DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN! April 01, 2007
I believe it was Yogi Berra that first uttered that famous line I borrowed for this blog title. The reason I chose it is that Debbie and I have been living close to the poverty line these past three years, much the same as we had to live when we first married twenty-two years ago.
Why? Well, in 1985 I was in my twelfth year of teaching, maybe making $15,000 per year (and working 80 hours per week!) not quite half way through a career of 31 years. Debbie worked full-time at low wages, but our combined incomes were minimal. Deb and I moonlighted with a D.J. service and later a band to make extra money. We never took a vacation until my parents sent us to Acapulco, Mexico. I had to borrow money from the bank to fix my van. The little rental home we lived in with Michael John, my son, and Diane, my daughter, was heated by a wood stove, and was often a chilly environment in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. We survived by simply not spending money, unless necessary. We ate, but I'd be lying if I said we ate well. Children's clothes came mostly from Goodwill, until they got old enough to notice the difference, around third or fourth grade. Times were bad. And they wonder why 50% of all teachers quit teaching within the first three years!!! They wonder why they can't get and retain good teachers!!!
Things gradually improved around my twenty-fifth year of teaching, by then making near $30,000 per year. That's when we could tell a difference. We could actually get the little things that before required a "family conference"- an agreement before purchase. I remember coming home with a $120 VCR machine that I'd gotten without consulting Debbie, and feeling a tad guilty. But the bad-'ol-days were behind us, finally. We started making payments on a home just outside Independence, Virginia. The kids grew up and went off to college. Paying for it wasn't too big a deal because they got half their expenses paid by us and half by their biological mom with whom we shared custody fifty percent of the time. Yes, we still moonlighted doing D.J. and band work, but times were better; you could just feel it. It took 25 years of teaching to just feel comfortable, but we were finally fairly comfortable for the first time in our lives.
Then I retired with a full pension. We had been looking for five years for a place on deep water so we could have a small, cruising sized boat and maybe see some of the eastern coastline from the water. Our search took us to my birthplace- Hawaii, specifically the island of Kauai (the most beautiful one!)- but 24 days of looking at property there (in 2000, when it took $250,000 to get a crowded, little home) convinced us that there is indeed a reason you don't see too many white haired retirees living there. We met a doctor at his retirement party that told me he was leaving Kauai to move to California so his dollars would go farther. If a doctor would make that decision, what chance would a retired teacher have of financially surviving there? We hated giving up the idea of living in paradise, but decided to look elsewhere.
We looked from the Northern Neck of Virginia all the way down to Key West. Almost every vacation found us camping with a tent or in a cheap motel, looking for "the perfect place" somewhere on the east coast of the US where it doesn't get too cold or crowded. Key West used to be nice back in the '70s, but it had changed. Still a good place to visit. All of Georgia and South Carolina were just too hot and humid! Beaufort- pronounced "buu-fert"- South Carolina was the most friendly spot. Nice strangers would approach us to chat there. But the humidity almost did Debbie in!
The best place we found was Beaufort- pronounced "bo-fert"-North Carolina. The folks were a tad more reserved there, and waterfront home prices in that area were sky-high. But we both liked that area enough to start making concentric circles around it to outlying areas. We found New Bern, North Carolina, about 45 minutes away from Beaufort, to be just the right size, beautiful in enough spots- especially the historic, downtown area, and affordable. I bet I searched Realtor.com every day for real estate in the Beaufort- New Bern area for close to 2 years! Then I found it: the property listed on Realtor.com had what they call a "virtual tour"- a series of photos stitched together so that by downloading it you could turn your view to look at other adjacent areas, similar to standing and slowly turning your head in both directions. The price was close to right, it was on deep water, on Brices Creek, which emptied into the Trent River, which emptied a mile later into the Neuse River, which emptied a few miles out into the Pamlico Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. We had boating access to the entire east coast! We visited and bought it. Nothing else was as affordable. We were lucky to find it.
Now we had to put our home in Virginia up for sale. I had stripped wallpaper and painted a few rooms, getting ready for this time, but I hadn't done enough, it turned out. The home sat on the market for two years with only very "low-ball" offers. We rarely visited the house, but when we did we continued to clean and clean it out, trying to make it "salable." All this time we paid a nice neighbor boy to mow and trim the yard, check on the house weekly during the winter months and knock down cobwebs. We kept the heat on low, so pipes wouldn't freeze, and kept paying monthly mortgage payments, insurance, taxes, etc. It quickly drained us financially. It was tempting to rent it, but previous experience with renters in Debbie's mom's home taught us that lesson. (It cost us $6,000 to fix that home so it would sell.)
