Me

My tenants moved out a couple of weeks ago. I have been spending every spare minute trying to get the place ready to rent again.

• The countertops needed to be replaced at a cost of $4,000.
• The lawn is dead because they turned off the sprinklers in a bid to save money.
• They glued mirrors to one of the walls with construction adhesive. The entire wall will have to be ripped out and replaced in order to get them out of there. I will do it myself, but a contractor would charge $3,000 or so to get it done.
• There is a large amount of filth in the place. I found sausages under the stove, and it looked like no one had moved any of the appliances to clean behind or under them for the four years they were in there. There are bits of food stuck to walls, ceilings, and some of the light fixtures.
• Most of the light bulbs needed to be replaced. Of the 42 bulbs in the house, 24 of them were burned out.
• There were over 200 nail holes in the walls, a hole in one of the doors, and numerous pushpins in the ceilings and walls.
• The lanai screen needs replacing after someone/something pushed it out of the frame.
• The screen door from the lanai to the back yard has to be replaced.
• They painted a bedroom that has to be painted back to its original color.
• The laminate floor in three different rooms has liquid damage from what appears to be pet urine. I’m not going to replace it now, but reflooring the place will likely cost $6,000 to $7,000.
• The stove and refrigerator need to be replaced. The glass cooktop on the stove was shattered.

All in all, the damages come to about $20,000. There is no way that I am giving this guy his deposit voluntarily. He is claiming that, since I am doing most of the work myself, I can’t bill him for anything but materials. He claims that since the appliances were more than 5 years old and depreciated, I can’t bill him for that, either.

This is why landlords need to charge so much. This is wiping out a large chunk of the profit from the past four years they were renting from me. This reduces my ROI to about 2.5 percent per year. I would do better putting that money into a high yield CD. The only saving grace here is that the property has increased in value, so when sold I can pull some profit out.

I am seriously thinking about selling now, but the wife likes the passive income and wants to try to find another tenant. So for that reason, I am spending most of my free time getting it ready for the next tenant. Then once that is done, I have to get the other house ready for sale.

For the next couple of months, I don’t have a lot of free time.

I have watched my parents get older, more feeble, and finally die. It’s been two months since Mom passed, and Dad died 19 years ago. Time makes it easier, but it still is a difficult part of growing up that you don’t spend much time thinking about when you are young.

Long day yesterday. I had a Dr appointment, then I had to meet with the cabinets guy to replace the countertops in the rental house. That’s gonna cost me about $3800. Then I had to run to the hardware store and get the stuff to install our water conditioner.

The story there is that I had a slop sink and a water conditioner that I needed to have installed. I called a plumber, who came out and estimated $600 for the sink, and $900 for the water conditioner. WTF.

The sink was easy. It cost be $50 in parts to install this:

The water conditioner was a bit harder, but this is what the completed underground plumbing looks like. Service line through the wall to the water conditioner, then from there back out to the connection that goes to the house.

As you can see, we didn’t finish until 8:30 or so, after it was dark, but we got it done. Like my Dad used to say, you only need to know a few things in order to be a plumber:

• Hot’s on the left
• Cold is on the right.
• Payday is on Friday
• Shit won’t flow uphill
• Payday is on Friday

That’s it. The only casualty was the loss of my cordless drill. The gearbox was destroyed because I was too cheap to buy a $200 hammer drill. The drill I broke was 9 years old. I ordered a new one.

Long day yesterday, which is why this is the first post of the day…

As my readers will recall, my mother passed away a little over a month ago. When we initially went to the funeral home, her husband told us that he didn’t have any money, so my brother and I covered the costs associated with the cremation and other expenses. Over $3000 worth of expenses. At the time we paid, we designated my sister as the point of contact for the family. We paid for the cremation, 4 certified copies of the death certificate, and urns to split the ashes. (The Husband wanted some, my sister did, too. My brother and I didn’t get one, we just got the free container, because it’s our intention to bury Mom’s ashes in the grave that her and Dad already paid for.)

Once that was done, he asked us to provide him with one of the copies of Mom’s death certificate, and he also said that Mom didn’t want to be buried with her late husband (my Dad), but instead wanted to be buried with him (the widower). He asked us for another 10 large to cover the costs associated with a plot for the two of them, again claiming that he was broke. That was one thing that we weren’t going to pay for. Not my responsibility to pay for the burial plot for a man I barely knew.

He and mom were married a little over two years before her death. At that time, mom disposed of most of her stuff somehow, and moved in with him. Mom’s husband asked us to come over to his house and clean out Mom’s belongings. We agreed, because we were trying to find out what happened to a house full of expensive furniture, as well as the whereabouts of 150 thousand dollars in retirement funds.

Mom didn’t leave a will. Or so we thought. While we were cleaning out the detached garage, we found $4000 in cash and a copy of four wills. The first three were from when Dad was still alive. The fourth was interesting- it was less than 10 years old, named my brother as being the executor of the estate, and even though it was from before she remarried, it was the most current will. My sister handed the cash to the husband and his daughter before my brother and I could stop her. As a reader here, you would know that my sister is kind of stupid like that. She is also a Democrat, which explains why she doesn’t understand money, the law, or most other things of practical value.

