Category: Writing

Parting with the Bank

The consequences of subprime mortgages and credit default swaps were surfacing when we decided to buy a house. It was 2007 and a buyer’s market, which meant that we had to sift through a lot of overpriced shitboxes because the starry-eyed heirs to some of these pee-soaked rehabs hadn’t heard the news: The party was over. Anyone who could was waiting out the storm. We made two offers over nine months. It was exhausting.

In the meantime, I was working at the Minnesota House of Representatives where I was hearing from distressed constituents who were facing foreclosure. These cautionary tales and some unexpected advice would frame my approach as a first-time buyer, which was to get out of debt as soon as possible. I made a spreadsheet to help us with this goal and have since cleaned it up to share here (2007 Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. Note: Downloading this .xlsx file may cause your anti-virus software to warn you.)

Why be aggressive about paying off our house?

One day at work as I waited for my turn for the microwave in a cramped but lobbyist-free zone, a co-worker told of feeling trapped by a house he could not sell. He was “underwater” and – on top of that painful reality – paying almost two hundred dollars a month in mortgage insurance. Mortgage insurance? What’s that? “Avoid it if you can”, he warned. “It’s a terrible feeling to hand over that kind of money and have nothing to show for it.” I had a lot to learn.

As it turns out, to avoid mortgage insurance – designed to protect the lender from loan defaults – the buyer must make a down payment of at least 20 percent. So that was it. I came home and announced that if we couldn’t afford to do that, we couldn’t afford it. While I might have been a little puffed up with resolve that I had no right to have, we managed to swing it.

Another random tidbit of information came from a friend who wasn’t convinced that we were buying at a good time. “Wait until the prices hit bottom. They’re still going down.” This otherwise sage advice lost out to our sanity that was being threatened by our neighbor, the dipshit. On the other hand, making one extra mortgage payment every year was something we could do. As any mortgage calculator will show, extra payments can significantly reduce the payback period of a loan, slashing the cost of interest by thousands. After playing with a few of these free calculators online, I found myself wanting my own spreadsheet that I could understand, customize and edit more easily. So, I made one and it has helped us stay on track with some simple financial goals.

By simple, I mean simple. “How fast can we pay off the house?” That was the question, not whether we’d come out ahead if we made other investments instead. You’ll have to go elsewhere for that advice. All I can say is that hearing about the unraveling of lives that started with a balloon payment, a rate adjustment or a late payment and referring the broken men and women at the center of these stories to Lutheran Social Services for last-ditch help with foreclosure prevention made an impression on me; I was driven more by a desire to part with the bank than what might be generally considered to be shrewd financial planning.

I recently shared my spreadsheet with a friend who – just like me – didn’t realize what a difference an extra fifty dollars towards the principle of a loan can make when paying down your debt. You’re welcome to download it here. Please be advised that I do not guarantee that there aren’t any mistakes in this spreadsheet. Disclaimer aside, maybe playing with some numbers will inspire you to set some goals and get out of debt sooner rather than later. And, of course, if you have any corrections, requests or suggestions regarding this spreadsheet, please let me know!

About the Spreadsheet

Download here – 2007 Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet. Note: Downloading this .xlsx file may cause your anti-virus software to warn you.

Input your Data
Enter your data (house price, down payment, interest rate, etc.) in the green cells. Other cells cannot be changed, but are calculated fields. If you want to unlock the spreadsheet to add some of your own calculations, let me know and I’ll give you the password.

Default Extra Payments
Enter the amount of the extra payments you plan to make on your mortgage every month (Column B, Line 15). As with other variables, you can try different numbers to see how it affects the financing costs and payback time. In the event that you have a change to your default extra payment any given month, you can indicate this in Column F next to the corresponding date in Column G. For example, if by default I am going to make an extra payment of $150, but for the month of February 2014, I can only do $50, I would enter that amount in the column next to February 2014. If there is no change to your default extra payment, leave Column G blank. Keep in mind that $0 is not blank. Instead it means that you are paying $0 as opposed to your default extra payment.

Lump Payment
The idea of a lump payment is that you might want to save money with the intention of putting it toward your mortgage someday, but want the security of having access to cash in the meantime. This could help you make your regular mortgage payments in the event of a layoff, for example. Otherwise, this money could be used to pay off the house when what you owe, which goes down every month, matches what you have saved, which goes up. I did not factor in an interest rate for your savings.

Summaries
There are three summaries you can see at a glance. One factors in your extra payments, another does not. This will make it easy for you to compare the two scenarios. Finally, there is a third summary that factors in your extra payments and a lump payment.

