Usury

by john | Jan 5, 2010 | Real Life

Dictionary.com defines usury as – the lending or practice of lending money at an exorbitant interest. In practice, the street definition has been mangled a little to apply to any assholish lending practices, and my conversation this morning certainly qualifies on that regard, if not under the “exorbitant interest” qualifier. What follows is a cautionary tale of a man who mortgaged his adulthood for an education and is still paying for the privilege fifteen years later.

When I was in high school, I wanted to be a teacher. As soon as you’re done laughing at the concept I’ll continue. I wanted to be a high school English teacher in the Dead Poets Society vein, not realizing that most people who attempt to teach using those methods would end up quickly unemployed. As the child of working-class parents, I was informed at a very young age that if I wanted to attend college, it would be on my nickel. So I worked hard and got scholarships that would cover all my tuition to Winthrop, one of the schools I had short-listed. That list became one name long when they sent that scholarship offer.

The only problem was, tuition was but one portion of the expenses that had to be covered to get my happy ass educated. So I applied for Pell grants and this new thing called the South Carolina Teacher’s Loan. Now this loan was a great idea on the part of the state of SC, because if you became a teacher in SC at the end of your college education, the loan would be forgiven at the rate of 20% per year. So teach in SC for five years, and you don’t owe any money. Great, right?

Except I decided at the end of my junior year that I had no interest in becoming a teacher. So I finished up college like a lot of people, with a pile of student loans that I couldn’t afford to pay. So I didn’t pay them. And I didn’t pay them. And I continued to not pay them for a decade or so. A couple of years ago, I started paying on the student loans, and they stopped calling me with nasty threats, and all was good in the ‘hood. Until last week. I went online to check the total remaining balance, kind of a beginning of the year what’s up with my debt check-in, only to find that the amount listed as my monthly payment had increased by $120 per month.

I was a little befuddled, so I called the SC Student Loan Corporation and spoke to Tara, a very helpful young lady who had no idea what was going on. So she promised to look into things and call me back. Then she noticed that I was on what they call a graduated repayment plan, which might explain why the payment was increasing. I figured, “ok, not a huge deal, I can afford the extra $120/month, and if it’ll get this thing paid off quicker, all the better.” But Tara promised to talk to her supervisor and call me back.

Which she did, this morning. And she responded, as I expected, that her supervisor at the SC Student Loan Corp. said there was no way they could forgive any of the interest or renegotiate anything with me, and that my payment was scheduled for another increase on January 20th, 2010. I expressed some dismay at this, since the increase of $120/month was dated January 10th. So I said that Tara should probably have her supervisor call me, because a loan that increased by 25% in the monthly payment one month shouldn’t reasonably increase ANOTHER 25% ten days later. So I expressed to Tara that I couldn’t afford to make that payment, and someone should call me.

Now I’m not going to say that I’m without fault here. Had I paid the loans on time, I’d be done five years ago. Had I had the money to pay the loans, I’d have paid them. But this latest development is a little ridiculous, and now I just have to sit and wait for the fine folks at the SC Student Loan Corporation to get back to me and convince me that they’re not screwing me over, and that I shouldn’t just tell them to go into the kitchen and fix themselves a nice hit steaming cup of go fuck yourself. Which I won’t do, because I can’t.

Because here’s the cautionary tale about student loans – they never go away. They are guaranteed by the gubmint, and the gubmint gone get they money somehow. If I had paid for my room and board on credit cards I could have declared bankruptcy and pissed off with an education and never paid for it, or just settled with the creditor for less interest. But since it’s a student loan, I’m hosed. So now I wait for the nice supervisor to call me and try to figure out some equitable solution to this that doesn’t involve me taking a loan out against my 401k to pay off the student loan and then pay myself back into my 401k over the next four years. So pay attention to the terms of your student loan, because unlike other debts you’ll incur in life, they don’t have to work with you, or be reasonable, or do anything the way normal creditors do.

New Year, New whatever…

by john | Jan 4, 2010 | Real Life

So I don’t do resolutions. It’s not really a conscious thing anymore, I just don’t do them. Part of it is not wanting to set myself up for failure, part of it is not having a whole lot of focus in my life in general, and part of it just laziness. Of course there are things that I will try to do over the course of the year, and here are a few of them.

1) Lose weight. Like most Americans, I’m overweight. I could be comfortable around 225 lbs., which would be fine if I didn’t weight 275 lbs. currently. So I want to lose at least 40-50 pounds this year. I’ve done it before, as recently as 2007, so I know what it takes, I just have to get off my fat ass and make it a priority. I’m an obsessive type, so if I can work it into one of the obsessions, I’ll be able to get the weight off. Keeping it off may be a goal for another year, though. Making long-term lifestyle changes aren’t easy, especially when the lifestyle you’re in is one born of laziness.

