So I’ve made good progress on most of the things I mentioned in my last entry. I actually completed one of those things, if you count “walk 100 miles in a week,” as I managed to get in about 105 miles between the 27th and the 3rd. I did not attempt a repeat of that this week – I haven’t even taken my walk yet today. I think I’ll end up at around 75 miles, which is plenty. I did the 100-mile week just to see if I could.
On the house front, I’m happy to say that State Farm finally came through for me on a home insurance claim! They’ve made things as difficult as possible, but they are going to pay to replace my roof (minus my deductible), and I’ve got a contractor signed up to do the work. Actually sent the signed contract back to him this morning. State Farm started things off by telling me that the replacement value of the roof was just over $9,000 and that the depreciated value was just over $5,000 and then said they were sending me a check for $2,600 – which has to be endorsed by me AND by Chase Manhattan, because they hold the mortgage. I started to lose my mind when all that happened, but after a few chats with the claims agent, I managed to deduce that they’ll send me ANOTHER check (again, to be endorsed by Chase…sigh) either after the work is done or (hopefully) when I send them a copy of the contract to do the work.
If they decide to wait until after the work is done, I need to figure out how to pay the contractor out of my pocket while waiting for the insurance (not sure how I’ll do that), or convince him to wait for it. He and I have discussed that, and he’ll probably be okay waiting if necessary.
He may not have to, though, because I’ve started the process of refinancing the mortgage and pulling out some money for the other projects. This process began as complete fiasco. I initially put in an application with Chase because they’ve had my mortgage for close to 20 years, they’ve been spamming me for the last three with offers to lower my interest rate, and I figured it’d be a piece of cake. And it was at first. Did the online application, gave them all of the relevant information, said that I wanted to lower my rate and pull out some money for home improvements. All good. Got a call back from a banker and everything was pleasant.
Until he mentioned that, because of COVID-19, anyone who wanted to pull money out during a refi had to show that they had 18 months of mortgage payments in reserve, and 12 months of those had to be liquid reserves. You following me on this? In order for me to pull out $20,000 in a refi, I had to have about $14,000 in liquidity. I was like, “Dude. If I had fourteen grand lying around, why would I be asking to borrow twenty?”
So he offered to lower that amount by adding two points on the loan, and rolling those into the loan. You following this? Because they’re so concerned that I’m going to either lose my job or die because of COVID, they insist that I have enough cash on hand to pay my mortgage for a full year, but if I DON’T have that, they’ll be happy to give me a BIGGER loan and only hold me to having enough to pay for nine months.
So I said, “Screw you,” and went to Quicken Loans. Fired up a RocketMortgage application, took 2.5 percent off of my existing interest rate and pulled out $25,000. Changed from a 30-year mortgage to a 15 and lowered my payment to boot. That took a morning. Now I’m just going through the follow-up stuff with my loan agent and he thinks we’ll close within a couple of weeks.
That will make things interesting with the State Farm checks…
Anyway, I also settled on a contractor to replace my deck, and I’m waiting for him to send me a contract for that. Going to tear the whole thing down, replace it with a few modifications, and extend it about 8 feet so that it takes up almost the entirety of the back wall of the house. Since I do have enough in savings to cover that work, I’m hoping he can get started as early as this week.
I might use the same guy for the retaining wall, as he’s given me a pretty attractive estimate for that work. Going to see how he does on the deck before I make that decision. I also need to call one other hardscaper who lives in my neighborhood and see what he’d charge me for that work.
So things are moving forward and I’m excited about the upcoming changes at home. Here’s hoping I survive the pandemic long enough to enjoy them!