All day long I’ve been trying to get here.  I see my swirly dust tracks from my last visit are starting to fade as the walls of this joint get some use…now if I could just reach the ceiling  Yah, three posts in about eight days or so, S-C-A-R-Y!  Life is filled with such wonderful little messes and sometimes bad endings and sometimes good endings and endings that never happen but the suspense keeps building and sometimes the bad endings end up creating good in the long run and the good endings…well…damn I love a Cinderella story.  But I’m not here to relate one.  Just gabbin’.

Back a few posts ago I wrote about my old digs and the mortgage company’s bail-out and how the house went up for sale after it was sold on the auction block.  In that post I also stated that I simply stopped paying on two credit cards I had…and mentioned that I would write more on that later.  Here it is:

I had a Chase credit card for years.  About six months after the old digs were heading into foreclosure, Chase sent me a notice that they were lowering my credit limit…yah…they check the credit scoress now and then I guess.  Although I’d never been late on a payment to them and always prepaid on my account in all the years I was with them and before them with Bank One – they took it over.  OK.  I continued to make my payments.  In April, I think it was, I just stopped making payments to them.  I know it sounds like a WTF but it was part of my mood and part of my attitude about banking and partly my finances.  For two or three months I got the monthly statement and other letters reminding me my account was past due…and phone calls.  Yuppers, they were right, it was.  If I don’t have a phone number identified, I usually don’t answer the call, if it’s important they leave a message.  Once I identified that it was them, I set it to a different ring tone so I wouldn’t answer unless I was in the mood.  Tee Hee.  Sometimes I’m just a moody bitch.

Then I started getting a different type of letter from them, one that said we could work something out.  I took the next call.  They were right…we could.  Now I have a 6% rate and a payment of less than $160 a month for life through the end of it.   I like this.  I can prepay or not and live with it.  I never thought I’d have a credit card company do a conversion like that for me so I’m happy.  Yes, my CC is closed, but I like that too.

Same kind of deal with Community One but I had to fight for this one.  The Steed is financed through Community One and I had a CC with them…for years.  I also used to carry all of my checking and savings with them – close to 20 years of my doing business with them, paying off two other auto loans and a variety of things and never being late on a payment, always prepaying, and never a bounced check, etc.  When my CC was due to renew in January, they sent me a note and told me they wouldn’t renew it.  Shocker!  I called, they were just being converted to America 1st CU out of Salt Lake.  The woman I spoke with in Vegas looked at all of my account and couldn’t believe they wouldn’t renew my CC.  I was sure it had to do with the foreclosure but I was still pissed.  She called Salt Lake and, sure enough, it was true.  I went to Vegas, closed my checking and took everything out of my savings except the $25 that has to remain with them to have the account open.  Believe me, if I had had the funds, I would’ve paid off the truck and closed that savings account too.

I made payments on the CC until somewhere around April, all of the above with Chase is about the same picture here.  I continued to make payments on the Steed though.  They called, I ignored.  They wrote, I ignored.  I got an email where they said they would close my account/s and apply my next truck payment on the delinquent visa.  I replied that I would sue them via email.

I thought about it for a week.  Sure, I owe the money.  That was never the issue.  The issue is that I’ve been with them for 20 years and they can’t look at me as an individual.  I’m a number on a credit rating scale.  I called my contact guy and asked him about doing a conversion loan where the CC and the Steed became one.  The Steed books for about what I owe on both.  I had to do a workout sheet and a letter.  They sent it, I did it and sent it back.  That was way before heading north to the family reunion.

It took them until the 2nd week of August to get some kind of decision, I was the one that kept calling them, they stopped calling me.  When they came up with one, it was a 6.1% interest rate for a year and then it would go to 10.3.  WTF?  Let’s see, you make your payments on time and try to take care of your bill and they reward you by raising your interest rate?  That’s exactly what I said to the girl who told me the blood letting deal they were going to give me.  I told her that I would pay Joe Blow down the street 10% interest but not Community One.  We went through a 10 minute session back and forth and she told me about my credit score and I told her I didn’t give a damn, I’d been their customer for 20 years and this was bullshit. So…I had to come in and sign papers for it to take effect anyway.  I didn’t.

They were in the process of finalizing merging into America 1st and everything was backed up.  I called back, got the same department, and asked who I should speak to about sending my workout request back through the review committee because I believed they really didn’t know how to read.  I was sent to another # at Community One.  I spoke with someone that had me wait while she figured out who the person was I should talk to, in the end I was sent straight to his voice mail.  I left a message.  Never got a call back.  The following week I called back, went through the same process, talked to someone that didn’t know jackshit and got transferred to someone in collections that was either a serious smoker or dying of lung cancer since she never quit hacking and coughing and had to leave the line twice to clear congestion.  She had no clue as to what I was talking about but she did give me the name of the branch manager and his #.  I called the following day and left a long, heated message with his voice mail.  See…I’ve already put hours of my time into trying to straighten this issue out…that pisses me off too.

Two days later I got a call from my original contact about combining the loans and the workout request.  He told me his branch manager had sent him to straighten this out and he had a call in to someone that was supposed to contact me that day, if they didn’t, he would call me back and get it straightened out.

Amazingly, someone did call me.  A woman.  I old her about the workout loan and how it had been set-up and how unhappy I was with it.  I felt that it was punishing me for being a good customer.  And it appeared that someone there felt that next year I would be in better financial shape than I am now.  Go figure!  I don’t play the lottery so that’s out.  There thought was that I could ask to refinance after I made payments for a year…yeah right!  This is dandruff on my shoulders, not hayseed.

She went off to figure it all out after she listened to the fact that I wasn’t trying to borrow money – I already owed it – and was trying to figure out a way to be able to pay it.  She came back with an under 6% interest and a payment I can stand for five years and I’m done with it.  The fat lady is almost singing.  I go to Vegas on Friday to sign the papers.  That is some kinda wonderful.  Yes, I’m pleased.

On the other side of life that I’ve grown to hate, dadparental had a medical marijuana license that he left expire and he tested positive on a court order custody drug test.  Momparental did too but she’s got prescriptions.  So Riot is back with momparental for now with very limited, supervised visits from dadparental.  And he was varianced into a school due to being with dadparental, today was his last day there.  He has to start a new school tomorrow.  Being a grandparent is hell sometimes.  I believe he will spend the weekend with me.  Watch out bunny rabbits as we go hunting with our mega blaster water rifles.

Still no poker on my side of the mouse.  Just can’t seem to get there.  But you should.  The WCOOP is running and so is MiniFTOPS.  Good luck all.

Oh yeah, think good thoughts and send prayers to Boulder Colorado where PokerWorks writer and blogger, and my friend, Clearspine lives.  He reports that he and family are Ok but the smoke inhalation is brutal and some of his friends have lost their homes.

This was coming across the valley at me and Amy yesterday as we were out on an early a.m. hike – sun rays on the left, storm on the right:

Taken with the iPhone.  When it hit, we were safely at home but man was it unreal.  The wind has barely slowed down since – about 36 hours later – and when it first hit, it did massive splats of rain off and on.

G’nite.  Hey, maybe the world isn’t insane, maybe it’s all about the dust on the walls or not being able to reach the ceiling.