Financial Tangle Updates

[cimorene]

• We had that huge 11k plumbing bill last autumn, plus some other bills that were freaking us out. We were able to pay those last month thanks to my parents sharing my mom's last payout from her parents' estates (abusive evil grandpa died several years ago but there are 5 kids and a bunch of small properties to liquidate, plus the Trump uncle was stealing shit from the property and making drama and the other siblings kept having Conflicts because they were all abused and nobody got therapy).





• When our basement flooded and shorted out our <10-yr-old geothermal energy pump, our homeowner's insurance refused to pay because it was due to a plumber's work (a pipe exploding) but the plumber's indemnity insurance refused to pay because they contend that if all the drains in the basement had been working as they were supposed to it wouldn't have been damaged. I was going through a lot of stuff to send this case to the insurance watchdog agency, but it turned out that we just had judgments, no bills and no estimates even, and that's because the plumber never sent us one. He decided to just write it off and be glad it wasn't more expensive; he doesn't hold it against us and bore all the cost of repairs, so. We're feeling impulses of strong loyalty to him (he kept his partner and billing person off our back about the bill over the winter too, and all of this happened during a family medical emergency for him).



• In February I accidentally found a letter in a stack of folders from the cottage that referred to death insurance on MIL's pension. This isn't exactly life insurance but it's SOMETHING, and it's one nobody knew about and nobody had spotted before in our attempts to go through MIL's accounts; it's at a bank we thought she didn't have any money at anymore. Customer service was contacted and we eventually received 80% of what was left in her pension, which was only about 4k - not enough to have paid off those bills without my parents' contribution, but probably enough to get contractors back to do some work. We haven't called them about that yet though.



• We can live without unemployment or other income from me, which is what we've been doing for a few months now, but emergency expenses become problematic. I was going through evaluations with the aim of reaching a career counseling program and it had just been prescribed and signed off by social security last September when MIL died, and with the nice Pargas social workers' help I got enrolled in March, and should have been in counseling in June... except then the pandemic came and all courses are put off until further notice. But that means I can't start the work practice or get the social security payment you get for course attendance, and normally should have unemployment in the interim. But I can't, due to that mixup where the unemployment bureau didn't get our official change-of-address from the magistrate and sent two unsolicited job offers to our old flat last autumn, disqualifying me from unemployment when I didn't respond. I had a phone meeting in April with the helpful social workers again, but there's really nothing we can do about the unemployment disqualification now because there's an appeal period built into the process which is past. (They were just like, it really is important to read them on time. And I was like, yeah, definitely, I understand. Like yes ideally my mother-in-law wouldn't have died and I wouldn't have been camping in a disaster zone that looks like a tornado hit it with two critically ill cats and no hot water for most of the crucial period and inexplicably managed to lose track of some mail, but what can you do. Sorry. I will definitely be more likely to treat mail from them like precious gems in future.) And the recommendation even from the social workeers is like, maybe more customers will start flocking to non-essential stores after all this summer even though it's strongly recommended against... and then those stores might be hiring more people to be exposed to streams of dumb people constantly! Well, maybe they will, but unless the government and the epidemiologists change their recommendations I don't think I can see myself trying to get one of those jobs right now; it's... increasing non-essential social contacts just when the most socially responsible thing you can do is decrease them??? So.



• We still have no plumbing or electricity on the cold side (our side) of the house and it is still minimally heated due to only some of the radiators being on, and it is still full of tools and construction dust. The electrician hasn't finished putting in the electrical box over there and the new pipes have not been drawn to all the rooms yet so I'm not even sure if it would be possible for just a plumber and electrician to hook up the washing machine (and nothing else). That's what we would wish for, because the timeline to the other rooms being ready for electricity is still ?????.



• MIL's estate ended in the negative and they had to pay the funeral and burial costs, so once the summer cottage is sold and all that money poured back into this house, Wax's brothers will become part owners of it with us (each owns a sixth I guess?). The only way to recover anything from it is to get it livable so that we can rent the half of it we're now stuck in, because the summer cottage is worth less than the mortgage on this house: it was valued around 90k, but we all understand that pandemic and financial freefall is Interesting Times. In spite of these interesting times there was interest in the cottage and some people offered 71k pending bank approval of their loan, which Wax and BILs indicated they would accept. We're waiting to find out from the buyers' bank, I suppose. They intend to start with putting in running water, so we wouldn't have to empty everything out, either. Fingers crossed for that.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

So glad some of the pressure of those bills is lifted, and so glad you can get by on the current income level.

Bureaucracy! Argh!

Thank you so much for the update.

[cimorene]

💚💚 It is a relief... but it's also very frustrating. I've been thinking about trying to do something like the (horribly poorly paid and extremely low-quality) online freelance translation stuff we used to do like... 12 years ago...

[vass]

That sounds like absolutely no fun at all.

[torachan]

I'm glad you've had at least some good news there!