The Work, Travel and Everyday Life Newsletter
from Randy Lewis
The fine print.
Remember when I asked you to come along for this fairytale blog ride I told you we would talk about finances, travel, and/or everyday life experiences. Today I’m shooting for finances and everyday life. Hop on board.
This is the first of a multi-part series on mortgages, refinancing, creating cash, and just being smart about money. My readers range from less than 20 to 104 years of age. Not every strategy I use applies to each of you.
However, I would recommend this as you read along. First, I hope you are entertained. Secondly and just as importantly I want you to try to understand why I think these strategies are a good idea for me. If you can do that I think you will be better prepared to decide if you can use these ideas for you. We good?
I can’t make this stuff up.
Folks, I couldn’t make up the story I am about to tell you. It’s important to know that, in your mind, you’re going to be stepping into our master bedroom. If this makes you feel uncomfortable I suggest you shelter in place somewhere else……Well! I can see that warning did not deter a single one of you!
Refinancing our home mortgage is one of my hobbies. I do this every 2 or 3 years and have been refinancing pretty much from day one.
We are usually right on the borderline of the maximum loan to home value ratio that the bank will allow. If you don’t know what that means don’t worry much. It means we don’t have that much money. It means the bank doesn’t want to lend money to folks who won’t pay it back. I know right!
This ratio also means that our home’s appraisal is an integral aspect of the entire refinance process. If the house doesn’t, “appraise” then we don’t get the loan and we don’t go to Disneyland.
In order to get the best home appraisal our home needs to be in immaculate condition. Since we built our home and moved into it in 2003 it’s only been my wife, Carol, and me living there. That being the case, our house could pretty much pass for brand new with a couple of exceptions.
Our home appraisal date is coming up. We’ve made all of the necessary home repairs in preparation. There is one more BIG problem that needs to be fixed. Sometimes my solution to fixing big problems is a temporary fix. I don’t like to spend any more time working on problems than I absolutely have to. I’d rather be traveling.
I might be a hoarder.
So what exactly IS the problem? I might be a hoarder. No, not a hoarder like you see on TV where you can’t walk up the steps or back the car out of the garage but possibly still a hoarder anyway.
There’s no doubt about it. I am lazy.
I am also the laziest person that I personally know. Case in point…..back in high school, I had a pretty good-looking ’55 Pontiac Chieftain (younger folks can Google this reference). Whenever I went on a date I only washed the passenger side of the car, where my date would be entering and exiting. My side of the car commonly looked like I had just completed the Baja 1000 in the rain. Folks, that’s lazy! I also thought this was an absolutely brilliant idea. It worked well every time.
Where do I hoard?
I hoard stuff in essentially four spots in our home/garage. The first is my office. I have a very good friend who retired from Procter & Gamble. I visited his home recently. I got a chance to see his home office. He didn’t have a single thing on his desk except for a blotter. Wow!
In my own home office, I have a huge dark maroon mahogany desk. If I had to guess I have 200 different items on my desk at any one time. I know that some of those items have been there for five or maybe as long as ten years. I also pretty much know, or at least I think I know, where everything is on my desk.
This lady doesn’t come into my office anymore.
We have a person who comes in every so often to clean our home. When she first started she wanted to, “help” by rearranging things on my desk. I’m a pretty laid-back guy. However, when anyone messes with stuff in my office or on my desk I am not such a laid-back fellow. The woman who works at our house doesn’t come into my office anymore.
As I look at my desk I see a couple of cans of Vienna sausages, the master guide on how to wash a car, about sixty one-dollar bills, the closing statement from our last refinance of three years ago, a full case of thin mint Girl Scout cookies and much much more….200+ things more.
No! Not the bathroom.
My second place for hoarding stuff is around the bathroom sink in our master bath. My wife and I each have our own sink. On my side I probably have 6-8 different cans of shaving cream, 8-10 forms of toothpaste in various stages of usage, and maybe another 30-40 items.
We have a pretty large master bedroom. We have a sitting area with a large chair and table. At any one time, I will have 6-8 pairs of athletic shoes strewn around the chair. My bedroom floor “inventory” usually includes five or six sweatshirts, a few t-shirts, my travel bag for the next trip, and various other items thrown on the floor.
I just sold an SUV automobile that I have owned for the past seven years. In the back of that car was all manner of things including four or five dozen golf balls (I haven’t played golf in five years), three or four blankets, five or six baseball hats, and much much more. When I sold that car my wife packed up the contents of the car and dumped it into a huge heavy-duty black plastic bag. Then she dumped that plastic bag in a big cardboard box in my office.
The refi home appraiser is coming this week.
Now our home appraiser is coming in just a few days. I haven’t polluted my new car yet so I guess that’s a plus. However, my office is overflowing like a mini-warehouse. My sink in the bathroom looks like the inside of a Walgreens store. Our master bedroom looks like it houses half of the contents of a Nike athletic shoe store.
We last refinanced in October 2017. My solution back then for getting everything to look in tiptop shape was to simply get as many of those large black plastic garbage bags and fill them with all of the excess, “stuff” from my office, bedroom, and bathroom. Then I took those jam-packed plastic bags and jammed them in the back of the car until the appraiser left.
I was pretty proud of myself in advance of that last refinance. Back then my office and my side of the bathroom looked just like a model home. I thought I had the perfect solution, albeit a temporary solution to this hoarding problem.
I couldn’t believe I found this stuff from three years ago.
Fast forward to May 2020. I am under the gun again and the home appraiser is coming soon. I just found two large plastic bags in my office from the last refinance. They hadn’t been touched in three years.
It was with some trepidation that I began to explore the contents of these bags. I did it in front of my wife as she prepared herself for going to bed for the evening.
I begin to pull stuff out of the bag. I first noticed six containers of nasal spray, five of which had never been opened. For the life of us we couldn’t figure out if either one of us at ever had a need for nasal spray!
Act, file or toss.
I remember studying the ABC’s of personal organization as regards paperwork many years ago. The advice was either act on it, file it or toss it. That’s my plan to get rid of all of the extra stuff that has accumulated like a fungus in my office, bedroom and bathroom.
I would say 95-99% of the stuff hasn’t been needed in years and might not ever be needed again. However, as I pick up each individual item I have a very difficult time deciding if I should donate it or try to store it.
I like the idea of donating things that I’m not using. I know that other people could use much of this stuff. I also understand that if I do store any of these things that when I really need them I probably will never be able to find them!
If anyone has any good advice on how to handle the situation that I’m faced with I’m open to hearing what you have to say. I think I could pretty much walk out of my house, just like folks did at Chernobyl, never look back and I wouldn’t miss 98-99% of my, “stuff”.
If a person can be bribed….I don’t mind bribing them.
Right now I am waiting with a fresh batch of chocolate chip cookies and warm milk for the arrival of our home appraiser. I’m also holding two full gigantic plastic garbage bags behind my back with one hand.
Hoarding in San Clemente.
Randy Lewis
San Clemente, California
You’re kidding!
P.S. This afternoon I received a phone call from our home appraiser. She was scheduled to see us in four days. Now she tells me she will only be doing a “drive-by” appraisal. Was this a cruel joke? Apparently, with the coronavirus, the bank won’t let her come into people’s homes.
For the last couple of week’s my wife and I have been busting our butts to get our home ready for this appraisal. Now the appraiser isn’t even going to set foot in our house. We were 97% finished with making our home look like a model home. Now….do I really want to finish that last three percent? Remember, I am the laziest person I know.
This is a multi-part story so be on the lookout for Part 2.