WE contacted Mom’s stock broker to trace the money. What we didn’t know was that the husband and his daughter had taken Mom’s death certificate and a copy of their marriage license to the bank and had them cut the husband a check for the money. Not only that, but we found out that the husband had given Mom’s car away to his ex-wife. It turns out that the husband and daughter knew where the funds were the entire time, but neglected to tell us. They are deliberately hiding her assets.

When we pointed out that the estate hasn’t closed yet and they couldn’t be spending the money and giving away her possessions because things like funeral expenses needed to be paid from that estate, the daughter said “You aren’t expecting my father to pay for all of those things for your mother, are you? That’s HIS money now, because YOUR mother was planning on using that money to buy my dad a house. Her cremation expenses are your problem.”

My brother is PISSED. So am I. We are now paying an attorney to sue his ass and enforce the will. I don’t care if I don’t get a dime, but that asshole and his greedy twenty something daughter aren’t getting a penny more than the law says that they have to.

Folks- have a will. Keep it current. Don’t make your relatives deal with this sort of bullshit.

I am nearly completely out of my old house. Now we move into the new one.

My wife and I have been building a new house for nearly a year now. The time has finally come where the house is nearly completed. That means it is time to start moving.

For the next couple of weeks, posting may be spotty. I will be prepping the new house, working, packing up the old house, moving, working, unpacking at the new house, and did I mention that I will be working? Still, if all goes according to plan, we will be moved into the new place before the end of January.

I am spending the day with family and smoking a rib roast for Christmas dinner. You should, too.

As all of you know, my mother passed away recently. There are many details that need to be handled:

• Does she want to be buried or cremated?
• Where to place her remains?
• Who gets her belongings? Her money?
• Who is to take care of her demented husband?
• Where are my uncle’s ashes?

All of this could have been handled through a will, but she didn’t leave one. That leaves all of us to handle the mess that she left behind. Here is the mess:

We don’t know how much money she had, how many debts that she had, or where all of her belongings are located. I’m doing my best to honor her wishes while at the same time being fair to all involved, but it is a minefield.

First, all three of us siblings, as well as my brother’s wife (my SIL) remember her saying that she wanted to be cremated. Done. But what to do with the ashes?

• Mom’s husband wants her ashes to be placed somewhere that they can be interred together.
• My brother wants her ashes to be placed in the burial plot next to dad because mom paid for it, and even has her name and photo on the headstone.
• My sister wants some of the ashes to be placed in lockets that she and her kids can wear.
• My SIL says that mom told her that she didn’t want to be buried next to dad.
• My response to all of this, is that if mom had strong feelings one way or the other, she should have had a will made up that would tell us what she wanted. In the absence of a will, we are left to do what we think is best.

Financially, we have found a credit card with her name on it that has an outstanding balance of $350, and a checking account that has less than $1,000. We don’t know where the rest of her money is, or even if there IS any more money. So how that gets distributed is a mystery. The three of us kids decided to just give the husband the money.

Then there is the fact that my brother and I are paying for the funeral arrangements because the husband can’t. The daughter won’t be able to take care of him. She doesn’t believe this, even though I tried to explain to her how much care is required for a person in their 80s who has dementia. She thinks that they are going to move in together so she can keep an eye on him. That isn’t going to work.

That means he will wind up in a nursing home or memory care center. The way that those work is that they are so expensive, the home takes every asset that the patient has- their home, social security benefits, savings, all of it. The only way to save those assets from being taken by the nursing home is to put any assets that they have in a trust. The daughter wants all of mom’s assets to be put in a trust to pay for the long term care of her widower, but the daughter wants us to name her as the trustee.

I don’t mind the husband getting most of that stuff, but in those scenarios, the nursing home or his daughter are the ones who get everything. None of it will actually benefit mom’s husband.

Mom also owned a car. The husband wants that car because the car he owns has a Blue Book value of $7500, but he still owes $10,000. The problem there is that he isn’t supposed to be driving because just a month ago, he was the subject of a search when he went to the store and was missing for hours because of his dementia.

Complicating all of this is the fact that Mom’s husband is obviously deep in the grips of dementia. He hasn’t yet been diagnosed with it because he refuses to go to the doctor, but he is worse than Joe Biden in the mental faculties department. What this means is that normally the husband would be the one to make these decisions as her next of kin, but he is in no position to pay for any of this, or to make any informed decisions. His daughter has stepped forward and claimed that, since he can’t make the decisions, it all falls on her because she is HIS next of kin.

As to who will take care of my mother’s husband, I was in my 50’s when my Mom married this guy. I don’t know him, nor do I owe him anything. Taking care of him is his daughter’s responsibility.

Even more complicated is that my aunt (mom’s younger sister) died back in March. My uncle (the aunt’s husband) died about a year ago. Mom wound up with the ashes of both of them. We found my aunt’s ashes. We haven’t found my uncle’s. My mom couldn’t stand his ass- she downright hated him. Mom had mentioned to my sister that she was planning on flushing “that no-good sonuvabitch’s” ashes down the toilet in the nastiest, dirtiest gas station bathroom that she could find. (Yes, Mom could hold a grudge) The issue there is that his family wants his ashes returned to them. We can’t find them, and well, I think I know where they went.

It’s a mess, and the three of us (me, my brother, and my sister) are left to try and navigate this mess. I’m trying to be as fair and objective as possible, but this is far more difficult than I thought it would be.