guys said they’d cover any and all fees (the bank reversed theirs when they saw the $1,000 come back from the pawn shop) i told them about it and they zeroed out my other two layaways i had (a netbook and a sweet 90’s era gt bmx bike – total still owed around $80) and we called it good.

so the mortgage is paid, the pawn shop and i are good, i still owe about six bills on the tv, and i still have chase’s grand in my account…but how long should i leave it there before i spend it? or just close the account and move banks with their money?