The Financial Lives of the Poets Read Online Free PDF

threatened by the sexy, confident one, the one I couldn’t control, the one I could lose. If so, then I am an even smaller man than the out-of-work, out-of-gas loser who greets me in the mirror every day, and maybe I deserve my unraveling fate, pushed away from this beautiful beaten wife, who goes out every night on the Internet in search of her better self—pre-child, pre-forty, pre-me.
    More self-pity. It’s ugly. Counterproductive. I constantly warn my sons about the dangers of self-pity when they’re moping about being the only kids in the world without a Nintendo Wii. And honestly, with Lisa and me, it hasn’t been that bad. Beneath our current troubles, I think we still like each other, and as flatly unromantic as that might sound, it’s amazing how many of our couple friends genuinely don’t. Lisa and I still root for each other, still make each other laugh, still have fairly successful sex at least once a week, sometimes more—at least we did until about a month ago, when this dry spell started. We have similar goals and interests. Share the same politics. And (I realize I’m making the case to myself) we don’t even argue much. Certainly we did argue some last winter and spring, when our finances fell apart, but even then Lisa and I didn’t argue so much as not talk —our little ballet of sighs, pursed lips and hushed voices as I worried over mortgage statements and retirement bulletins and over the increasingly terse letters from various lenders and financial institutions—grim reams of paper that have led me today to the office of Richard Blackmore, our financial coroner…I mean, planner.
    When the hole started opening two years ago, Lisa and I congratulated ourselves because at least we weren’t in one of those La Brea Tar Pit adjustable-rate home loans. We had a normal thirty-year, with a normal fixed rate, and even though we’d unwisely cashed in equity for a couple of costly remodels, we were still okay. We had some normal debt: normal credit cards, normal furniture layaways, normal car payments, some uncovered medical bills, Teddy’s normal braces and Franklin’s normal speech therapy (Oh, for God’s sake, just say your ‘R’s). But then my perfectly normal dream of starting my own business, the afore-derided poetfolio.com, turned out to take longer and be more costly than we thought, and we found ourselves taking another line of credit on the house, going deeper in debt. Then came Lisa’s abnormal online shopping binge, and our credit cards rolled over on us a couple of times and the car payments lapsed and the ground began slipping away and the only thing that seemed rock steady was the house, so we took another chunk out of it, just to catch up, we said, to temporarily cover living expenses, and we refinanced at the peak value; like a snake eating its tail we borrowed against our house to pay the house payment of a house leveraged at forty percent more than the house was worth. When the dip came I scrambled back to the newspaper, but with the hole growing deeper and monthly interest charges eating us alive, we fell further behind, missed a few house payments and our helpful mortgage lender offered us an “agreement of forbearance,” six months leeway (with interest!) to get on top of our payments, and we jumped at that lifeline, but then I lost my job and maybe we were distracted by that and by my father’s collapse (we dragged him into the hole with us) because while we fretted and waffled and stalled, the stock market went out for milk, got stoned and lost forty percent of its value, depleting my 401(k), which, due to my stubborn love for financial and media stocks, had already begun to look more like a 4(k). That’s about the time I stopped showing Lisa the grim letters about the house, with their phony warm salutations (“Dear Homeowner…”).
    This is how a person wakes up one morning to find that he’s six days from losing his house.
    The advice you get when your mortgage