Troll Echos

In a pattern most people that have been through college would recognize, I busted onto the scene of “real life” in roughly May of 2000 with very close to $100,000 in debt.  According to my loan granting institution, I had a full twenty years of paying on those loans lined up ahead of me.  To most people in this situation it is “just the way it is” and the twenty year plan tends to make the payments every month a little more manageable.  In reality however, you get done being a student and instantly acquire a mortgage backed by your soul.

If that weren’t bad enough, a lot of us, myself included, were driving around the old car we were given near the end of high school by our parents.  I am not referring to a silver spoon “congrats on your graduation or sweet 16 here is your brand new Lexus” but rather the “here is the car that we’ve been driving into the ground for the last decade that may or may not run properly, has well over 100,000 miles on it and may or may not burn slightly more oil than gas and we know selling it would be a waste of effort so you can just have it” type of car.  So aside from a mortgage on your soul, most former students immediately find themselves with a car loan for some slightly less used car because their’s died.

Now imagine that twenty year time window for a moment.  A huge list of things will likely happen in that time frame.  A lot of people will need at least one more car, sometimes two.  Many will purchase some form of real estate.  This time the mortgage is backed by your house instead of your soul at least.  Most will be married, many will have at least one kid, and so on.  Thanks to economic forces beyond our control, most will also spend frantic periods of time unemployed and trying to figure out how to survive on credit cards or money from family or both.  In other words, this twenty years of college debt is never the only debt in your life largely thanks to the fact that it is over such a large time frame.

I often referred to myself as “the best paid poor guy I know” to my friends.  I will not lie, I am well paid for what I do and fortunately to support that, I’m also very good at what I do so I don’t have to feel guilty or anything.  Dispite my status of being well paid, I had the eight college loans, the three cars, the real estate, the wedding, the unemployment, and the credit card debt over the years.  That produced a strange pattern of literally living paycheck to paycheck as I funneled as much money as I possibly could toward debt every month.  My goal was to beat the odds, and pay off not only my college loans, but all of my debt in any form, and to do so before twenty years had elapsed on my college loans.

Several months ago I paid off the last of my college loans, putting me almost eleven years ahead of schedule, but I wasn’t done.  My credit cards are all at zero as well, but I had a mortgage on my house and a loan on my car so I wasn’t quite there. 

When I met my wife we both owned houses and that put us in a somewhat unique situation.  We had an extra house.  Honestly not a terrible situation to be in if you can each pay for your own place the same way you obviously could before you met.  Based on location we decided to move into her house instead of mine.  After a long process lasting roughly a year, my house has been repaired and sold.  This brought about an awesome debt tour de force.

The only two debts I had left were my house and my car.  I had just sold my house making it go away, and with the profit from the house in my pocket and no need to move it into another house thanks to having a second one already, I had the unique opportunity to pay off my car at the same time.  I did exactly that this morning.  So from May of 2000 to August of 2009, a total of nine years and three months, I have scraped my way entirely into the black.  I am now completely debt free.

Having worked at it so hard for so long I think I may still be in a little shock about it.  It doesn’t yet feel real.  The sudden drop in my monthly expenses will probably make it feel very real indeed very soon I suspect.

Last autumn I went to my house and prepared it as well as I possibly could for the cold winter ahead since the house was going to be sitting empty for the season waiting to be put on the market the following spring.    The pipes were drained, the furnace lines too, anti-freeze was added to toilets, sinks, tubs, and anything else that had any known residual water in it or was otherwise in posession of a U-bend.  It took quite a while to get all the ducks in the row for the winter, and when I was done, I figured I would be in pretty good shape.

Over the course of the winter I returned to the house at random intervals to verify that it was still standing, do a quick check inside, sometimes to do some chores, and to grab the latest mailbox-full of junk mail.  Each time I went, everything honestly seemed fine.  No floods, no fires, no problems.    You know what they say about best laid plans though.

After the cold passed, I returned to the house to start turning things back on after the winter and to do some final preparations for sale.  I turned on the water, opened the valve, and all seemed ok.  For about six seconds.  Then the ceiling of my basement in a section thankfully not immediately over my head sprung into an odd flow of water a bit like an ill conceived cross breed between a fire sprinkler and a waterfall.  I immediately cranked the valve closed again and the amount of water coming out of my house into my basement slowed quickly to a stop again.

A couple more ons and offs later, I had a reaonable idea of where the water could be coming from and all the evidence I needed that I had a split copper pipe somewhere up in the walls of my house.  I uttered, “this is not how this was supposed to go” sadly to my wife and got on the phone for a plumber and an insurance claim.

The next day the plumber arrived, confirmed my theory on where the leak was coming from, and repaired it.  A pipe had simply popped out of a 45 degree angle connector.  Once that was patched up, I turned the water back on, and the waterfall began anew.  More trouble shooting for what was obviously a second  broken pipe in the same vertical section of house, based on the fact that the first fix was no longer leaking but the water was coming from the same place in the basement, revealed the need to poke through more walls on the main floor of the house.  

Sure enough a second vastly more obnoxious problem was discovered, this time a split pipe in a nearly impossible spot to get to without swearing about it a lot.  To back up that theory, the plumber did a fair amount of complaining as the spot with the problem proved to be nightmarish.  Once that problem was fixed we turned the water back on and allowed ourselves a moment of hope as no waterfall resumed immediately.  False hope is the worst kind indeed.

A slow leak all over the kitchen floor inspired the water to be shut down quickly again and more research into the next problem.  The water this time appeared to be issuing from behind the refridgerator, which pointed at the ice maker water line initially.  That is until the water appeared to be leaking from somewhere within the refridgerator itself instead of the cheap copper line.  The specifics of this problem remain unknown but obviously something that carries water inside the fridge wasn’t meant to freeze.  A funny thought considering the primary purpose of the water in the fridge is to actually make ice.  With the tap for the fridge in the basement turned off, the water was once again returned to service.

And shut down again.  This time the water was coming out of the dishwasher.  The front panel was removed to show a pretty obvious leak out of the flow control solenoid.  So we shut that down as a lost cause too and turned the water back on again.  This time no obvious water problems, but it was time to move onto the hot water systems.  The valve on the furnace was turned on, and within very short order revealed that we weren’t done.  Now water was issuing from under the kitchen sink.

Don’t ask me why, because I honestly can’t come up with a good reason, but there was an extra hot water pipe under my kitchen sink.  I would be forced to guess that it was destined for the dishwasher, but an alternate tap off of the sink’s hot water tap had been created instead.  The result was about 15 inches of pipe under the sink ending in a welded on pipe cap.  On its own that wouldn’t result in any trouble, and in fact it didn’t for six years in the house, but today all bets are obviously off.  The cap itself split open.  The effect was a glorious sprinkler like one that only revealed itself when there was pressure in the hot water system.

Finally, things seemed to be patched up, almost $800 later and the plumber was on his way.  Drywall needs to be replaced to fill in the holes and repainted to make it look nice again.  This is far from done, and to avoid unknown problems the water was shut down again before I left.  Better to turn it on again and find a problem later than leave it on and come back to find your house is a lake.