Cause and Effect paper on My Personal Homelessness written for a class at Martin University

Michael V. Schwing
English 158.11
Professor Brian Gaddie
The Causes and Effects of My Homelessness
As I wrote in another paper, there are many reasons for an individual’s homelessness.
I learned at the annual meeting of the Coalition for Homeless Intervention and Prevention (“CHIP”) that my main reason, the mortgage crisis, was almost non-existent ten years ago. It now is the leading cause of homelessness for families, which are the fastest growing sector of the city of Indianapolis’s homeless population. (Blueprint 8). There are several causes of my homelessness, some of the effects of which became causes themselves.
One cause that plagues me to this day is my lack of higher education. Although I went to college after graduating high school as expected, I did poorly in college and after four years I had to leave. I could no longer afford to pay for college. I completed only two years in the four I was there. Without a degree in something, I could not prove I know what I know and could not get one of the better paying jobs which would have paid for good housing.
Another cause is my personal laziness. I have never done more than I needed to do pertaining to a job, work, or career. I never worked all the hours I could, or sought better jobs than the pizza delivery jobs I enjoyed where I was comfortable. I did work to pay student loans or car payments. When those things were paid, I did not care if I had a job or not. Consequently, the natural effect of this philosophy was I was more unemployed than employed.
The effect of these two causes is that I now, when I need to get and hold a job, do not have one. I should be at the point in my life where I have a career and a family. The children should be grown or almost grown, and out on their own, which the ones I legally adopted are. I can work some jobs and enjoy them. However, I lack the education to get a career I need to stay housed. I have addressed this issue by returning to college after a gap of 20 years since I was last in Pontiac Business Institute before they closed.
The next group of causes and effects which became causes concerns the mortgage I took out on my house. I inherited the house outright from my father with no mortgage on it as he had paid his mortgage in full before his death. For two and a half years I lived the “American Dream” of owning my own house outright, paying the taxes due on time, and enjoying my life as a dad and grandfather. When my second adopted son and the family whose daughter he “married” (they believe they are common law married, but that has not existed in Indiana since the 1950s) and with whom he had two children needed to leave the house they were in, I mortgaged my house to help them and myself. This was the second biggest mistake
of my life. The biggest mistake of my life was refinancing that mortgage with Washington Mutual Bank to save several points off the interest rate. Had I stayed with the original mortgage, I would have been able to keep my house over the long term. My job allowed me to pay an extra $100 or more a month and in some months a double payment of $700, with all extra funds applied to the principal of the loan. They had originally given me the mortgage loan with no income because I had a $45,000 stock and mutual fund account. I got a job delivering pizzas at the local Papa John’s Pizza which more than covered the new mortgage payments. The funds were used to buy a trailer for my son and his immediate family, pay a down payment for the trailer for the family of his “wife”, and restore my account with my stockbroker. This stockbroker will be discussed later.
Due to the nature of the pizza delivery business, I tended to fall behind in payments in the middle of the winter and the middle of the summer. The winter payments tended to be paid in full in March when the business and the tips increased. It was one summer’s payments that fell behind to the point of a foreclosure threat because I had lost some hours and income when my car’s engine burned up.
Digressing to the car cause, I got the car engine fixed with the last of the money I had remaining in my stock account from the first time I had a stock account. This destroyed my financial safety cushion against illness or temporary job loss. While the car was being fixed, I used a rental car, which consumed all my tips and commissions for the rent and gas usage. I could only pay my bills out of my paychecks so I fell two months behind. Then my nice red Chevy Lumina car (the one dad would have liked to buy, but thought too flashy for his American Legion friends so he bought the “sand-grouse” colored one, a golden tan-brown) decided the old transmission could not operate with the new engine and caused the transmission to die. Then I had no car, which meant no job or income as my then current job was dependent on having access to a car.
I went to Cal-Cars and got a car with my paycheck. Cal-Cars is a “buy-here-pay-here” dealer. This is one thing my first adopted son did for me before he left my life. His older biological half-brother was the manager of the particular Cal-Car dealership to which I went. At my son’s request, his brother dealt with me even though I lived outside the radius of ten miles. Now I had a car payment eating up my tips and commission. Falling farther behind.
