Revenge, Personal Responsibility and Karma
I'm fuming tonight. I've spent a part of today dealing with the management company that I helped pick and hire back when I was on the HOA board. All those fruitless, angry, threatening to mud wrassle meetings that ate my brain.
So what's the deal? We sold our house almost a month ago, on July 31st, and a month before I let the HOA management company know that as of August 1st I was no longer responsible for any HOA monthly fee. I let them know well in advance not to debit my bank account any longer.
What did they do? If you said take the moolah out of my checking account on the first of August you would be right. They took it. I called them again, and they told me this time that they had not received any of the paperwork or payments from the settlement company, meaning I was still responsible for the payments. Told me I could have a refund when they got the settlement payment, which had the August HOA payment rolled in with the deposit the new owner had to put up.
It's not like we're talking much money. Nobody is going to go hungry, or miss paying the electric bill if they didn't return the funds asap. It's the idea of the entire thing, a clodhopper flimflamming version of the financial Virginia Reel.
Call a couple more times and get the answer they are processing the paperwork. Call today to ask them to be sure and not take any more payments, asking about the status of the refund. I was told that they were keeping my August payment and crediting it to the new buyer. Not at all what we'd discussed any of our previous calls. She told me if my account was hit in September they would credit the new owner and offer me no refund, yet they claimed they could make no changes to the online portal where our information was.
Starting to sound like a sloppy scam, because I'd been in the online portal many times trying to close my account and remove the info and all I got was error messages. So I ended up pulling something of a fast one because there's more than one way to skin a kitty. I called my bank, who gave me the name of the bank running the online portal and contact information. And they removed the info, closed the account and sent me an email confirming it!
Part of me is still miffed over the little HOA dues, another reason why we refused to look at any houses here in Costa Rica with HOAs. I have yet to see or hear of an HOA that didn't fall apart like one of those 5Guys burgers when you load it with all the options. It ends up a mess.
The way I see it is that I could take them to small claims court for the money, I could contact BBB and file a complaint, I could complain to the state agency that regulars HOA management boards. I could blare out my problems with their sleazy scammy ways to the masses on the various consumer complaint sites that already have them down with a D minus business rating. Or I could do nothing and wait for universal reciprocity to kick in.
So how does that work, you ask? I've experienced it a few times, the worst universal asskicking I witnessed was of my ex husband and his years of ducking my attempts to collect child support. We took him to court again and again, he kept ducking out of the state for six months or a year, and not paying a dime. He was harder to nail down than greased jello, and twice as slimey.
After a few years my lawyer pointed out I was just running up a legal bill I was struggling to pay, telling me because Dan didn't have a regular job, he was a traveling musician, that I was unlikely to see a penny ever.
He did give me a useful peace of parting advice. He told me this: "Some day you're going to meet a man who'll treat you right, who'll love you and love your child by extention. That's going to capture Dan's attention when he thinks you're seriously with someone else and your child might call this other man 'Daddy'. When that happens Dan is likely to try and sue you for custody. All you have to do is show up in court with evidence of no child support, his lack of contact, his many marriages, his lack of a stable home, the time his third wife beat your child and the judge will toss him from the courtroom, likely ordering him to pay all the back child support in a very short time. He will get no say over your child and if you make decisions for your child."
I cried when Fred, my attorney, told me this, but it turned out to be the best advice ever. I got engaged to marry Jim and we were moving to Germany mere months after the wedding for three years. Can you guess where I'm going with this? Dan tried to legally stop me, taking me to court to take custody. It didn't go well for Dan, the judge ended up severing his parental rights based on the non-payment of child support for nine years. Not a leg to stand on, and I had to do nothing.
Two years later he tried to come to Germany to see our daughter. I had complete control, a court order saying that visitation was strictly at my descretion. He tried to legally force me to not only allow him to see our daughter the week I was due to have my son, but tried to say in court that because I'd moved to Germany I had to allow him to stay at my home. That time the military lawyers stepped in and suggested if he came anywhere near any of us during that month that there would be a restraining order in place. We were fighting about this in court six months before my son was born. It was definitely a hostile act intended to screw with my mind while I was pregnant. Little did he know I never did more than chuckle over his presumptin and awfulness, knowing the military would handle this, and they did. It was the very last time in a long list ot times that Dan tried to screw up for me. Again I had to do nothing.
I am thinking that perhaps this is another one of those very bad karma things, and if I try to take revenge it will not go well,but if I sit back and let it happen it could be very bad indeed.
I'm just happy to be finally done with the stupid HOA that was always the stupideous collection of people fomenting weird drama. No more do I have to referree when neighbors try to sue each other. No more nasty letters on my doorstep threatening to kick neighbor X's ass because they refuse to cut their bushes into cubes. No more going to meetings and gritting my teeth as the treasurer tries to scream that everyone is giving her a hard time because she's black, convienently forgetting that half the board is black, and half the home owners.
