Chapter 6 - The Paper Trail
The next three days were a whirlwind of frantic desperate moves by my family.
On December 3rd, my father went to his local Chase bank branch to attempt to take out a $2,000 personal loan to cover Caroline’s mortgage payment.
He was flatly rejected.
What my father hadn't realized was that his own credit was severely overextended from co-signing on Todd’s truck lease two years ago. His debt-to-income ratio was maxed out.
On December 4th, my mother called me fourteen times from a burner phone after I blocked her primary number. When I finally answered one call thinking it was a client, her voice was hysterical.
"Sammy, please! Your father tried to sell his vintage watch collection today! The jeweler only offered him twelve hundred dollars! We don't have fifteen hundred dollars to pay Wells Fargo by tomorrow!"
"Then Todd can sell his fishing boat," I said calmly, looking at a spreadsheet on my screen. "Or Caroline can return the designer clothes she bought at NorthPark Mall last week."
"They don't have time!" she wept. "The deadline is 5:00 p.m. tomorrow! Sammy, if they go into default, the foreclosure notice gets posted on the county registry!"
"Then I suggest they start listing things on Facebook Marketplace," I said, and hung up.
What my family didn't know was that Arthur Vance was keeping a hawk-like watch on the Tarrant County clerk's digital portal.
At 4:15 p.m. on December 5th—forty-five minutes before the bank's strict cure deadline—Todd managed to scrape together $1,480 by selling his high-end hunting gear and borrowing $500 from a co-worker. He made the wire transfer to Wells Fargo in the nick of time.
They saved the house from an immediate December default.
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But they were completely broke. They had zero savings, zero credit, and a monthly mortgage payment of $1,480 hanging over their heads for January 1st—less than four weeks away.
And for the first time in her adult life, Caroline had to look at her actual bank account balance: $42.18.
