Well, with everyone getting a bailout of some sort,
I think now it’s my turn.
In the past week I lost about twenty thousand dollars in my 401K, and to make things worse my forty-six hundred dollar a month mortgage is really starting to get on my nerves after three years.
And every month it seems it’s getting harder and harder to “lay that egg”. I empty out whatever money I have from my other accounts, wait for checks to clear, hold off on all the electric bills, gas bills, cable bills, and then start to “cackle” like a great big old two hundred pound chicken.
Just sitting there with my arms flapping up and down,
and bouncing my big ass on my “Office Max” chair.
“Bak, bak, bak, bak......bak baaaaaaaaaaaak!!!
“Bak, bak, bak, bak......bak baaaaaaaaaaaak!!!
“Bak, bak, bak, bak......bak baaaaaaaaaaaak!!!
I can feel the “giant egg” slowly start to make it’s out of me.
The pain of it all seems unbearable.
It’s coming!
It’s coming!
Oh my God,
here it is!
I press the “pay this account” button
on my mortgage bank’s website.
"Thank you for your payment" is all it says
With the great big white egg just sitting there on top of the straw,
I look at my account and all the wonderful zero’s lined up just like the chicken “egg” I just laid.
“You mean I have to pay this shit for the next 27 years?”
“Forty-six hundred dollars a month for the next twenty seven years?”
No, no, no, I’m getting a “bail-out” folks, because this really sucks.
And of course I have no one to blame but myself.
You see when the banks were giving out “Re-Fi’s” and "HE" loans like candy on a Halloween night in Kensington, there I was. Standing there at the bank with my hands out and thinking about what to do with “the money”.
Yeah, just throw it in my bank account and I'll
promise not to eat too much and make myself sick.
And thank God I was married to my wife when I did it, because I actually did what most people don’t when they take out loans, or re-finance. I actually built another house with the money and also renovated 399, so every apartment is perfect. I mean all my tenants have a washer and dryer and dishwasher too. Well, it’s a lot of work running up and down the stairs washing their plates by hand, but a promise is a promise, and at least my nails are always clean.
Yes, if I wasn’t married the house would look like the “haunted house” that it looked like in the 1980’s. And my driveway would be full of old cars and leaking transmissions like it was when I was single. Thank goodness I got married, yes Virginia certainly did save me from “myself” and the NYC Dep as well.
And I’m not going to bull shit you either, because if it wasn’t for the two wonderful tenants I have that help me lay that “egg” every month, I would really be in deep shit like everyone else is today.
And no, I never fell for a “variable rate”; no all my loans are fixed.
And I will never see the 4.75 rate I have on my mortgage ever again in my lifetime.
No, never again.
And all this is exactly the root of the mortgage crisis
and Wall street crisis we are in today.
I may have graduated with a B- average, but “Brooklyn” knows.
I went for the bait like everyone else.
I have a 640,000 mortgage like many others.
But I own a three family house and have the support
of tenants to help me with my mortgage.
No, wasn't that stupid
No, not me.
The people out on Staten Island with the same mortgage as I do are living in a one family house and “not” laying that egg every month. No, there are more foreclosures on Staten Island than anywhere in the city.
Those one family houses can really be trouble if you don't watch yourself.
And you can say that’s true for the rest of the country too.
Although they may not be laying such a big egg as us here in Brooklyn.
So, you can blame anyone you like, but I would never have taken out a 640,000 mortgage if I didn’t have a multiple family house. Because I would have defaulted three years ago!
No, graphic designers don’t make that much money.
So there you are, one man’s take on the crisis we are in today.
“Bite off more than you can chew”
and of course my grandfather Paco’s favorite,
“Your eyes are bigger than your stomach”
“Yes, we know the enemy, and the enemy is us.”
Oh, and not to mention that chicken that
used to peck the shit out of my hand upstate.
Never try to bother a chicken when it's
laying an egg, never.
Ron Lopez
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