Hopefully No One Will Be Moonwalking on the Ceiling

Some of you may know that we are some of those crazy people who took advantage of the fact that about two years ago pretty much any bum off the street could walk into a mortgage broker's office and have a loan in about five minutes. I call it "Mclending." Just before the whole thing was becoming disastrous, I'm pretty sure Countrywide had actually opened up a drive-through. Just bring a recent check stub to the window and get your loan in five minutes or less.

So in our early days in Memphis, I was lying awake one night pondering my life in the land of the South when good ol' Carlton Sheets came on trying to sell his "How to make millions in real estate" tapes, and I had a great idea. I was going to buy rental property. And because I was a very poor college student who was married to an also poor college student, I was going to do it with no money down whatsoever.

Well, I did just that, only, it wasn't like we all of a sudden had a rental property after hitting up the drive through at Countrywide.

But we did end up buying a house. The only catch was that we had to live in it, for a year.

Then, about three months before Kaydn Rye was born, our year was up. So we went to the McLender and got a new loan for a new house. One week before Kaydn Rye was born we moved into that house, and the plan was to do the same thing with that one.

We still own that first house and let's see, how best should I describe it? I guess most days I stand by the phone hoping our property manager will call to let us know that the place burned down and the insurance check is in the mail.

I can honestly say that some of the weirdest people I have ever met have been a result of our rental. Let's see, let's take a walk down memory lane and revisit some of our wonderful tenants.

There was the first lady. She had two or three kids and a trucking job that left the crazy kids home alone at all times of the day.

Apparently the summer that we moved back up north one of the boys was actually arrested on the lawn for breaking into all the houses in the neighborhood, for selling drugs out of MY house and for G-d knows what else.

After we gave them the boot, the property manager's "walk-through" yielded some pretty interesting findings, one being the appearance that someone was trying to literally climb the walls. I don't know how it all went down, but apparently there was one heck of a party and people ended up moon walking on my ceiling.

And then there was the next round with the next tenant, oh, no wait, it was the lady after that, who could atleast vacuum, dust, sweep the floor, you know, things that most people do to atleast keep the rats at bay.

But the funny thing about her was that she just couldn't seem to come up with the rent money. We finally booted her out and I am now using my judgment enforcement skills to collect my money. And low and behold, now that not every Tom, Dick, Harry and their dog can just pull up to the drive-thru for a home loan, people are coming out of the woodwork trying to rent the place, and we have a new renter lady.

She makes hardly any money, has a teenaged son who just had open-heart surgery and she begged and pleaded for the place so she could get her son out of their old apartment into a home.

The last lady also couldn't afford to keep her water on, so needless to say the place wasn't in the most sanitary of conditions when the new lady moved in a couple weeks ago. She apparently moved in with the place a mess and offered to clean it herself.

So, we'll see how this one works out and pray that every month the rent money comes in and life is full of rainbows and butterflies, without people moon-walking on the ceiling.



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