2) Write more. I want to create at least one poem each week in 2010. That would be 52 pieces at the end of the year, and that’s a decent body of work for a year. And if I continue to revise and rewrite as I generate new stuff, I’ll have plenty of work to submit. Which leads to my next goal, which is to submit more. The only path to success as a writer seems to be to write a bunch, submit a bunch, and get rejected a bunch. If I don’t put in the time to submit, I don’t even take the shot at publication. So in addition to creating one poem each week, I’d like to do one submission for publication each month, and if possible, enter one contest each month. The contests are a little more iffy, because there might not be that many contests I think I’m a good fit for, but we’ll give it a shot. I did two submissions last week, one for an anthology locally and one for a national website. I should hear back from those in the next couple of months.

3) Spend better time with Suzy. She’s got some health issues that we’re addressing this year, and I want to make sure I schedule our time together better. It’s important to me that we eat together whenever possible, and now that the new year has started and I’m not on my “all about me” kick that I spent the holidays on (yeah, even more than usual), I want to make sure that when I’m home in the evenings that we spend some time together. With the time I spend in Atlanta and the travel I do for the rest of my job, I want to make sure that the time I spend at home is focused on us being together. Not that we won’t necessarily have our own time in the evenings, just when she doesn’t have anything going on, I don’t want to play video games or poker and ignore her.

4) Get my poker game back on track. I have a couple of ideas as to what is off-kilter in my game, and I think I know how to fix them. I didn’t log a win this weekend at BadBlood’s, but I think with a few notable exceptions I played pretty well. And on one of the notable exceptions I got lucky and won anyway. I need to take apart a few pieces of my game, and I’ll be working on that in the coming weeks and months. If I can get on a good streak online I may even make a withdrawal from Full Tilt and play a WSOP event this summer, but don’t hold your breath there. I say that every year, and every year I either lose focus and blow my online roll, or I decide that it’s not a good investment of my time and money and pull the plug before I register.

5) Work on my photography. I have a decent camera, and I’ve taken some nice shots this year, now I need to focus more on learning how to use all the settings on the camera and get the most out of it. I think I have a good eye, and my experience with lighting design helps in composition, but I’ve got a long way to go before I have anything marketable.

So those are some things I’m going to focus on this year, as well as coming up with a way to disseminate my poetry without it fouling the “unpublished” status and wrecking my chances of having it accepted somewhere. Because I do want to share the stuff I’m writing with you guys, but I don’t want to screw myself out of publication opportunities, either. So once I figure that out, I’ll let you know.

Oh sweet baby mother-humpin’ Jebus…

by john | Dec 30, 2009 | Real Life

I’ve had this screen open and blank for half an hour as all my little chillun’s keep coming into my office expecting me to work while I’m in the office instead of the rampant fucking off I had intended for my last workday of the year. Meh, that’s why they pay me the medium bucks, I suppose.

So the deal to buy my dad’s house is a no-go. Turns out the credit union I was talking to doesn’t make their own mortgages, they go through Wells Fargo, who goes through Fannie/Freddie and has very specific rules about buying a house that you aren’t going to live in. One of those rules is a 25% down payment, and since I don’t have an extra $45K just randomly lying around, that deal’s pretty much off the table. So now my dad needs to look at a reverse mortgage, which would allow him to live in the house for the rest of his life without making any payments, and keep the tower revenue, and at the end of his life the bank takes the house. The only catch to that is that if my mother outlives him, she has no home. Now my mother has dementia and there’s no way in hell that she could live there on her own anyway, so it’s not a huge issue, but we certainly hope that my dad either outlives her or outlives the dwindling remainder of her faculties, so that she would be blissfully unaware of the fact that she was placed in a nursing home.

On the other hand, once my dad dies we (the family/heirs) have a year to figure out what we want to do – either buy the house back from the bank, or empty the place out and call it done. I never intended to move back to Bullock Creek, SC, I was just trying to make sure my dad still had a place to live. I can’t ever see living somewhere that I can’t get cell phone reception and high-speed internet access again, so it’s not really a viable option for me. I just hope that everything will work out for my folks and my sister, who currently stands to inherit the house if she wants to deal with the debt attached to it. Of course I have fond memories of my childhood home, but it’s just a building. My family isn’t a building, it’s people, and the memories I have for them, so I don’t have some odd attachment to the building just for its own sake.

