It's always fun to get new drive axle tires installed on a semi tractor. Number one because you are looking at close to $4,000.00 for 8 tires. No-one ever said maintaining a semi was cheap. However, the last 8 tires on that truck have been on there for a full 3 years - which is very good for a truck.
Number 2, cause' once you get on the freeway with that new rubber driving you forward? You're all OVER the place!! I'm serious, every time I have had new rubber on a truck, the thing is attempting to zig and zag everywhere. It usually takes a couple of WEEKS before that stops happening.
Taxes. Beginning to drive me crazy. I was on the phone with the IRS today after the online company I was in an online chat with said that this is a "very complex tax issue and you are better off calling them". So I did. The man I was talking with was cool enough, but he started reading from a publication, an IRS publication of course. Endless questions. I answered all of them I could. In the end? I have to be able to PROVE the fair market value of the home before it burned down. Lol.
The ONLY existing publication that I know of that I can actually get a hard copy of is from the county tax assessor's office. I don't know about where you live, but around these parts, a house is never given as much value as the market actually gives it. Which is a good thing, I guess, when it comes to paying property taxes, but in this case? Not good at all. I'm going to have to use it, I have no other choice.
BTW, next year, the county's FMV on my current home? Almost HALF of what I owe on it. Gag. If that IS the FMV, I am SCREWED. The only way to answer the question as to whether I should short sale this place and eat the bad credit for however many years is to have an appraisal done on it. Scary scenario, for me anyway.
The next question was about the contents of the house. I most assuredly hope that they don't think I should have to come up with receipts for every single thing I had in there. Do you have receipts for every piece of furniture, clothing, electronics, etc that you own? Oh, I am sure there are people out there that have all the stuff and probably have it in a safety deposit box. Not me. I am 99% convinced that I am going to be audited on this situation. I don't care, I am not going to lose all the money I can get out of it just for the fear of having to face the IRS. This may end up being a long, drawn-out process.
But, I am ready for that. I don't expect a check in the mail from them anytime soon. I do, instead, expect either phone calls demanding documentation or a letter saying I am being audited. Come what may, I am heading down this road because I must.
It's about this time in life where I wished I had a few thousand dollars in savings to be able to draw off of to get a real accountant, sit down with that person and have a face to face discussion about what is actually going to happen.
Oh well. I guess I could pay off the $463 loan on my 401K and then get another loan - but - there is a 30 day lapse between the time you pay off the loan and the time you can get another one. Too late : )
No, this is the only course of action I am financially able to take, it's the one I'm riding on, wish me luck!
ben
6 comments:
Wednesday
Where does it end? I read and read and read all kinds of "expert" opinion on whether to keep a home, send in the keys, let them foreclose, short sale and now a "deed in lieu of foreclosure" action. The latest one I read was speaking about the last one, but then proclaimed going bankrupt may be a better option.
?!!!
It's all utter insanity. It doesn't matter which one of those you take, you are screwed, in terms of your credit rating and it's going to stay that way a long, long time.
I have struggled with this entire situation for some time now. What to do. At one point, I was settled to stay in the house and live with the loss of being underwater.
Yesterday, looking at the FMV published on the county's site, and seeing the house is now valued, by them anyway, at nearly HALF of what I actually owe on it? I'm pulling my hair out on this situation. I have no clear cut path to take here. It isn't a Y in the road, it's more like standing in the middle of an intersection with 8 roads leading out of it, none of the roads leading anywhere good.
In a case like this, when I don't know what to do - or more like can't decide what to do - I will do nothing. Stay in the house, eat the loss for now and see what comes down the road.
I just made the third payment of the 3-month trial in the HAMP modification. I don't know....what to do at this point.
I know what a lot of people are doing: stop making the payments and save the money. Stay in the house as long as possible until they come to boot you out. Minimum 6 months before that happens, a lot longer in many cases. In fact, I know a family that has not made a payment in over a year's time. Still in the house, but, they have been notified they have to be out by the end of next month.
That doesn't really answer the question, though, and I wonder about the ethics of staying in a house that you aren't paying for but enjoying the benefits of a free roof over your head, while you take that money and stuff it into savings. Perhaps that is a small piece of the puzzle as to why the economy is where it's at right now.
Of course, if you lose your job and you CAN'T make the payments, that might paint a different picture. What are you going to do, move out onto the streets? Desperation forces people to do things they normally would not.
I'm really quite clueless here as to what to do, going around in a large circle and coming back to the same point and question.
With that floating around in my head, I am still battling this tax situation. I am going to have to make a trip to downtown Phoenix to get a hard copy of the FMV for my old house before it burned down for tax purposes. The proof that the house burned down will take up to 45 DAYS to receive, but I can file the return without it, I may have to show that proof later on, but getting the return filed before the 15th is the goal. I may go to that department as well and see if I can get that expedited.
As for the contents of the house, I am supposed to put that as a separate loss, at least from what I am gathering. I don't know, but when I send in the tax return, I already have an itemized listing of the things I lost in that fire and how much I think it was worth at the time. I did that a long time ago and saved it in an email - which I am glad I did because the old computer has crashed several times since then and that information would have been lost. I would be racking my brains attempting to remember everything that was in that house at the time.
Now, proving that I had that stuff? Not possible. Maybe - now that I think about it - I might have pics on my Photobucket account - I think I took pics of everything and uploaded them. I'll have to go through the 1,000 photos I have on there and see. It would at least help. I do have pics on my Zillow account - just a few - that show the damage to the house from the outside, pretty bad stuff indeed.
Umm, work day is here and I am lost in a conundrum of thought concerning all of this.
ben
Your situation re house is certainly upsetting.