DO NOT BELIEVE HOME APPRAISER ESTIMATES OF YOUR HOME'S VALUE! We learned that the hard way. We were told by our first appraiser that our home was worth $214,000. (He was an ex-student of mine with whom I had had more than a few problems, and was doing me a "favor" he said.) The next appraisal came in at $185,000. (This was done by a friend of my ex-wife's, and he frankly told me it was a more realistic value!) So Debbie and I agreed a good asking price would be somewhere between the two appraisals- $189,000. Boy, were we wrong! Maybe in a great housing market would that have been a good price, but things in Grayson County, Virginia, and surrounding mountain communities were not lookin' up. Factories had closed left and right, sending almost all textile manufacturing to Mexico and China. Even the furniture plants were cutting back or closing entirely. There were, and are today, few good jobs to be found in those beautiful mountains. The few folks from Charlotte that came to the mountains to look wanted a home way out in the country with a dirt road and at least 5 acres of privacy in all directions. The locals who looked wanted a turn-key home where all they had to do was move in their furniture. Nobody seemed to want a home that needed (more) rooms stripped of their wallpaper and painting and new carpet! No one had the imagination to offer us a reasonable low-ball price and then do the work themselves with their choices of paint and carpet!! To this day I am amazed at that.
So we bit the bullet and paid to have all the rooms painted and new carpet put down in every room-even the basement- and two porches. This decision cost us close to $10,000! It came at a time when Debbie and I had already tightened our purse strings, so it meant "sucking it in" and tightening them some more. We were now living close to the poverty line again. It was deja vu all over again. We went again this year to AARP- American Association of Retired Persons- to have our taxes done because they did it for free. In the past three years we've learned (again) to simply not spend money unless absolutely necessary. We buy meat by looking for those special sale stickers they put on it just before it goes out of date. I ask for a "senior citizen" discount at many restaurants. (Wendy's Hamburgers is the best at this.) For my birthday this year Debbie gave me a new set of guitar strings. (I've still not put them on, wanting to stretch the usefulness of my current year-old strings by way too much!) No needed repairs to the house we live in have been done, windows replaced, faucets repaired, etc. (Just a leak in the roof fixed to keep more damage from occurring.) No vacations that we paid for. Mom paid to fly us out to San Antonio to visit her. When I "blew-out" both my shoulders pulling on the starter rope to my granddad's old outboard motor for three hours, it froze my right shoulder and pretty much disabled my left. I hated to do it, but went for help.The doctor did a series of x-rays and a costly MRI scan of my right shoulder that showed bone spurs and torn cartilage, basically a blown rotator cuff. When he told me he'd only operate on it after I unfroze it with therapy, I went. But when the therapist charged $70 per visit as my co-pay, out of pocket expense, I had her teach me how to try and do it myself at home. I only went there three times. It gradually got better, but I never went back to the specialist. Deb and I have postponed needed dental work, lots of it, and minor physical problem work, like "pre-cancerous" skin lessions removed, etc. We were right back where we were back in 1985! Don't get me wrong: I know there are plenty of folks out there who have it a lot worse than us. We never had to pick up aluminum cans to put food on the table like some. But we were one paycheck away from having to do just that! Fortunately, those paychecks kept coming.
Debbie works full-time in child care, and I work part-time at Sylvan Learning Center, but have held down two jobs for a few months, totaling over 50 hours per week. plus my retirement pension and a deferred compensation whereby I worked an extra year teaching, but get paid for it over a five year period. But paying two mortgages, two upkeeps, two sets of taxes and insurances were draining the financial blood out of us. Deb figures it cost us close to $800 per month to let that home sit empty. Times 3 years that comes to approximately $28,800! Maybe we should have rented it! But once burned, twice shy.
It's sooo nice to talk about it all in the past tense! Two days ago we closed on our old home. We had dropped our asking price incrementally down to $159,900. Someone finally looked at it and saw the money we had put into it, and the overall potential of the home and made us a realistic offer. It was a nice, local couple with a thirteen year old son, probably wanting to be closer to their workplaces and the school. (The home sits a little over a mile outside the town limits, so has easy access to schools and shopping, yet still has that country feel, but has a paved road leading to it!) Yesterday I walked them through the property, and they love it. They're happy there. And Debbie and I are more happy here, the first time in a long while. Another era in our lives is over. The deja vu is slowly fading away.
