I’ve Paid For This Twice Already…

Archive for the ‘musings’ Category

A few months ago, my mother’s cat started acting funny, and $1000 worth of visits and tests later, it was determined that the cat had a cold.  There is more to the story than that I am sure, but basically, that is what it boiled down to.

I kind of feel like that this afternoon.  Basically, I’ve been having abdominal pain off and on for the past two months - sometimes severe, sometimes moderate, and sometimes nothing at all.  Couple that with seeing a tiny smear of what looked like blood to me a few times after wiping, and I freaked out.  So a few doctors visits, a bunch of blood and stool tests, and a CT scan later, and basically, so far everything has come back normal.

Which is great and I am happy.  But now the doctor wants to do a colonoscopy, just in case.  In case of what, I have no idea.  But I will, just in case.  Even though I sort of feel like I am throwing money down the drain.  So someone will call me in a week or so to schedule the procedure, and off I will go.  Hopefully that will come back normal too.

Having a $1000 healthcare deductible stinks.  I’m just glad we didn’t choose the high-deductible plan this year.  And I will continue to throw money down the healthcare drain.  Hopefully it continues to reward me by everything being normal.  I’m sure my colon could use a little look-see once in a while.  And compared to the alternative, I hope I’ll continue to feel like I’m throwing money down a drain.  Even when the bills start rolling in.

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Our neighborhood association is having a yardsale this weekend, and we are taking part.  I’ve got markers and signs galore with “Baby/Kids Clothes” written on them in big letters, and I feel good to go.  But this year, something will be different.

You see, we had two yardsales last year.  And since then, sitting in our garage, have been about 5 boxes of stuff that didn’t sell, waiting for this year’s yard sales.  No more.  No more holding on to stuff just to see if I can eventually sell it.  I guess I kept it because I figured I wouldn’t have anything new to sell this year, but, interestingly enough, even though we bought less, I seem to have even more stuff to purge.  I’ve finally booted a bunch of my kids toys, I’ve been sorting through collections of CDs and DVDs and books and purging, I’ve even pared down my closet more than last year.  We have 10 boxes of stuff to sell this year (plus 4 boxes of outgrown kids clothes) in addition to the leftovers from last year.  Somehow I think we’ll never run out of stuff to stock a yard sale with.

And if we do run out of stuff, we just won’t have a yard sale.  Sitting outside waiting for people to argue with you about how much they’ll pay for stuff you don’t want any more isn’t all it is cracked up to be anyway.

And after the second neighborhood yardsale this August, everything that remains goes.  Everything.   If I can sell it to resale shops, fine, but if not, it doesn’t matter.  It will go.  Donated, freecycled, whatever works, but it will all go.  By the time my son starts school in the fall, everything that has been designated yard sale should be out of my house permanently.
This is now my mantra.  I need to repeat it to myself frequently to remind myself that it will happen.  Because honestly, I still am quite a hoarder at heart.

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Over the weekend, BeThisWay sent me an email with a link to one of the oddest eBay auctions I have ever seen. The auction has ended, but as of my writing this, you can still see the auction. Someone decided to sell their debt on eBay, all $103,245.11 of it. It does include their house and car if you’d like it, but the car, a 2004 Ford Focus, has a $9200 debt on it, so I doubt you’d even break even on that part. Maybe the house.

This is disturbing to me on so many levels. First off, who is going to buy someone’s debt on eBay? Is it even a valid legal transaction? Is it enforceable? What if the house and car sale part are valid but not the debt transfer? Now you just sold your house and car, and you still have over $100K in debt. Oops. I don’t know honestly if any of it is valid, but it seems to me more likely the actual asset sale part would be and not the debt transfer part. Maybe both are. Which makes it interesting for the person who bought the auction for $1, I suppose. If the house was enough to pay off all the debt, you’d think the people would have sold the house to pay the debt off before deciding to list the auction on eBay.

Second, was this really their only option? Was there nothing else they could do but try to get someone else to take over their debt? Was there no other way? Somehow I don’t think so. Have we gotten to the point in this country that if things seems too hard, we want a do-over? They claim in their listing that their debt is average for most Americans. Not that I think over $100K in debt is average, but if they feel they are average, do they think everyone lists their debt on eBay for some random person to take care of it for them?

I feel especially bad for the kids in this scenario. The person posted a picture of their family. What will be the affect on the kids when the family has to move out of their house because they sold it on eBay for a dollar? Next time, at least set a minimum price… really. You have to have other options than running a less-than-informed eBay option. I wish they’d had someone to reach out to that could have helped them with some information before they went this route.

Only in America, I guess.

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I have a lot of stuff. Not expensive or extravagant stuff, but just the random detritus that one collects traveling through life, especially if one is a hoarder. I don’t have a use for a lot of it, but yet I can’t seem to get rid of it. Why? Because it still works, I might need it someday, it goes on and on.

The bottom line is, I have trouble letting go of things if they are perfectly good. Even if they have no use in my life.

I’ve tried selling a lot of it, and have gotten rid of some that way. I have boxes of stuff though for our next yard sale, which I know won’t all sell. And I know what I need to do, no matter how hard it is.

I need to get rid of it.

Whatever doesn’t sell at the yard sales this summer needs to be carted to Goodwill, or wherever else will take it. I need to let go of all the clutter that abounds in my house. I don’t need it, I don’t even want it, I just can’t get over the fact that I spent money on stuff and I won’t get it back. I honestly can’t even recall what most of the stuff in the boxes in the garage even is. It needs to go.

Someone else might need it, and put it to good use. And my world will be a little easier to navigate with much less stuff.

Of course, I hope I sell a ton of it at the yard sales, and snowflake it all to debt. A girl is allowed a dream or two, after all.

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Yesterday I went to the hospital for a (scheduled) CT scan. Without getting mired in details, I’ve been having some unexplained abdominal pain as well as a few other intestinal symptoms, and my doctor decided to do a CT scan to look for both a colon issue or an ovarian cyst at the same time. Dependent on the results of that (I go in for a followup to talk about it next week) I might get the pleasure of either a colonoscopy or an ultrasound as well. Yippee.

But that’s not the mortality part I faced yesterday. When I went in for the CT scan, I had to sign a waiver that I understood that the contrast media they use in the scan actually is fatal to a small percentage of people (about 0.0007%), and a larger percentage (about 5%) have an adverse reaction to it. And then I got to sit for 90 minutes thinking about that before I had my scan done. Honestly, I hadn’t even considered the idea that the scan itself might be dangerous to me, and I got a slight bit panicky.

And so I did what any not quite rational person might do, I took out a piece of paper and wrote a will.

This is not the best of ideas. A good idea is to already have a will in the first place. Use a kit, hire an attorney, do something, and have a will in place. Don’t wait until mortality stares you in the face to actually do something about it. I’ve started researching options for creating a will, and my goal is by the end of the month, my spouse and I have something formal in place. And then by the end of the year, we see an attorney and spend the money to create something even better. But we need to start now. We’ve put this off too long.

It turns out, I was in fact one of the lucky 5% that have an adverse reaction to contrast media. Although my reaction was mild, the radiology department still got quite excited over it, and if I ever have another scan, I need to be medicated beforehand because once you have a reaction, it’s worse the next time. That makes me super excited to have another one, let me tell you. Hopefully it won’t be necessary… ever.

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