Kat's Cat Quilt

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Getting a handmade quilt for my birthday is a good reminder that at any given moment you never know when there’s a sweet little someone who’s holding you dear in her heart. On a day that I might have been feeling down, my niece could have been preparing her surprise, putting on the finishing touches, maybe those button eyes that I imagine she picked out with great consideration. She might have been stitching through the night to finish the quilt in time or driving through a famous Boise inversion to get it shipped before she headed off to the salon for a ten-hour day on her feet. Or, as I fell prey to the misconception that it’s a cruel world, she might have been choosing fabric that I would like or consulting with my mother – grandma who took a vow of secrecy – about a new sewing technique. She might have been having lunch with her mother – my sister, also sworn to secrecy – showing off her work, so excited to give me the first quilt she had ever made using “an actual pattern.” However it went, I do know that on Christmas day my niece decided to sew me a quilt. She had made one for her grandmother and could hear me in the background over the telephone gushing – actually she said I was squealing – over it. I was. But, I had no idea that my reactions were registering with anyone who might be taking note or scheming to totally floor me with their kindness two months down the road.

Cat Quilt
Cat Quilt
Cat Quilt
Cat Quilt
Cat Quilt
Cat Quilt

Fireplace Insert – Free (Taken – Thanks!)

As part of a fireplace repair, we are having the insert replaced with a more efficient, cleaner burning one. The old one will be recycled on February 20, unless someone else has a use for it.

Front: 44″ W, 30″ H, 24″ D. Vents with blower.
Opening: 26 3/4″ W, 14″ H
Vent on top controlled by lever on front.
Box: 26″ W, 25″ H, 12″ D

Taking in Some Theater

The Year I was BornWe’ve been enjoying The Walker’s Out There series, which comes around every year in the heart of winter, a good time to hunker down in their cave of a theater that makes the audience feel like a part of the set with its wavy gray walls that bring spray-painted Styrofoam to mind. With one exception, we loved the series, each show for different reasons. We recommend that you catch the last of it tonight or tomorrow. Lola Arias’s The Year I Was Born is definitely worth seeing.

Generally worried about the road conditions and realizing that the time I was going to use to make myself presentable might be needed to help shovel our way out instead, we considered bagging it. I’m really glad we didn’t.

The Year I Was Born was great theater and solid story-telling and it will stick with me for a long time. Following eleven Chileans with disparate political and economic backgrounds and who were born during Pinochet’s reign (1973-1990), the piece widened my vision and deepened my capacity to absorb parallel histories such that I could somehow understand everything at once. What was I doing when Alexandra’s mother, Pitty, was gunned down by government thugs? I can only hope that I wasn’t cursing Verizon or consumed with some similar inanity.

By comparison, Wunderbaum’s (with LAPD) Hospital was a didactic dud that would make me think twice about seeing a show put on by political activists the same way I might be highly skeptical of a movie starring Keanu Reeves. Unlike The Year I Was Born, which is also a historical piece that relies on personal stories, this show has few theatrical elements that work. Instead it lays out the history of health care in the United States in such a way that it wouldn’t have been surprising if they had fired up PowerPoint. Overall, Hospital lacked a sense of humor, a refuge that even a play about a brutal dictatorship provided.

Kuro Tanino’s Niwa Gekidan Penino (The Room Nobody Knows) was visually stunning the minute the curtains opened to a diorama-esque scene that made you long to step into its sparkling amethyst cubby. It was a scene so intimate that the audience was actually seated on the main stage, creating a stage within a stage that I liked to imagine infinitely repeated itself. The music was equally breathtaking. There is no version of Pachelbel’s Canon that will ever come close to what four actors accomplished with recorders. More than once for a conventionally unacceptable number of minutes, the director leaves us in the pitch dark with nothing but this music. Everything else melts away. Every worry. Every plan. Every thought. If I could conjure up this moment on demand, I’m not sure I would do anything else.

Equally addictive was a moment from Clément Layes’ Public in Private. A potted plant. A spotlight. A performer, head tucked and pointing to the plant in the light. Music! Cut mid-note! That was it for me. More than wondering how this guy did the entire show with a glass of water balanced on the side of his head, or recalling other stand-alone physical feats that amazed and made for wonderfully playful moments, I’ll think about that plant and wonder how such an image could make me feel sad about the state of the world and hopeful at the same time. I love a show that leaves you speechless, and this is one of them.

How to Change a Habit

When someone is sending electric shocks to the hair follicles on your face, you’re apt to listen more than talk. I listened and learned about The Charge – Activating the 10 Human Drives that Make you Feel Alive.

Bev had good things to say about this latest recipe for success and while it made me cringe with its nauseatingly pat tagline, I bought a copy, taking cover under the notion that it would give us something to talk about. While it’s fair that a definitive list of life’s secrets might induce involuntary eye-rolling (I always wonder, “Why ten?”), there is no call for anyone’s tiresome skepticism here.

Upon finishing the book, I gave my copy to a friend who was in need of some insight as she navigated an unbearably dysfunctional job situation that was undermining the confidence of this otherwise competent and fabulous young woman. I thought about JoAnne a lot as I turned the pages.

It had something for me too. While The Charge is the reason why I took on some scary projects instead of lesser undertakings and while it reinvigorated – at least temporarily – the blind courage of my 20-something self who somehow ventured off to Brussels with little money, a copy of Let’s Go Europe and a plan that went as far as “Take the train to ‘Le Gare du Nord'” – I mostly liked it for its solid practical tips more than for its fleeting inspirational passages. For example, “When this, then that” can help you develop lasting good habits. The idea is to add an action onto a well-established routine, as opposed to trying to change a behavior without the benefit of context. It’s the difference between saying, “This year I’m going to eat better!” and saying, “From now on, when I finish dinner every day, then I am going to eat an apple.”

