Stealing a Vet’s House
HELP! I hate these MFers so much. I bought a truly awesome, old New Orleans house right after Hurricane Katrina. It was built in the 1870s, and has a million times the character of some crap McMansion in a Florida subdivision. It has stained glass windows and hard-carved woodwork from, you know, the 19th Century. I even added a long bar under the split staircase, a secret door leading to a spiral staircase and hidden room on the 3rd floor. I worked on this house for 17 years and finally got it just perfect…
But then the 5th Circuit, America’s stupidest appellate court by a country mile, decided that New Orleans didn’t have the right to regulate Airbnb or some such nonsense, so the city said no more short term rentals. The house is way too big for me to live in alone, plus the insurance and taxes were so high now that I definitely couldn’t afford to stay there.
I started seeing if I could rent it out, and that’s when people got really mean. People called me a gentrifier, a parasite, an A-hole, and worse. They posted pictures of guillotines and eat the rich and laughed about how it was good that I was suffering because, somehow, I “took” this housing out of the imaginary affordable stock of housing for service industry workers and students when I bought it with my VA loan, lived in it, and fixed it up for 17 years.
So, I can’t live in it, rent it, fix it, Airbnb it, or afford to keep it… that leaves selling it, I guess. Made me sad to part with it after so long, but at least I have a lot of equity and I can buy a sailboat and travel a little right? Haha, no!
Last year, all the smart people came to me and said, “This place is worth $500,000! But you can’t sell for 500K. Interest rates are too high and nobody wants mid level houses. You can sell a tear-down for 100K or you can make a place sparkle and sell for a million, but you’re just screwed. You need to put money in and make it luxury! And I know just the people to go to.”
Goddamn fool that I am, I trusted these people… I traded in my nice, safe, VA loan for a 13% Hard Money nightmare loan. They charged me something like $30,000 just to make the loan and then in one fell swoop took $200,000 in equity and told me I needed to make insane upgrades like working fireplaces, commercial ovens in the kitchen, expensive tile everywhere, electronic security gates and off street parking.
Soon, all the money was gone, I owed $375,000 now on my place and we put it up for sale $775,000. And there it sat for a year while the Fed raised rates, and nobody bought houses except for scavengers and wholesalers and investment firms… all offering me basically what I owed+ a coupon for Starbucks- what a deal!
I dropped the price every month. I started falling behind on the $6,000 monthly payments. One buyer agreed to $725,000 and then their financing fell through. Drop to $680,000. I offered to insure the place for a year, maintain the lawn for a year. I offered it furnished or as rental property. I tried to reach a deal for lease-purchase with a nice family, but the Evil Hard Money jerks said no, Pay Us!
They finally announced they were going to foreclose on me in May and that now with penalties and fees I owed the $445,000. In sadness and desperation, I accepted a wholesalers crap offer of 500K and found a tenant to defray some of the costs of the last months.
But now it gets worse! Wholesalers, I learned, don’t even take possession of your house. They find someone who is desperate, make a promise to pay them an absurdly low price for their house, then they pick a day to close and try to sell it to someone else for 20K more on that same day. If they find someone, cha-ching! easy money for nothing. If they don’t, they just cancel the sale at the last second.
While this jackal was out looking for a fast buck at my expense, my idiot tenant decided to have some friends over and have a little party. They somehow broke the tub shown above and let water rain down into the kitchen. The stapled sheets to the wall for a projector screen, moved furniture in insane places, and had a roaring fire even though it was 75 degrees out. The fire spread and soon the NOFD was there chopping holes in the wall and pulling my electrical meter.
The wholesaler backed out. The tenant vanished. The sheriff dropped off the foreclosure notice, and now I didn’t have power. I tried to go back to the VA to get a loan to keep my house, but now they said I couldn’t afford the house I’d had for 17 years because I owed too much.
One strangely-frank investor said he would love to buy the property, but he can just wait now and get it at auction for half the price. Others have proposed a deal where the realtors get paid, the Hard Money Jerks get paid, the title attorneys get paid, the inspectors get paid, the appraiser gets paid, the broker gets paid, and someone gets a cool house. And I get to pay closing costs and kiss both my house and my life savings goodbye.
I have no idea what to do. I am lost and angry and feel like a moron. I even wrote Nic Cage to see if he wanted a cool New Orleans house, and I was trying to see if I could donate it to some interesting charity rather than give it to these bastards. Maybe all that’s left to do is shame them a little? Print this here and send it to my senators and locals media, and then chain myself to the front porch when they try to steal it?
I don’t know, but if *anyone* has any ideas or would just like to help a broke-ass vet fight against some Wealth Management Asshats, I’m all ears. I can be easily reached at evancwolf@yahoo.com
