top of our payments, and we jumped at that lifeline, but then I lost my job and maybe we were distracted by that and by my father’s collapse (we dragged him into the hole with us) because while we fretted and waffled and stalled, the stock market went out for milk, got stoned and lost forty percent of its value, depleting my 401(k), which, due to my stubborn love for financial and media stocks, had already begun to look more like a 4(k). That’s about the time I stopped showing Lisa the grim letters about the house, with their phony warm salutations (“Dear Homeowner…”).
This is how a person wakes up one morning to find that he’s six days from losing his house.
The advice you get when your mortgage is in danger is to “contact the lender.” The last time I contacted my lender, some twenty-five-year-old kid answered the phone and talked me into forbearance, this six-month amnesty of procrastination. I should have known it was a bad move when I contacted my lender the next time and found out the kid had been laid off, that our mortgage had been bundled and sold with a stack of similarly red paper to a second company, and that the second company had been absorbed by a third company. Now I have no idea how to “contact my lender.” I seem to spend hours in automated phone dungeons (“For English, press one”) desperately looking for a single human voice to gently tell me I’m dead.
Clock ticks. Planet turns. Six revolutions from now whatever bank owns my mortgage will start foreclosure proceedings unless I can either beg more time or come up with the balloon forbearance payment of $31,200. Meanwhile, I try to figure out how to tell Lisa about this looming deadline-keeping in mind that (a) she adores this house, (b) she was raised to connect financial security to love and (c) I’m quite possibly losing her anyway. So I go it alone.
In the office of Richard Blackmore, Idiot Financial Planner, on the third floor of a squat downtown building, the reception
area’s littered with Forbes and BusinessWeek and Investors Daily: crisis porn, full of emphatic dirty-talk about “Hidden Opportunities in the Wreckage,” climaxing charts, “How to Make Money in a Crash,” photos of wet-browed, bug-eyed investment experts looking for full relief in this overheated climate.
The meeting is as predictable as coffin shopping. Richard keeps his diplomas on the wall, and I wonder why journalists and poets don’t do that. He tells me that losing the house might be inevitable, but that it’s only the beginning of my trouble. “Look,” he says, and he plays his adding machine like Jerry Lee Lewis, shows me various groupings of red numbers, offers painfully obvious advice. I could go into deeper detail, but frankly, I’m not that interested in the further specifics. Except these two points: (1) my money guy Richard is going without a tie now, like a politician who wants to appeal to the suffering common man (or perhaps every morning his firm takes the ties and shoelaces away from the brokers and financial planners to keep them from offing themselves); (2) Richard’s basic advice is to liquidate, sell, sell, sell, dump, sell, scale down, sell some more, live “like a fry-cook in the ’70s,” try to get a job, any job “very fucking fast,” beg my lender for more time, and with a great deal of luck we might avoid losing the house and going bankrupt.
This is something like taking your car to a mechanic, only to hear this: I hope you have good walking shoes.
“And by ‘scale down,’ you mean…”
“Scale. Down.”
“Right. And by ‘down’ you mean…”
“Down,” Richard says. His mouth is car-ported by a black mustache, an effective tool for delivering bad news: “Down down down. I’m talking public school down, used-car, canned-food down, lower-middle class down, Matt. Not 2004 upper-middle class down-not eight-person Jacuzzi and lawn guy down-but
1977 generic-food buy-your-clothes-at-K-Mart down. I’m talking dump your car payment, have a garage sale, clip coupons, Christmas shop at Goodwill. I mean-look at these numbers.” He spins a red page. “You see anything I don’t?”
I see London. I see France. Flood tide below me! I see you face to face! Heat check: still high. “Richard, if we cash out everything, is there any tax benefit to-”
“Tax benefit?” Richard’s mustache spits laughter. “Jesus, Matt. I don’t think you understand.” And he leans forward, his bleary eyes darting around my face. “Once this starts, you can’t stop it. I’ve seen this before. You’re parked on a hill without a parking brake and your car is rolling toward you and the only move is to get out of the way…and you want to talk about tax benefits?”
I should point out that my money guy Richard is not the best money guy in the world. (My first clue in this direction came in the late 1990s, when I was doing pretty well on my own, blindly investing at the height of the tech boom and I let Richard talk me into what he called “a safer bet”-Mexican shipping bonds. So while I had doubled my own easy bets on Microsoft and Cisco, I lost thirty cents on the dollar on Richard’s great tip-that anchor of the business world: Transmaritime-Pacifico.) But if Richard is not the best number guy, he’s a brilliant word guy-probably the reason I stay with him-and should anyone doubt it, the man shifts metaphors while I’m still marveling at the idea of our finances as a rolling car.
“Look,” Richard says. “I’m gonna give you the straight diagnosis, Matt. You are severely hemorrhaging here-not just on the house, in every area possible. Credit-card debt, health care debt, the equity you took on your house, unpaid creditors from your little business venture, your stubborn insistence on riding those bank and media stocks into the ground. And I don’t know who talked you into forbearance, but that’s the worst thing you could have
done. It’s just a way for lenders to squeeze the lemon once more. Did anyone tell you that ninety percent of the people who make the big forbearance payment still end up losing their houses?”
I seem to have missed that part of the sales pitch.
“Listen,” Richard says, “unless you’re about to inherit some money, what we’re talking about here is irreversible, fatal. You have fiscal Ebola, Matt. You are bleeding out through your nose and your mouth and your eye sockets, from your financial asshole.”
See! Fiscal Ebola? My financial asshole is bleeding? This was exactly why I started poetfolio.com; there are money poets everywhere.
Richard slides a small check across the table to me. “Here’s another way to look at this. The last thing you can afford right now…” And he pushes the folders from my file over to me. “…is a financial planner.”
This is why I’m here, of course. To cash out. I am pretending to need advice, but what I really need is whatever cushion I have left. So…I hold my breath and pick up the check. It’s in the high…four figures. Nine thousand four hundred and twelve dollars. I laugh. “That’s it?”
“I wanted to diversify you, Matt. You insisted on media and financials.”
This is true. In my past life as a business reporter I’d decided I was the expert and I clung to a tip from a banking guy who, I can only hope now, is lying dead on a sidewalk somewhere. But I can’t entirely blame him either, because I rode those stocks up for years, and when the financials first cracked, I stubbornly refused to sell. Then I got distracted by my own job loss and by Dad’s senility meltdown. And every time Richard begged me to let him unload those bad stocks, I reminded him of his last advice, And buy what? Mexican Shipping Bonds?
So…as I say, here we are-
“After penalties,” Richard’s mustache continues, “taxes, commissions…”
“Wait.” I look down at the check again as Richard stands. “You took a commission? Do travel agents take commissions on flights that go down?”