Here the worse thing I had to deal with is the monkey peeing on me the other afternoon while I walked under a tree. I'll take that any day than having to put up with scamming corrupt venial people.
So what's the deal? We sold our house almost a month ago, on July 31st, and a month before I let the HOA management company know that as of August 1st I was no longer responsible for any HOA monthly fee. I let them know well in advance not to debit my bank account any longer.
What did they do? If you said take the moolah out of my checking account on the first of August you would be right. They took it. I called them again, and they told me this time that they had not received any of the paperwork or payments from the settlement company, meaning I was still responsible for the payments. Told me I could have a refund when they got the settlement payment, which had the August HOA payment rolled in with the deposit the new owner had to put up.
It's not like we're talking much money. Nobody is going to go hungry, or miss paying the electric bill if they didn't return the funds asap. It's the idea of the entire thing, a clodhopper flimflamming version of the financial Virginia Reel.
Call a couple more times and get the answer they are processing the paperwork. Call today to ask them to be sure and not take any more payments, asking about the status of the refund. I was told that they were keeping my August payment and crediting it to the new buyer. Not at all what we'd discussed any of our previous calls. She told me if my account was hit in September they would credit the new owner and offer me no refund, yet they claimed they could make no changes to the online portal where our information was.
Starting to sound like a sloppy scam, because I'd been in the online portal many times trying to close my account and remove the info and all I got was error messages. So I ended up pulling something of a fast one because there's more than one way to skin a kitty. I called my bank, who gave me the name of the bank running the online portal and contact information. And they removed the info, closed the account and sent me an email confirming it!
Part of me is still miffed over the little HOA dues, another reason why we refused to look at any houses here in Costa Rica with HOAs. I have yet to see or hear of an HOA that didn't fall apart like one of those 5Guys burgers when you load it with all the options. It ends up a mess.
The way I see it is that I could take them to small claims court for the money, I could contact BBB and file a complaint, I could complain to the state agency that regulars HOA management boards. I could blare out my problems with their sleazy scammy ways to the masses on the various consumer complaint sites that already have them down with a D minus business rating. Or I could do nothing and wait for universal reciprocity to kick in.
So how does that work, you ask? I've experienced it a few times, the worst universal asskicking I witnessed was of my ex husband and his years of ducking my attempts to collect child support. We took him to court again and again, he kept ducking out of the state for six months or a year, and not paying a dime. He was harder to nail down than greased jello, and twice as slimey.
After a few years my lawyer pointed out I was just running up a legal bill I was struggling to pay, telling me because Dan didn't have a regular job, he was a traveling musician, that I was unlikely to see a penny ever.
He did give me a useful peace of parting advice. He told me this: "Some day you're going to meet a man who'll treat you right, who'll love you and love your child by extention. That's going to capture Dan's attention when he thinks you're seriously with someone else and your child might call this other man 'Daddy'. When that happens Dan is likely to try and sue you for custody. All you have to do is show up in court with evidence of no child support, his lack of contact, his many marriages, his lack of a stable home, the time his third wife beat your child and the judge will toss him from the courtroom, likely ordering him to pay all the back child support in a very short time. He will get no say over your child and if you make decisions for your child."
I cried when Fred, my attorney, told me this, but it turned out to be the best advice ever. I got engaged to marry Jim and we were moving to Germany mere months after the wedding for three years. Can you guess where I'm going with this? Dan tried to legally stop me, taking me to court to take custody. It didn't go well for Dan, the judge ended up severing his parental rights based on the non-payment of child support for nine years. Not a leg to stand on, and I had to do nothing.
Two years later he tried to come to Germany to see our daughter. I had complete control, a court order saying that visitation was strictly at my descretion. He tried to legally force me to not only allow him to see our daughter the week I was due to have my son, but tried to say in court that because I'd moved to Germany I had to allow him to stay at my home. That time the military lawyers stepped in and suggested if he came anywhere near any of us during that month that there would be a restraining order in place. We were fighting about this in court six months before my son was born. It was definitely a hostile act intended to screw with my mind while I was pregnant. Little did he know I never did more than chuckle over his presumptin and awfulness, knowing the military would handle this, and they did. It was the very last time in a long list ot times that Dan tried to screw up for me. Again I had to do nothing.
I am thinking that perhaps this is another one of those very bad karma things, and if I try to take revenge it will not go well,but if I sit back and let it happen it could be very bad indeed.
I'm just happy to be finally done with the stupid HOA that was always the stupideous collection of people fomenting weird drama. No more do I have to referree when neighbors try to sue each other. No more nasty letters on my doorstep threatening to kick neighbor X's ass because they refuse to cut their bushes into cubes. No more going to meetings and gritting my teeth as the treasurer tries to scream that everyone is giving her a hard time because she's black, convienently forgetting that half the board is black, and half the home owners.
Here the worse thing I had to deal with is the monkey peeing on me the other afternoon while I walked under a tree. I'll take that any day than having to put up with scamming corrupt venial people.
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