house, estate, and debt update

Wax's maternal aunt drove up to switch cars with us on Saturday. Her car and MIL's were the same age, but hers was slightly smaller and in worse condition, and she gave us the car itself (which won't survive the next inspection because of illegally high emissions) and its winter tires (which we can put on the van we got last summer) and a couple of thousand, that is, the list price, for MIL's car.

Wax was able to pay a couple of thousand of the unexpected 11k plumber's bill a couple of weeks ago therefore (her aunt paid her in advance), but Friday afternoon someone in the office at the plumber's still sent an email that was like "Thanks for the payment but if you don't get a payment plan to us on Monday we'll send it to a collection agency".

Since we need to sell things in order to get money, that sent Wax into a tailspin. She read the email and then opened the door to her aunt while I was in the shower, and when I came out her aunt was standing there trying to talk her down and she was nearly shrieking about it. We got her to make a pot of tea and take a benzo, and her aunt called a couple of people looking for leads on selling the antiques. I texted her brothers to ask if they had contact info for their wealthy second cousin and therefore I learned that her brothers didn't even know about the antiques dealers or that she was panic-spiraling already because one had written her back and said that nobody is buying 19th century antiques now. So in short order,

• Her brother called the master plumber in charge of our house and it turned out he didn't know about the letter from his office, and he agreed that as the summer cottage is currently listed we do not need to create a payment plan until it has sold.



• Her aunt called a handful of wealthy relatives from the bourgeois side of their family and finally landed on her (the aunt's and MIL's) first cousin who married a rich and posh knight, and it turns out that she and her children are interested in the furniture and even the heirloom objects that MIL had which came from the house MIL's and the cousin's parents, who were siblings, grew up in. She already offered to buy the incredibly racist 19th-century parcel-gilt polychrome torchiere in the shape of a statue of a black lady sculpted and painted by some Venetian who didn't know what black people look like. Hopefully they'll also take an enormous gilt mirror and a massive Empire-style secretary desk and maybe some glass and silver. (We can't find the fancy china. WTF, why can't we find the china? Ugh.) Anyway, MIL's cousin is coming next Sunday to look (and possibly her offspring, Wax's 2nd cousins? I hope not all of them, because they won't fit in here all at once; they'd have to take turns going in the room to look at the stuff because it's all so crowded with stacked furniture and boxes of things).



• I have been putting off going through MIL's papers because I can't do it without Wax, and Wax is tired all the time and tends to panic when it gets brought up. But after we fed her the benzo and got a couple of pieces of hopeful news, while she was distracted talking to her aunt, I sat down and started going through the piles of papers for recyclables and getting her input when necessary. And one of the first things I looked at was a folder labeled "pension" that we hadn't looked in before, and the top paper in the folder was a statement about MIL's pension that said something about the pension itself containing insurance for if the beneficiary dies while receiving the pension, said insurance being, apparently, 80% of... something. Wax therefore called the bank's customer service to ask what it was. Apparently MIL has an account at the bank for the pension - not a normal account, but the one that her pension came out of, so not one you can just draw on, which is apparently why we didn't know about it. In fact, we have a letter from the bank about this account somewhere, and it's sitting in a pile of "probably not important" things because we all knew that MIL had closed her regular checking/savings accounts at that bank and moved them to the Pargas bank which holds our mortgage and loans. (It was not clear at all from the letter that there was an open account that had anything in it.) So the customer service rep couldn't see into the account or tell us anything about it except that it was there, but as Wax has power of attorney now, she can get the legal documents to close out the account and then we'll find out what's in it. We are not celebrating yet, but hopefully some money will ultimately come out of there. (None of this stuff works exactly the same way in Finland as it does in other countries.)



• It took several hours on both Saturday and Sunday but I got Wax to help write a letter to the insurance consumer protection organization. In the process of going through their list of information to include in the complaint, we realized that we don't even have a bill from the plumbers for the geothermal pump and the basement drying, so she wrote to them instead to ask about it. We can hardly take it to the consumer protection place like "Both of these insurance companies claim this bill for [we don't know] is the other one's responsibility".