The Boomer Chronicles

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A Sad Email from My Friends in Japan Posted: 16 Mar 2011 07:52 AM PDT Here is a poignant email I received yesterday from my friends in Japan: I am so grateful to read your messages. The nuclear plants in Fukushima are getting worse and worse and worse… We should think of leaving Japan now, but very sadly, we had no time and chance to evacuate with our passports. I tried to get new ones during last two days but in vain… It was truly a critical mistake. S. has been working fiercely against nuclear plants in Japan for a year. She is now aggresively sending messages to friends to save their lives. If we can get passports for us, I would like to leave Japan, live in somewhere else to begin my second life, engaging in social movements. My U.S. friends and I have gotten together a living space, cars, and other resources. We don’t know where my Japanese friends will choose to resettle, but we want to be ready if they choose the Boston area.

Dan the Early Retired Man: Trying to Get a Mortgage Means Being Treated Like a Terrorist Posted: 16 Mar 2011 06:07 AM PDT My cousin Dan, who retired in 2009 from the U.S. Postal Service at age 53, is trying to get a mortgage so he can ditch Minnesota and move to warmer climes in Arizona. He encounters difficulty: We were less than two weeks away from the closing on our new Arizona home when I received an email from my mortgage broker stating, "The underwriter needed proof of liquidation of funds for the down payment." This didn't make any sense to me so I sent them a screen print of my bank account with a big red circle around the money, and wrote, "Here is the money, just waiting for the closing." The phone rang a few minutes later. "No, you don't understand" my broker said. "The Patriot Act requires you to show the complete paper trail of how that money got into your account." The Patriot Act, as I understood it, was to help stop "terrorism." In fact, the word "Patriot" is actually an acronym where the last "T" stands for terrorism. I'm not a terrorist, I'm just a guy who retired from the federal government after 37 years who wants to be warm in February. In fact, when I retired, I held a national security clearance. "ARE THEY CALLING ME A TERRORIST?" For the next four hours, I scanned receipts for each stock I sold from two different accounts that made up the down payment. If a statement had 9 pages, all 9 pages had to be included even if the page was blank or had nothing on it but my address. All account numbers had to be in full view as well as both of our names. Since it was in the middle of the statement cycle, I had to go to my bank and wait 30 minutes for a "banker" who could print out the last few transactions with the account numbers showing. I sent the papers. Then the phone rang again. "Still no good!" she said. "There is an $800 discrepancy between the sale of the stocks and the deposit I made into my bank account."  A call to my broker revealed the mystery. Not only did they send me a check for the sale of the stock, but the check included some cash I had in the account. The broker sent me more money than I asked for. I had to go back another month to a statement that showed the cash. I scanned in that statement then created a spreadsheet showing each individual stock and the cash. I was down to a 20-cent difference. Twenty cents. It would have to be good enough. I'm trying to buy a house, damn it, not a SCUD missile.

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