No More Band-aids: Part One
The end of the week is here and closes with a lot to consider. In asking the question "What is it we're doing wrong?!" some truths were faced this week. Truths I actually already knew but didn't know how to deal with. A very old friend of mine was making some suggestions in response to my complaint that I don't have enough time to sleep because I work 35 hours a week, then I have to do household stuff, and then I sew, and then I write. I was complaining about not having time to spend with my kid. I got really annoyed when she started making suggestions because they all represented tiny little band-aids on a much greater problem that seemed impossible to solve.
I told her that I have choices and I'm making the choice I think is the better of the two but neither are acceptable to me. I then listened to myself. All my friends and kind supporters in my life are always trying to come up with similar solutions to things like the fact that I can't pay my taxes or that I can't find time to write or to my problem of getting psychological help when I most need it. I frequently bite the people trying to help because no one is addressing the bigger issues. Including myself.
Often times in life we get into a situation that we think we can handle, we make a chain of choices that leads us down a difficult road, and once we've gone so far into the woods that we get scared and start to understand just how lost we are and just how wet the matches in our pockets have become, it feels too late to undo the situation. We think we can't get back to the starting gate so instead of facing the fact that we're lost in the forest, we start coming up with solutions that feel more doable. Maybe we decide that we'll somehow make it in the woods without fire, we'll feast on salmonberries like the bears do and we'll eventually stumble onto a stream and find drinkable water.
Unless you retrace your steps and attempt to undo your commitment to this long road that got swallowed up in darkness and trees, you won't fix anything by eating salmonberries. You'll survive, maybe, but you won't accomplish the things you intended to, you may never find your way back unless you intentionally retrace your way.
That's how I feel. I don't make enough money and Philip and I keep scrambling for more ways to make a few extra dollars to stave off further ruination. The question has always been "How do we make more money?" and then "How can we spend less money so we can get by?" and this is fine if we are only coming a little short all the time.
The truth is, and always has been, that we can't afford our mortgage. We never would have purposely put ourselves in this position. Getting the loan on this house, at the rate we got, was supposed to be temporary. It was part of a larger plan that fell apart when the bank gave us $20,000 less than we had originally gotten approved for when we bought this house by taking equity out of our other house. For our plan to work, we had to be able to sell the other house, and to do that we needed $20,000 to cover two mortgages for several months while we put the other house on the market.
Don't pick this situation to death. Don't get lost in the details. The details are no one's business and they're past now. I'm only giving the sketch because it illustrates the moment we made a choice, a poor choice, that has overshadowed our entire life for the past two years.
When we found out that we weren't getting the funds we needed to make our plan work, we still went forward. We were already packed. We were already committed to moving into the new house. Our mortgage officer failed to tell us that we weren't getting the money we needed when the bank changed their mind, so there we were on the title signing day with the choice to not sign the papers, to walk away from the house we wanted to live in, to unpack and resettle in the house that depressed me...or to sign the papers and hope that we could still sell the other house, more quickly than we originally planned.
We had only a few minutes to make the decision.* We chose to take our chances.
Right there. That's the moment we made a wrong turn. We have both agreed that in spite of everything that has happened because of our decision, we don't regret it. Not regretting something doesn't mean you don't pay for it and find payment painful.
Right there is where we took on something too big in the hopes that we would turn it around and that we could sell the old house in spite of a quickly crashing housing market. Right there is where we made a choice that has landed us in PERPETUAL SOUP.
As you all know, we couldn't sell the house. We spent $20,000 trying to afford having a house on our hands we couldn't sell, double mortgage, and then even when we rented it out we couldn't ask for enough to cover our expenses. I would like to point out that my understanding of what we needed from the bank to pull off our plan could not have been more spot on! That $20,000 we didn't get ended up being the $20,000 that sent us into bankruptcy.
So here we are. I know how we got here and we can sit around asking ourselves how we can make enough to afford this house and this mortgage all we want but the truth is just as blaring today as it was the day we signed the title for it. We can't afford this house. We always knew we couldn't afford this unless we could sell the other house, put more into the equity and refinance. None of which panned out.