I believe it was Yogi Berra that first uttered that famous line I borrowed for this blog title. The reason I chose it is that Debbie and I have been living close to the poverty line these past three years, much the same as we had to live when we first married twenty-two years ago.
Why? Well, in 1985 I was in my twelfth year of teaching, maybe making $15,000 per year (and working 80 hours per week!) not quite half way through a career of 31 years. Debbie worked full-time at low wages, but our combined incomes were minimal. Deb and I moonlighted with a D.J. service and later a band to make extra money. We never took a vacation until my parents sent us to Acapulco, Mexico. I had to borrow money from the bank to fix my van. The little rental home we lived in with Michael John, my son, and Diane, my daughter, was heated by a wood stove, and was often a chilly environment in the mountains of southwestern Virginia. We survived by simply not spending money, unless necessary. We ate, but I'd be lying if I said we ate well. Children's clothes came mostly from Goodwill, until they got old enough to notice the difference, around third or fourth grade. Times were bad. And they wonder why 50% of all teachers quit teaching within the first three years!!! They wonder why they can't get and retain good teachers!!!
Things gradually improved around my twenty-fifth year of teaching, by then making near $30,000 per year. That's when we could tell a difference. We could actually get the little things that before required a "family conference"- an agreement before purchase. I remember coming home with a $120 VCR machine that I'd gotten without consulting Debbie, and feeling a tad guilty. But the bad-'ol-days were behind us, finally. We started making payments on a home just outside Independence, Virginia. The kids grew up and went off to college. Paying for it wasn't too big a deal because they got half their expenses paid by us and half by their biological mom with whom we shared custody fifty percent of the time. Yes, we still moonlighted doing D.J. and band work, but times were better; you could just feel it. It took 25 years of teaching to just feel comfortable, but we were finally fairly comfortable for the first time in our lives.
Then I retired with a full pension. We had been looking for five years for a place on deep water so we could have a small, cruising sized boat and maybe see some of the eastern coastline from the water. Our search took us to my birthplace- Hawaii, specifically the island of Kauai (the most beautiful one!)- but 24 days of looking at property there (in 2000, when it took $250,000 to get a crowded, little home) convinced us that there is indeed a reason you don't see too many white haired retirees living there. We met a doctor at his retirement party that told me he was leaving Kauai to move to California so his dollars would go farther. If a doctor would make that decision, what chance would a retired teacher have of financially surviving there? We hated giving up the idea of living in paradise, but decided to look elsewhere.
We looked from the Northern Neck of Virginia all the way down to Key West. Almost every vacation found us camping with a tent or in a cheap motel, looking for "the perfect place" somewhere on the east coast of the US where it doesn't get too cold or crowded. Key West used to be nice back in the '70s, but it had changed. Still a good place to visit. All of Georgia and South Carolina were just too hot and humid! Beaufort- pronounced "buu-fert"- South Carolina was the most friendly spot. Nice strangers would approach us to chat there. But the humidity almost did Debbie in!
The best place we found was Beaufort- pronounced "bo-fert"-North Carolina. The folks were a tad more reserved there, and waterfront home prices in that area were sky-high. But we both liked that area enough to start making concentric circles around it to outlying areas. We found New Bern, North Carolina, about 45 minutes away from Beaufort, to be just the right size, beautiful in enough spots- especially the historic, downtown area, and affordable. I bet I searched Realtor.com every day for real estate in the Beaufort- New Bern area for close to 2 years! Then I found it: the property listed on Realtor.com had what they call a "virtual tour"- a series of photos stitched together so that by downloading it you could turn your view to look at other adjacent areas, similar to standing and slowly turning your head in both directions. The price was close to right, it was on deep water, on Brices Creek, which emptied into the Trent River, which emptied a mile later into the Neuse River, which emptied a few miles out into the Pamlico Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. We had boating access to the entire east coast! We visited and bought it. Nothing else was as affordable. We were lucky to find it.
Now we had to put our home in Virginia up for sale. I had stripped wallpaper and painted a few rooms, getting ready for this time, but I hadn't done enough, it turned out. The home sat on the market for two years with only very "low-ball" offers. We rarely visited the house, but when we did we continued to clean and clean it out, trying to make it "salable." All this time we paid a nice neighbor boy to mow and trim the yard, check on the house weekly during the winter months and knock down cobwebs. We kept the heat on low, so pipes wouldn't freeze, and kept paying monthly mortgage payments, insurance, taxes, etc. It quickly drained us financially. It was tempting to rent it, but previous experience with renters in Debbie's mom's home taught us that lesson. (It cost us $6,000 to fix that home so it would sell.)
