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December 15, 2008
Happy Holidays from Kentucky
This was the last photo ever taken by my digital camera (before it bit the dust), and is from December 2007. Here are Julip Jessica and Julip Kai wishing everyone a happy holiday season.
It has been a very trying holiday season. After having sold off a good amount of our belongings and paying a hefty sum to movers to bring the rest down here (except for some still in a storage unit in Michigan) life seems inclined to make us part with the rest of the money that we have left.
Brian called our insurance company to let them know that we had vacated the house, thinking that we would get a reduced rate on our house insurance. Not so! An unoccupied house is a greater insurance risk than an occupied house. So they threatened to raise our insurance rate from $350/year to about $800/year.
Brian told them to forget about it, and to not change the policy, but now they are hounding us with letters and calls about the unoccupied status of the house.
We found out that to register our cars in Kentucky is a bit different than in Michigan. Instead of getting a license plate for between $75-100, it costs several hundred dollars per vehicle here. So we have put off getting Kentucky plates, having just paid for a year's registration on both cars in Michigan in October.
I lost $20,000 in the stock market crash, which was 20% of what I had left for my retirement.
When our house in Michigan does finally sell, if it does, I will have to pay out $40-50,000 at closing (which will be the difference between what the house sells for and what we owe on it.) I am very, very angry about this. I feel like I will have to pay somebody to get to keep MY house that I put $100,000 cash into and that I intended to live in the rest of my life. I will never see a dime of anything I put into that house ever again.
The house has been for sale or for lease through a licensed real estate agent, and we have had nibbles but no bites. The closest was a couple who spent an hour and a half in our house, loved it, and then made an offer on a house in Milford.
Kentucky is catching up with Michigan in terms of recession. Nobody is hiring, even retail outlets aren't hiring extra staff for the holidays. I won't be able to get a job until after Derek goes to school, anyway.
Because Brian is stuck with paying the mortgage on a house that we can't live in, can't sell and can't lease, there is no money to pay for groceries. So I am shelling out $400/month just so we can eat.
Not to mention all of the other expenses I have incurred since coming down here.
I have been ill 100% of the time we've been here. I have paid a hundred dollars out in co-pays this month just for the doctor visits, and the bronchitis has gotten better, but the infection has returned to my sinuses. I am on yet another round of antibiotics. It's not working! I am still sick.
I finally was able to get the Christmas Tree out of the garage (it had been placed in the very back corner, the farthest from the door) and set it up. The box of decorations I normally use is in a storage unit in Michigan. I found a box of older, rather tacky ornaments in the basement. Derek helped me decorate the tree. Brian went to Wal-Mart and bought an extension cord so that we could plug in the lights.
The house is full of boxes that we can't unpack because there is nowhere to put the items. There is no pantry to store food (food is in the cupboards, leaving little room for kitchen gear), no bookshelves or storage cupboards in other rooms (except the bookshelves we brought with us, which is a fraction of what we need. Keep in mind that we donated 1/3 of our books before coming down here.)The closets are inadequate for our clothing, let alone storage of other items.
The first week we lived here the basement sewer backed up...about three times. Feces all over the basement floor. (The landlords and a plumber eventually fixed the problem.) We can't store anything down there unless it's in a plastic container.
Still, I am grateful to have a house at all. We so easily could be crammed into a small apartment right now.
Brian talks about buying another house as soon as we sell our house, but I don't think I'll even have enough left for a down payment by the time we get rid of that house.
So ho ho ho. Sorry to have such a downer of a rant, I'm trying to keep my spirits up, but I just had to vent a bit.
Posted by Jessica at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)