I'm blonde. Not stupid. Good grief -

[kyburg]

I came home last week on my lunch hour to meet with a very nice man from a contracting company associated with the Gas Company here in California to see about replacing windows in our house.

Very nice. Had to skip out to go back to work because, well, I have to make a living and my lunch hour is over. Gotta run.

But were were given a quote - a little over $7,000, to replace 12 windows. Okay, I don't have that in the bank (without touching my 401K, of course) - so go ahead, see if you can finance it.

Just got off the phone.

The dirty bastards tried to write it as a second on my home mortgage. A $7,000 loan. They wanted a $500,000 house (I just got a comp yesterday for a smaller lot with a duplex on it for $612,000 down the street) as collateral for a $7,000 loan.

Okay. Livid now.

Told them to go back and get an unsecured (don't know how unsecured it can be, they can come back and take the windows, fer crissakes) loan - or forget it.

Boy, they can forget it. They can SO FORGET IT.

Getting with the bitey stabby death here. Big time

Comments

*nods*

[turandot.livejournal.com]

I doubt that this practice started with you, Donna, and I shouldn't wonder if they've already gotten away with swindling someone out of their homes with the practice (back when I lived in Chicago, there was a huge scandal over a couple of crooked lawyers who increased their personal fortunes on the backs of elderly home owners who forgot to pay their property taxes: the attorneys would pay the outstanding tax bill unbeknownst to the home owners, then sue them out of a house. The county didn't even blink at the practice until a newspaper report created a huge uproar over it).

Good grief, if they were on the up and up, they would have suggested that you take out a home equity loan as soon as you claimed you couldn't afford the job, instead of securing one using your home as a collateral. Is that even legal?