We found a townhouse about five blocks from the old place. It's a little older, used to have a bug problem, and has a few maintenance issues, but it's bigger, has a backyard and a porch. We got a grill of our own for the first time since we left Ohio. The kid and dog both love running around outside, and it's a hell of a lot quieter. There are no neighbors upstairs stomping around, no sirens right outside our window and solid cinderblock walls between us and the next townhouse over.
The move nearly bankrupted us. With the sudden cost of movers, paying double rent and utilities for a month, security deposits and everything, we had to dump out all of our savings and burn up a bunch of credit balances we were just getting ready to pay down. Six months later, we're no longer living paycheck to paycheck. It has been hard.
The Wolf's health has finally improved, also. From about Thanksgiving to the beginning of March, we all had some kind of illness or another. In December, The Wolf came down with RSV which led to pneumonia. He was in the hospital for about three days, lost a bunch of weight, and had a cough that lingered for months. I think he and I are just now getting over that--I still have some phlegmy mornings every week.
When we broke our lease at the Flats at Wheaton Station, Gables--the management company that owns the thing--took the option of imposing a penalty of about $2,000 on us. We tried to negotiate with them, because we thought it was really their company and their building that made the living conditions untenable, but they had nothing of it. They actually didn't even return our emails. Last month, we started to get letters from a rent collection agency.
The guy at the agency was quite cool. He was in the process of putting the file together to report us to the credit bureaus, but noticed that there was an old address on the file, so he gave us a call. "It seemed odd that they'd send a demand notice to the address that you broke your lease to leave from..." he said. I explained how the whole thing evolved, and we resubmitted our offer of paying half of what Gables was demanding. He said "that's about the most reasonable offer I've heard from someone like you and I've been doing this for over 20 years." He said he'd send it up and was optimistic that it would be accepted.
It wasn't. Gables wanted the whole amount.
The best he could do was 80% of the total, which is what his contract allowed him to collect without any input from Gables. So we did that. Hopefully, all these shenanigans won't affect our credit.
That matters so much now because the credit market is so shitty, you have to have a credit score of at least 720 to even be considered for a home loan. With our debt burden including the houses in Akron, old credit cards that bubbled up only a few years ago, weird little utility payments that we believe we paid but don't have any records of now, stupid, stupid, stupid lawsuits from former clients, and all our student loans... our scores aren't great.
But we're getting there. Our careers and our salaries are doing just fine. We've got a month or so of savings right now and a few ways to put our numbers back together. It's a slog, but we'll get through it.
Now, pictures of the Wolf.
No comments:
Post a Comment