Court & ComEd
Thursday, February 22nd, 2024 01:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio |
60F and sunny again, in this... not even last week of February.
I had a look at the copies of what Bantam filed to the court.
Not easy to decipher, because it's mostly legalese.
It seems to have two purposes; firstly to stop a judgement against me in my absence... and secondly, to say that isn't my debt, but this is my house, so they can't just swoop in and take it from me.
There seemed to be something even about squatter's rights, mentioned in there, in passing.
There was also a good deal of, "Defendant doesn't have enough information about such & such, and requires strict proof."
I guess the burden of proof for everything is on BMO, but I've now submitted proof that the house is indeed mine, but the HELOC is not.
Does this mean the suit gets... vacated or whatever? I dunno.
Meanwhile, I finally got the payout demand that I asked for, from the BMO lawyers a couple weeks ago.
That figure is 17K.
But I suppose that too is negotiable depending on who is to blame for who's legal fees, and whether i'm really on the hook for late fees.
Still, it would've been too much for me to pay, even with the AmEx, so it's good I went with a lawyer instead.
I think it's fairly clear, BMO never wanted to be paid back.
Instead, what they've wanted all along is to just liquidate the house.
Lying to Dad about having 10 years to pay back the HELOC, after June of 2023, was likely just a gamble that he'd either be dead in a year, or, if still alive, in such a state that he'd just go ahead and sell the house to pay for a nursing home or whatever.
I'm sure they never counted on me getting ownership of the place with a TODI, immediately upon death, with no probate or anything.
And since then, they've been trying to get me to assume the debt... so that they can swoop in and kick me out.
They've been pushing loss mitigation (assuming the debt) as my only option since last summer... stonewalling my first lawyer, and rebuffing attempts to pay it off through Discover, and AmeriSave.
The foreclosure too, I'm sure was meant to scare me into loss mitigation... or, maybe prevail over me if I just failed to answer the summons.
That's why they came after ME with the suit, and not the estate.
Because if a judgement was made against me, in my absence... then the debt really would legally be mine, finally!
As for WHY, they'd rather auction the house, than get paid back...
Well, why did all the street cars vanish across America, after WW2?
All the street car companies were bought out and shut down... to transform this into an automobile society.
The same thing is happening with housing right now.
The collective goal of the banks is to get all the housing into the hands of landlords, and make this a rental society, where nobody will ever own their own home again.
So in a way, I'm not just up against BMO... I'm up against the entire American banking infrastructure, in this battle to simply own a shitty little house, in a boring little town.
As for ComEd, their system is still down.
I did do a bit of Googling about it, though.
Apparently, they're trying to restructure their billing system, and part of that is to assign everybody new account numbers that will follow them from residence to residence.
(is it part of the rental society master plan???)
Supposedly, they were to be back up and running by FEB 19, which was Monday, but they're not... which tells me they bit off more than they could chew with this.
But it now does make sense that they auto-deducted from Dad's old account, if they lost the more recent information pointing it at my AmEx.
And it also makes sense that the robot on the 800 line didn't recognize the account number... because it's been reassigned... but I don't know what it is!
So I'm in for a huge headache now, because it's still in Dad's name, and he's dead.
So I'll have to get my own THIRD account number from them.
And I can't do that until they get their shit back online.
And there's no telling when that will happen.
And no, there's nobody to call.
They say themselves, the only calls they're taking right now are to report outages. That's it!
So tomorrow I'll pay off the BMO overdraft with the refunded AllState money.
But I'll have to be prepared for another electric bill auto-deduction next month, if this isn't straightened out.
Lastly, this morning, it's now been four full days since I've seen Snoop.
Today will be day five of him missing... which I think is a new record for either of them.
Prowly, meanwhile is always around lately... which makes me really wonder if he doesn't know something that I don't.
Like, did Snoop go adopt a new owner?
And does Prowly know that he'll never be coming back?
The two of them have long been acting like this house isn't big enough for the two of them, so I wonder if they didn't finally come to a resolution, where Snoop found a new home... with owners who actually have the time to pet him.
I dunno.
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