In my ignorance of thinking more money would fix the problems, I got a second mortgage to “catch-up”. This was a short-term fix and a long term failure. The effect of this cause was to add to my debt beyond an ability to pay it. I restored my stock and mutual funds account. Now back to my mortgage problems.
The first time I went into foreclosure, I had the help of a man who loaned me the money necessary to past due payments, interest, and lawyer’s fees current on the mortgage. A couple years later, the process repeated itself. This time there was no one to help me. I tried to negotiate a re-payment plan as the mortgage papers allowed, but someone named Michael refused to accept anything less than the entire past due amount and at the mere mention of his name customer representatives at WAMU actually hung-up the phone on me refusing to take or post payments of any kind. Refusing any payments, WAMU sent me into foreclosure. I reacted by filing bankruptcy.
The bankruptcy was originally a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, which if successfully completed, would allow me to keep the house. New issues with the bankruptcy trustee then started. Apparently, he felt I should not have a bankruptcy. Every month, even though I made my payment, he filed a complaint. Finally, jobless, broke, and with no resources to turn to, I had to terminate the Chapter 13 bankruptcy. The trustee allowed the change from Chapter 13 to Chapter 7. I would have to give up the house, but I would keep my car and my credit card debt was eliminated. Five years after I lost my house in foreclosure, the news broke about “predatory banks”. Washington Mutual (also called WAMU) and its mother company Wells-Fargo top almost every list of “predatory” banks. Predatory banks were those which made mortgage loans to people who could not afford them and then filed foreclosure papers to take the house. By the mid-2000s decade, entire neighborhoods had been destroyed by these banks. When Barack Obama became President of the United States, he gave “bail-out” money to many of these struggling banks and mortgage lenders. I had to laugh when WAMU got in line for a bail-out. No one bailed me out, and Washington Mutual had sold the mortgage after they realized they would get no more money after I filed my bankruptcy. My bankruptcy also prevented them from coming back to sue me for the difference from the sale of my house and the amount which they said I owed.
One cause not yet mentioned is my stockbroker. I do not know if I signed a paper that somehow allowed him to do this; I will never know what happened, but he stole from me anywhere from $5000 to $20,000 over a five year period. When I had my first account with him after my father died, I had taken a loan for something I do not now remember, instead of selling the stocks. This was a mistake I will never repeat, although I repeated this same mistake the second time I had a stock account which had the same disastrous effect. This loan was for $5000. Whenever I sold stock for some reason, I would always put half the proceeds into the loan account to pay it down. Yet, for some reason I did not figure out until the second time I had a stock account with this man, the loan account grew to over $11,000 before I closed the account and sold off the stock to pay for it.
The second time I had an account with him, he acted like he was doing me a favor because he acted as if he made no money from my account. As he was paid for every stock I sold or bought, I did not understand what his issue was. He opened a new account for me but did the same old things with it. After another loan (I had not learned the lesson the first time), he started raising my loan account without new loans and with payments being made. Then it struck me one day what was going on. He was writing up stock sales as loans. The way the process should have worked was this: he would sell the stock for me to get the desired amount of money; he would take half of that and apply it to my loan account, thus reducing my loan balance; and send me the other half in a check. The amount in the check was my money from the stock sale, not a loan.
However, the way it did work was: he sold the amount of stock necessary, applied half of it to the outstanding loan balance, then sent me a loan check for the remainder of the stock sale proceeds which was a loan which I had to pay back. When I noticed the words one day of “loan proceeds” on my check receipt instead of “stock sale proceeds” or something similar, I called to ask him why it said “loan” when I made no new loan. He attempted to explain to me that he sold the stock and placed all the proceeds into the loan account and sent me a new loan check. I asked him where the original amount of one-half of the stock sale proceeds were, as his statement supports the loan account and the loan check but where is the other half of my money. He said the numbers were the same and hung up the phone. I called the national office and had him removed from my account. They could not understand what my complaint was. I had the national office sell off my stock and close my account and will never go back to that company and will never take a loan against stocks or mutual funds. I will always sell them to get the money.