DO NOT BELIEVE HOME APPRAISER ESTIMATES OF YOUR HOME'S VALUE! We learned that the hard way. We were told by our first appraiser that our home was worth $214,000. (He was an ex-student of mine with whom I had had more than a few problems, and was doing me a "favor" he said.) The next appraisal came in at $185,000. (This was done by a friend of my ex-wife's, and he frankly told me it was a more realistic value!) So Debbie and I agreed a good asking price would be somewhere between the two appraisals- $189,000. Boy, were we wrong! Maybe in a great housing market would that have been a good price, but things in Grayson County, Virginia, and surrounding mountain communities were not lookin' up. Factories had closed left and right, sending almost all textile manufacturing to Mexico and China. Even the furniture plants were cutting back or closing entirely. There were, and are today, few good jobs to be found in those beautiful mountains. The few folks from Charlotte that came to the mountains to look wanted a home way out in the country with a dirt road and at least 5 acres of privacy in all directions. The locals who looked wanted a turn-key home where all they had to do was move in their furniture. Nobody seemed to want a home that needed (more) rooms stripped of their wallpaper and painting and new carpet! No one had the imagination to offer us a reasonable low-ball price and then do the work themselves with their choices of paint and carpet!! To this day I am amazed at that.
So we bit the bullet and paid to have all the rooms painted and new carpet put down in every room-even the basement- and two porches. This decision cost us close to $10,000! It came at a time when Debbie and I had already tightened our purse strings, so it meant "sucking it in" and tightening them some more. We were now living close to the poverty line again. It was deja vu all over again. We went again this year to AARP- American Association of Retired Persons- to have our taxes done because they did it for free. In the past three years we've learned (again) to simply not spend money unless absolutely necessary. We buy meat by looking for those special sale stickers they put on it just before it goes out of date. I ask for a "senior citizen" discount at many restaurants. (Wendy's Hamburgers is the best at this.) For my birthday this year Debbie gave me a new set of guitar strings. (I've still not put them on, wanting to stretch the usefulness of my current year-old strings by way too much!) No needed repairs to the house we live in have been done, windows replaced, faucets repaired, etc. (Just a leak in the roof fixed to keep more damage from occurring.) No vacations that we paid for. Mom paid to fly us out to San Antonio to visit her. When I "blew-out" both my shoulders pulling on the starter rope to my granddad's old outboard motor for three hours, it froze my right shoulder and pretty much disabled my left. I hated to do it, but went for help.The doctor did a series of x-rays and a costly MRI scan of my right shoulder that showed bone spurs and torn cartilage, basically a blown rotator cuff. When he told me he'd only operate on it after I unfroze it with therapy, I went. But when the therapist charged $70 per visit as my co-pay, out of pocket expense, I had her teach me how to try and do it myself at home. I only went there three times. It gradually got better, but I never went back to the specialist. Deb and I have postponed needed dental work, lots of it, and minor physical problem work, like "pre-cancerous" skin lessions removed, etc. We were right back where we were back in 1985! Don't get me wrong: I know there are plenty of folks out there who have it a lot worse than us. We never had to pick up aluminum cans to put food on the table like some. But we were one paycheck away from having to do just that! Fortunately, those paychecks kept coming.
Debbie works full-time in child care, and I work part-time at Sylvan Learning Center, but have held down two jobs for a few months, totaling over 50 hours per week. plus my retirement pension and a deferred compensation whereby I worked an extra year teaching, but get paid for it over a five year period. But paying two mortgages, two upkeeps, two sets of taxes and insurances were draining the financial blood out of us. Deb figures it cost us close to $800 per month to let that home sit empty. Times 3 years that comes to approximately $28,800! Maybe we should have rented it! But once burned, twice shy.
It's sooo nice to talk about it all in the past tense! Two days ago we closed on our old home. We had dropped our asking price incrementally down to $159,900. Someone finally looked at it and saw the money we had put into it, and the overall potential of the home and made us a realistic offer. It was a nice, local couple with a thirteen year old son, probably wanting to be closer to their workplaces and the school. (The home sits a little over a mile outside the town limits, so has easy access to schools and shopping, yet still has that country feel, but has a paved road leading to it!) Yesterday I walked them through the property, and they love it. They're happy there. And Debbie and I are more happy here, the first time in a long while. Another era in our lives is over. The deja vu is slowly fading away.
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