What I realized this week is that we're struggling and fighting and slowly, painfully, sinking more deeply into ruin than I thought possible after having gone bankrupt because we are paying way too much money for our housing. Everything would be solved if we rented an apartment or a small house for under $1000. I've been looking at rental prices and looking at how much we're short every month of what we need to be putting aside towards taxes and shoes and clothing and the solution is so breathtakingly obvious and my stubborn desire to never move again, to not lose yet another house I love, to not have to start all over again with a new place a new garden...
or worse yet...no garden at all.
These places we can afford to live in are most of them very depressing. So I kept telling myself "NO!" I refuse to give up and live in a 2 bedroom apartment with no yard and give up my hens and my sewing room and my freedom to paint the walls whatever color I want.
Then, after being so annoyed with my friend, I realized that I was annoyed because I know that our situation is untenable. We spend all our time, all hours of the day, wondering how we're going to make it work when the truth is that we never will. Reality is that I already work too many hours trying to make things work. I have this yard, yes, but no time to spend in it. I have this house, sure, but no way to fix things when they break. I have no time to clean it or enjoy it.
My kid has reached this amazing age, this wonderful place in his life, and I want to spend time enjoying that with him. I have no time because every day when I'm done working, I go do dishes and cook food, and then it's either Kung Fu time or it's time for me to write or sew. Sewing for money or writing to keep alive what little fragment of hope and dream I have left for myself.
Something has to give. But what?
The house. We can't afford our house. But we've already gone bankrupt and no bank will let us refinance. We can't just walk and go rent because we have NO MONEY saved. It all seems so impossible. But what I learned is that sometimes you have to let go of everything you think is important to find the answer and to understand how it will all work.
This is already a long post. I'm going to write the rest in the next post. It'll go up today too but then you can bite off half the story if you want. Digest and then get to the rest.
*I just know someone is dying to nitpick me to death on the details here even though I've asked them not to: technically speaking you have three days once you sign the title papers to change your mind and call the whole thing off. So TECHNICALLY we still could have pulled out. Why are people so annoying with their need for 100% specificity? It doesn't change our perception of the need to make a quick decision and our commitment to moving away from a house that was depressing us.
I told her that I have choices and I'm making the choice I think is the better of the two but neither are acceptable to me. I then listened to myself. All my friends and kind supporters in my life are always trying to come up with similar solutions to things like the fact that I can't pay my taxes or that I can't find time to write or to my problem of getting psychological help when I most need it. I frequently bite the people trying to help because no one is addressing the bigger issues. Including myself.
Often times in life we get into a situation that we think we can handle, we make a chain of choices that leads us down a difficult road, and once we've gone so far into the woods that we get scared and start to understand just how lost we are and just how wet the matches in our pockets have become, it feels too late to undo the situation. We think we can't get back to the starting gate so instead of facing the fact that we're lost in the forest, we start coming up with solutions that feel more doable. Maybe we decide that we'll somehow make it in the woods without fire, we'll feast on salmonberries like the bears do and we'll eventually stumble onto a stream and find drinkable water.
Unless you retrace your steps and attempt to undo your commitment to this long road that got swallowed up in darkness and trees, you won't fix anything by eating salmonberries. You'll survive, maybe, but you won't accomplish the things you intended to, you may never find your way back unless you intentionally retrace your way.
That's how I feel. I don't make enough money and Philip and I keep scrambling for more ways to make a few extra dollars to stave off further ruination. The question has always been "How do we make more money?" and then "How can we spend less money so we can get by?" and this is fine if we are only coming a little short all the time.
The truth is, and always has been, that we can't afford our mortgage. We never would have purposely put ourselves in this position. Getting the loan on this house, at the rate we got, was supposed to be temporary. It was part of a larger plan that fell apart when the bank gave us $20,000 less than we had originally gotten approved for when we bought this house by taking equity out of our other house. For our plan to work, we had to be able to sell the other house, and to do that we needed $20,000 to cover two mortgages for several months while we put the other house on the market.
