The Curse of the Threes

You've heard of this right?  All bad things come in threes?  Yesterday was that day for us. As we continue to deal with the high stress fiasco of moving, I've been coordinating the mover assessment, the house inspection, the house appraisal, etc.  Last week the mover that the school recommended came, did an in-home estimate of our belongings and yesterday we received a quote that sent me into a sort of daze due to sticker shock. The school has given us an allowance toward moving and the quote we received was over double the allowance. While I paused to let the news digest, the phone rang. Our realtor started by saying, "I owe you an apology...." What a bad way to start a conversation! She had given us a wrong deadline date for the buyer to get back to us with an addendum to the sale contract with repairs they want completed before the closing date. There are now three things we have to fix, when last week we had been told by our realtor that they had waived having anything fixed because the deadline passed. As Nate and I wrote emails and instant messages back and forth regarding these issues and what we needed to do, he asked why does it always seem like bad things happen all at once? And the cute little comeback I gave was "bad things come in threes!" And of course, we had only had the opportunity to experience two of them at that point. While we were eating dinner (and internally I'm breathing a sigh of relief thinking that we've almost made it through the day without a third issue) Nate's phone rang and it was the bank in Connecticut that is pre-approving us for a home loan. The loan officer was calling to  see if we were aware of the "odd" items they found on our credit report: a second mortgage, three home-equity loans, etc. and so on. We then spent the evening pulling our credit reports from each of the major agencies and low and behold, one of the agencies has combined someone else's information onto my credit report. It doesn't show up on any of the other reports, so I don't believe it is a case of identity theft. The person hasn't changed their name, etc.... but their information is on my report.

To deal with the mover assessment, I googled Two Men and a Truck. Several people I know have used them and seemed to like them a lot. So, I clicked on what I thought was their website and put in the necessary information to receive a quote and since hitting send, literally before I could push away from the computer, or look away from the computer screen, my phone was ringing. As I listened to this woman from National movers, I kept thinking I was talking to Two Men and a Truck. At one point I said, "and you're connected to Two Men and a Truck?" And she proceeded to inform me that the site I had visited sent my information to basically any and all moving companies. She said, "you're going to be getting a lot of phone calls."  She was right. In fact, my phone went dead in the middle of the afternoon yesterday from me fielding all of these calls. I've decided it's a blessing in a HUGE disguise because I can now get a variety of quotes and I can see if they will "outbid" one another. So far, I have received two quotes that are right around the allowance provided for us. I have two in home estimates scheduled for tomorrow and then another on Friday.

On the home repair side of things, I have an electrician coming early in May to fix his part, and a handyman coming to do a minor repair on the roof and we're asking my father in law to switch out the dryer vent.

On the credit report side of things, I felt like one of the people in those commercials who begins to bang their heads against the wall because even though they are carefully following all instructions given on the phone or online, it doesn't work. On the agency site it clearly says that you can dispute an item (s) listed on your credit report. It gives step by step instructions on how to do it. For the first erroneous item, I clicked on dispute and it said that for that specific item I had to call and talk to someone. I thought, ok, let's go to the next one. I go to the next one, I get the same message. I go to the third, I get the same message. I scroll down tot he ones that lists the other person's name and that is actually one of the options given for the dispute: "name listed is not my own"...or something like that. So, I click on that. The message that pops up says, "Is it possible that someone in your family has used your social security number. If so, click ok. If not, click cancel." I clicked cancel and it took me back to the very beginning - not having registered my dispute at all. So, tomorrow, my day consists of calling the credit agency, having two moving assessments, and running off all this stress!