FMV is obviously an unstable indication of the 'worth' of the place to YOU and yer dawgs.
You need to ask yourself how you like your neighborhood and the commute to your job, and the availability of places to walk them etc from where you now live.
Not many places are going to rent to someone with a quarter ton of animals. That sixty foot snowpack in Calif is going to make the desert bloom shortly (lets hope it is not radioactive) and perhaps real estate in Phoenix will rebound.
And always, there is the 'known' vs the 'unknown' when dealing with a place to live. Your recent vid shows you have put a lot of sweat equity into the yard, and a lot of effort into a quasi-formal rental situation in the house and driveway. When all that extra tax free income is included, can you find something comparable for yourself and your animals for the same or lower price?
Fin, thanks for the thoughtful comments. I have asked myself a LOT of questions in attempting to come up with an answer to all of this, the dogs definitely being one of them. Another question, sans the dogs: how much does it cost to rent a place. I'm down to less than a grand a month on the mortgage payment and that includes taxes and insurance. Of course, without dogs, I have seen places renting for $500 or even less, some of them don't look too shabby.
For peace of mind sake: staying put would be the obvious answer. Don't have to move, get rid of a lot of stuff, deal with the drama of getting rid of the dogs, living with the unknowns of who is living beside you, behind you, above you and below you. Further, I am the landlord, not the other way around in renting out a place.
From a fiscal sense, though, the obvious answer is to get out of it. Walk away from it and be done with it. Trash an already not so good credit rating, but not have to deal with a house that is so far underwater, it may never rebound, who knows.
From the standpoint of my neighborhood - there are some great people and some really raunchy people as well. But, I can deal with that, at least for now. I don't have to talk to the idiots, I can ignore them and go about my business. They don't start trouble with me anymore - there are some real neighborhood bullies around there - the last encounter with one of them, well I won't really say what my words were to that individual on a public forum, just safe to say that my home is my castle.
Again, in this situation, when I don't know what to do, do nothing. Ride it out a little longer, see where all of this is going. Save, save, save. I have more money going into my 401k now than I have had going in there for over 2 years.
There are many unknowns right now, not the least of which is the employment situation. I am somewhere around 2 years into this reduced hour situation and when I ask about reinstatement of full hours, I don't get an answer.
Because of all the little factions that are included in all of this situation, it becomes mind-boggling. I have to shut it off at some point because it starts to consume me.
And really, right now, at least for the next week or so, I am fully engaged in this IRS tax situation and getting the paperwork necessary to make sure I have it right the first time. I don't want audited by the IRS, but I am guessing a good chance they will do so anyway, which is all fine and well, I just want to make sure I have my ducks in a row before I even send the return in, that way I am prepared in advance. I am guessing that situation in itself may turn into an ordeal which will put everything else....on hold.
ben
Thursday
I received something in the mail yesterday from Sierra Vista, where my dad lives. I opened it up and found a newspaper clipping with a picture of my dad in it. I about died: I thought it was an obituary! What did I miss?!! I started reading it and it quickly became evident that it was a write-up about him, what he has done in that community and the fact that he is moving out of that community to go live in an assisted living center in Tucson - a pretty good drive away from there.
It was a great article and a fitting farewell to a man that has poured out his life in terms of ministry to all kinds of people, from the homeless to the rich and wealthy and everything in between. It was cool to read this article, it was pretty long and it covered a lot of ground. I finally got an email back from him this morning: he is in the middle of moving and it is pretty much consuming him and his time.
My buddy Fin wrote an interesting comment to my last blog entry and it got me to thinking about this situation: whether to keep the house or short-sale it (or any of the other options available). What hit me is that I should get a big piece of paper, 11X15 anyway, write down pro's to moving on one side and con's on the other and start jotting it all down. In my mind, there is SO much to sort through in making such a decision. Writing it down in such fashion might help me to get a clearer picture of all of it.
Taxes. Moving right along with that portion of it. I have house fire totals listed with my version of that fair market value is of each item, the contents of the house that is. I am going to print out pics of the burned out structure, proof that yes, my house burned down along with the fire report. It's more than just that, though, the pics will verify that the house was a total loss. Not just a small fire, it was a BAD fire that caused the destruction by one of 3 methods: the fire itself; the intense heat that spread throughout the house and the extreme smoke damage that finished everything off.
I was thinking yesterday, though, what it would be like to still be in that house. Old, yes. Cheap - operative word. The mortgage payment was only $450 per month. No need for tenants and all that kind of aggravation. By now, I would have had the interior finished with a complete renovation, I had it about half done at the point of the fire.
Not crying over spilt milk, I was musing things. Now I have tenants to make up the difference. I do think that to make the quality of my life a bit better, I need to focuse on keeping good tenants and getting rid of the bad. To that end, the kid needs to go. I believe he needs to have one of those rude awakenings in life: go live with kids his own age and find out how they deal with his junk. In his mind, I'm sure he has already HAD a rude awakening - such as when he was yelling at me on the phone and I spit it back right into his face. But there's the rest of it, not worth going into here, just to say that it's more than I want to deal with.
Which reminds me, that old computer's monitor is kaput. Need to find a good used one somewhere. Lynnette uses it to try and find a job, plus doing surveys that actually do pay money to do them. I don't use it anymore, at all. It's an old behometh to me, but to everyone else that uses it, well, it's better than nothing.
Musing for today: over, work day is here.
G'day.
ben
The paper with line down the middle and pluses one side and minuses on the other is an excellent useful tool.
Sometimes I see it credited to Ben Franklin. I am a big fan.
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