It’s not sexy, but we use the rule to keep the litter box clean. Since it’s in the basement, it could easily be out-of-sight-out-of-mind until there was a revolt. But we have forstalled an uprising by saying: “When we feed the cat in the morning, we then clean the litter box.”

The Charge is loaded with other – probably better examples of – tips that made it worth it to replace the copy that I gave to my friend. While my enthusiasm for it might have been a case of my being particularly receptive to its insights for whatever reason when I first picked it up, I suspect that the book will hold up nicely as a reference.

Avoid these hangers

HangerHangerSprucing up for spring means having a good way to put stuff away. If you do, you’re more likely to stick with a system to keep things organized. So, I’m a fan of hangers that are designed specifically for pants and bought a stash of them a few years ago when I reorganized my closet.

HangerDon’t make the same mistake I made. Avoid these wooden slack hangers that are plastic around the neck of the hook. As much as I have tried, I can’t find a use for these headless wooden slats, which is an almost certain end to the last of my premium-priced hangers with their seductive velvet padding.

Hanger
The hangers that come with garments in the store have lasted.
Hanger
Slack hangers can also be used for boots! This hanger is all metal and has been around forever. I’m not sure where it came from or where to get more.

Teaching Jan How to Drive

Just when it seems like the Wolves have turned a corner, they suffer a heartbreaking loss. It reminds me of teaching Jan how to drive.

When Ying asked me to teach her sister how to drive, I countered that her husband should do the honor. But putting a man in the uneasy position of critiquing his wife’s driving was ill-advised, as opposed to the much easier task of overcoming a language barrier while explaining the importance of checking your blind spot. I didn’t speak a word of Chinese and Jan was still learning body parts. “I have two feet. I have two hands. I have a head.”

We started in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn on the north end of Mt. Rushmore Road or Eighth Street depending on whether you are a tourist or a cruiser, generally high school kids mixed with the occasional GI who is too young for nightclubs. With the side mirror angled toward the road so she could see the stripes in relationship to the car (a trick borrowed from my dad who taught me how to drive and the extent of my bag of tricks as a driving instructor), for more than two hours Jan drove a rusty Volare Station Wagon from one end of the lot to the other. No one got hurt. It was a good day.

Jan steadily improved as we ditched her regular English workbooks for the South Dakota driver’s manual. Eventually we progressed to traffic while I gradually made my way out of Jan’s lap and firmly into the passenger’s seat where I could not reach the brakes. When it came time, Jan handled the freeway just fine and the practice runs to the DMV were becoming tedious; she had turned a corner and was ready for the road test. Great. Ying’s husband could stop with his daily harangues and I could stop imagining my bloody demise; it would have been an ironic fate after having survived my senior year of high school screwing off in that beloved heap.

The night before Jan was to take her test we took the wagon for a final run. What happened next is difficult to describe. Just as Jan’s driving was becoming effortless, she had suddenly and completely lost her sense of the car. She was clipping curbs and swinging into wild and overly broad turns that scared the hell out of me. In what I recognized to be a game of chicken, we hiccupped down the road in herky-jerky spurts, barely stopping in time to avoid collisions and pissing off everyone in our path, teenagers, GIs, old ladies. Everyone.

Jan would certainly face another berating from her brother-in-law who apparently learned how to drive on his lunch break while blindfolded and handcuffed to a monkey, and I was doomed to a career as a driving instructor, the end of which could only be marked by a license with Jan’s picture on it. Defeated and at a loss for what to do next, we had no words sitting in the parking lot of the Colonial House, the last restaurant heading south out of town before everything becomes a tourist attraction or a billboard for one. From a distance, I might have been ten playing Charlie’s Angels with my sister Amy. There we are in the driveway under the basketball hoop where we live in Shell housing that’s just inside the main gate at Ellsworth Air Force Base. The side-by-side duplexes of Shell have long been dozed. This time, this time a heated chase will not bring to the morning a blaring radio, the swishing of wipers nor blinking lights that will startle our dad as he sets off to work. This time it’s just Jan and me.

I’d look at Jan. She’d look at me. We’d both look straight ahead reaching eons beyond the windshield as if the answer might have wandered off into the ponderosa pines. I couldn’t figure it out. I’d look at Jan and she’d look at me. We’d both looked straight ahead… An eternity ticked by before a hint of inspiration rose up from deep inside her gut, filled her chest, and washed the residue of a bad day from Jan’s face.

“You change the seat?” She said.

The seat?

I don’t know why or how or why I didn’t notice it, but the seat was moved all the way back. Jan could barely reach the pedals! She could barely see over the dashboard!

The next day Jan took my car for her road test while I stayed behind to pray in the waiting room of the DMV. Jan returned a short while later to tell me that my prayers had been answered.

Coach Rambis, you change the seat?