To further illustrate the “new math” he employed, I use the following example. I sell $5000 of stock. $2500 is paid into the loan account of $5000 outstanding balance (ignoring the small interest rate in these examples). The loan balance now should be and is $2500. A check for the rest of the $5000 ($2500 balance) should be mailed to me. This is stock sale proceeds, not a loan. He sold the stock for $5000. He applied the full $5000 to the stock account, which is now $0. He writes a new loan check for $2500. The loan account is now $2500. The $2500 check I have is a loan that must be paid back—a loan I did not ask for and did not authorize. To me it looks shady at the least. The loan paper I originally signed may have authorized this kind of transaction. I cannot say for I have no copy of it. All original papers were lost shortly after I found an old friend who worked for the company in a different location who said he would look into it for me. Whether or not I could get any money back, he could not say. But he could at least explain what happened. He is the one who years after the fact told me of the shady dealings this company uses with its loan accounts.
Before I had to leave the house in November of 2003, I had taken a job transfer and gotten an over-priced apartment two blocks down the street. I was not homeless yet. But, I could not drive my car on the job with no insurance so I worked as an insider making one-third of the money I would have made as a driver. Now I was under-employed. I did not make enough money to pay for my apartment, so was evicted from that, but only after I had left my job when the manager who had hired me as a favor to my manager in Brownsburg, took me out of the system as he did not really need me. I did not realize I was quitting, still, this was the effect of my leaving that one day. So now I was homeless and unemployed and had exhausted all resources available at that time which I knew about and took myself to Wheeler Mission. I had known about Wheeler Mission for years. I had even donated money and clothes to it. Once, I had driven someone there and talked with him until they opened. He called me later and said no one had ever done that for him and thanked me. So, being homeless, I followed my own advice and went into Wheeler Mission.
I am a Christian and do believe in God. One cannot know me and not see this, although I normally do not sit around trying to explain my beliefs or convert others to them. I believe that God knocked me off my pedestal as a friend said one night, out of the blue, while we were closing the Papa John’s Pizza in Brownsburg. Apparently he had a plan for me and I was not listening. I thought he put on me to donate to Wheeler Mission $1000 and eat with the men. I did not do it. The next year I felt the compulsion to donate $500 and eat with the men. I did not do it. The next year I was broke, living in the mission, and eating with the men whether I wanted to or not. In the mission I believe I gave back to God the time I owed by not going to church—when church was two blocks away—for years, and not using my money as God intended. I could have bought a couple houses and repaired them and sold one and used that money to buy more and get some people out of the street. That is one of my dreams now. To buy and repair houses and get homeless families into them and even to sell some of the houses through a rent-to-own program where all rent they pay after they sign a declaration to buy would go to the purchase of the home. The purchase price would be twice what it cost my business to buy and fix, with no interest at all. I would also like to get a large apartment complex (several are empty in Indianapolis) and put in those homeless I know personally, without having to go through Midtown and the like—my version of Partners in Housing which has housed so many homeless for short or long term.
My car had died on the way to the mission and got towed a few days later. I stayed there for six months then moved in with a family who is like family to me. A couple months later, I went back to Wheeler Mission when she found a man online who was moving in with her. I was in the mission for a whole year before I was blessed with a job at the Papa John’s Pizza at 10th Street and Indiana Avenue. That job got me out of the mission. I stayed housed for a year and nine months then lived with family again. After the woman and her man moved to Florida, I lived with her brother who is my foster son. I left there and stayed outside in the summers for two years. Now I am on the verge of getting housed again through Midtown and Partners in Housing. [Update: I am not going the Midtown drug route, so cannot get housed by Partners in Housing.]
Works Cited
Indianapolis Housing Taskforce. Blueprint to End Homelessness in Indianapolis. Indianapolis:
October 2002. Print. [Also available online at http://www.CHIPIndy.org]
CHIP (Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention). Annual Meeting.1 July 2009.
Speeches by several caregivers, case-managers, and organizations serving homeless families.