So now I don’t have to try to scrape together another $400-500 each month to make a second mortgage, I can focus on paying off some credit cards. I had a good run there a year or so ago where I had zero credit card debt, and I loved it. Then I got a free hot tub that ended up costing me several thousand dollars to get running, and I got a little stupid with my spending, not to mention dealing with a couple of weddings that I had my own expenses as well as some other folks’ expenses to help out with, and all of a sudden I’ve got $8k in credit card debt. Big bag o’ suck. So that’s where my focus will shift for the first part of the year – to paying that crap off and living like a reasonable human being again instead of like some asshat that’s made of money.Unless I win the PowerBall tonight, at which point I will BE an asshat made of money, and that will be just fine with me.

So have a good New Year’s – don’t do anything on Amateur Night that would find its way to Texts from Last Night or any other embarassing website.

Year in Review…or not

by john | Dec 29, 2009 | Real Life

I’m not going to go down the rabbit hole of looking back over a year’s worth of posts and scribbles to tell you that this was a goofy year, one full of fun and change and upheaval and all sorts of other jazz. I started the year off right, getting in hot water with my boss at PokerNews and getting booted off a couple of assignments, which cut into my frivolous spending money a bit. Then I got back in the good graces of said boss in time to cover the WSOP for the third year, but then saw said boss get sacked at the end of the WSOP and a new boss be brought in. The new boss’s arrival (who I like and is doing a good job with the site, BTW) coincided with a desire to focus on work and creative writing, so I made what I think was a graceful exit from the employ of that site and focused on my poetry and fiction writing for most of the year.

It turns out that one of the best things for me as a writer was getting put on probation with PN back in the spring. It woke me up to the fact that while I was being paid (and paid well) to write for several years, what I was writing was formulaic crap. There really are only so many ways to say “he got all his money in ahead and lost, too bad” while trying to add some slight flavor to the story. My work for PN was pedestrian and followed a formula, but it was dependable and harmless. Kinda like chicken fingers. It’s hard to screw up, but there’s not a lot of flavor there, either. So from a purely financial standpoint, I miss doing that work (and am still available for hack jobs if anybody is hiring). But from a creative standpoint, I enjoy what I’m doing now much more. The edict for the PokerStars blog is different from the PN stylebook – I’m encouraged to be a little freer with the language and style and I’m not really supposed to follow the AP stylebook like I tried to do at PN. That makes it a little more fun to write, and I only do a couple of articles a month for them, so it’s less of a load on the whole day-job mortgage paying life, too. I could probably stand to pick up another 3-4 articles each month if anybody was looking, but barring the WSOP or another short-term high-intensity series of assignments, I’m mostly done as a poker writer.

And I’m not in much better shape as a player. This will mark my third losing year in a row, ranging from stuck a couple grand in 2007, to stuck less than a hundred bucks last year, to stuck about $1,500 this year. I do think that later in the year this year I made a few adjustments to my game that were good ones, and had it not been for a disastrous run at the WPBT trip I might have struggled back to even for the year. But I may have to look at the hard evidence that I’m a losing poker player and need to make some adjustments to my game. I definitely need to tighten up – a lot, and go back to the basics a bit. So I’ll start that quest on Friday with my annual pilgrimage to the House of Blood for the New Year’s Day tourney (won in 2006, cashed in 2008, I remain the only out-of-towner to ever win this event) and we’ll see where we go. Playing poker has taken a back seat to my creative writing work and the podcast later this year, so it’s more of a recreation to me than it has been in previous years. I still look at the WSOP schedule whenever it comes out and look at the NLHE Shootout event, thinking that if i can run the $200 in my Full Tilt account up to something close to the buy-in between now and summer I may take my shot. But if it doesn’t happen, it’s no big deal.

With the attempt to purchase my dad’s house in full swing I’m looking at options to make that work financially and I may end up sacrificing some long-term to make things work in the short term. If I take a bigger mortgage and use cash from that to pay off Suzy’s car and my student loan, then I can negotiate things so that I’m actually laying out less cash each month. Unfortunately that means I’m then paying off those things for the next 30 years instead of the next 3 and 5 respectively, but it may still be the best option I have to get this house purchase worked out and be able to afford everything. It means that I don’t have the nirvana of having an extra pile of cash each month in a few years, but it also means that I’ll own a 9-acre plot of land in the country that in a few years will generate enough each month to pay for itself.

If you’re in Charlotte or the surrounding areas, block off the evening of January 23rd for the next Carolina Writer’s Showcase at Story Slam. And I’ll be reading two original pieces at Just Do It on January 15th at Theatre Charlotte. Hope to see you there!