Don't pick this situation to death. Don't get lost in the details. The details are no one's business and they're past now. I'm only giving the sketch because it illustrates the moment we made a choice, a poor choice, that has overshadowed our entire life for the past two years.
When we found out that we weren't getting the funds we needed to make our plan work, we still went forward. We were already packed. We were already committed to moving into the new house. Our mortgage officer failed to tell us that we weren't getting the money we needed when the bank changed their mind, so there we were on the title signing day with the choice to not sign the papers, to walk away from the house we wanted to live in, to unpack and resettle in the house that depressed me...or to sign the papers and hope that we could still sell the other house, more quickly than we originally planned.
We had only a few minutes to make the decision.* We chose to take our chances.
Right there. That's the moment we made a wrong turn. We have both agreed that in spite of everything that has happened because of our decision, we don't regret it. Not regretting something doesn't mean you don't pay for it and find payment painful.
Right there is where we took on something too big in the hopes that we would turn it around and that we could sell the old house in spite of a quickly crashing housing market. Right there is where we made a choice that has landed us in PERPETUAL SOUP.
As you all know, we couldn't sell the house. We spent $20,000 trying to afford having a house on our hands we couldn't sell, double mortgage, and then even when we rented it out we couldn't ask for enough to cover our expenses. I would like to point out that my understanding of what we needed from the bank to pull off our plan could not have been more spot on! That $20,000 we didn't get ended up being the $20,000 that sent us into bankruptcy.
So here we are. I know how we got here and we can sit around asking ourselves how we can make enough to afford this house and this mortgage all we want but the truth is just as blaring today as it was the day we signed the title for it. We can't afford this house. We always knew we couldn't afford this unless we could sell the other house, put more into the equity and refinance. None of which panned out.
What I realized this week is that we're struggling and fighting and slowly, painfully, sinking more deeply into ruin than I thought possible after having gone bankrupt because we are paying way too much money for our housing. Everything would be solved if we rented an apartment or a small house for under $1000. I've been looking at rental prices and looking at how much we're short every month of what we need to be putting aside towards taxes and shoes and clothing and the solution is so breathtakingly obvious and my stubborn desire to never move again, to not lose yet another house I love, to not have to start all over again with a new place a new garden...
or worse yet...no garden at all.
These places we can afford to live in are most of them very depressing. So I kept telling myself "NO!" I refuse to give up and live in a 2 bedroom apartment with no yard and give up my hens and my sewing room and my freedom to paint the walls whatever color I want.
Then, after being so annoyed with my friend, I realized that I was annoyed because I know that our situation is untenable. We spend all our time, all hours of the day, wondering how we're going to make it work when the truth is that we never will. Reality is that I already work too many hours trying to make things work. I have this yard, yes, but no time to spend in it. I have this house, sure, but no way to fix things when they break. I have no time to clean it or enjoy it.
My kid has reached this amazing age, this wonderful place in his life, and I want to spend time enjoying that with him. I have no time because every day when I'm done working, I go do dishes and cook food, and then it's either Kung Fu time or it's time for me to write or sew. Sewing for money or writing to keep alive what little fragment of hope and dream I have left for myself.
Something has to give. But what?
The house. We can't afford our house. But we've already gone bankrupt and no bank will let us refinance. We can't just walk and go rent because we have NO MONEY saved. It all seems so impossible. But what I learned is that sometimes you have to let go of everything you think is important to find the answer and to understand how it will all work.
This is already a long post. I'm going to write the rest in the next post. It'll go up today too but then you can bite off half the story if you want. Digest and then get to the rest.
*I just know someone is dying to nitpick me to death on the details here even though I've asked them not to: technically speaking you have three days once you sign the title papers to change your mind and call the whole thing off. So TECHNICALLY we still could have pulled out. Why are people so annoying with their need for 100% specificity? It doesn't change our perception of the need to make a quick decision and our commitment to moving away from a house that was depressing us.