Closing

The house in Illinois is scheduled to close at 11:30 this morning. Hopefully, this will be the last posting I will make with the "house disaster" tag.

Because tomorrow night is Yom Kippur, just about my entire work this season has been on letting go of my residual bitterness about this whole situation. I think I've mostly done so. It will be a great relief to be able to go into the new year with this situation resolved, without the fears of lawsuits and foreclosures and everything else.

I now need to call Nicor (the power company) and the city of N-ville to indicate my intention to pay all the utilities that we've accumulated since we moved out of the house. So it's not completely over, and it's not like I have an extra $50 a month or whatever it's going to be to devote to this, but you do what you gotta do, I guess.

A couple of days ago there was a post on Get Rich Slowly about his brother who bought a house before he had sold his other house and is now likely to foreclose on both of them. There was a lot of talk about how irresponsible he was, and I suppose that's true, although I think we were brought up with the idea that the bank wouldn't give you the money if they didn't think you could pay it back. (I also think he's incorrect to say that the amount forgiven by the bank via the short sale is taxable income - I've had legal advice telling me so.)

But anyway, I'm fairly confident this criticism doesn't apply to me - we played by the rules, but the rules changed in the middle. It's common to look for a reason that something like this happened to someone, some personal flaw within them, because it makes people feel it won't happen to them. Or because it justifies their political me-first-ism. But of course it could happen and it does happen, every day. Not because people are bad actors, but because they acted under a certain set of circumstances and the cirumstances changed.

I'm not happy, I'm not relieved, I'm just exhausted. And poor. Where's my bailout, Henry?