After our weekend on the slightly artificially luxurious environment of Kiawah Island, we headed west to the mountains on Monday, waving goodbye to the Atlantic Ocean for a while. The five hour drive gave us plenty of time to contemplate the likely state of the property after the tree blown down blocking the driveway, an inch if snow and an extended electricity outage. We detoured on our journey to see Jim Diffenderfer of Accent Truss who had supplied the massive beams which are such a feature of the house. By the time we reached Porter Springs Road, it was already dark. And dark really means just that – no lighting about apart from the moon and stars. As we drove carefully down to the house, we could see the fallen tree that TJ had dragged off the driveway – it still represented a hazard to the unwary. In front of the house was the new concrete driveway – looking good. The house was in good shape too, though the broadband service had not fully come on following power restoration. It was good to be home.
There was lots to be done in the house. There hasn’t been much unpacking, and Lisa was getting a little concerned about things like her mother’s cutlery sets and the antique clock that hung in the living room of our London house. So, I have started an unpacking regime down on the lower floor, targeting five boxes a day (but not quite achieving it). Unpacking generates large quantities of recyclable paper and cardboard, which we are able to dispose of in a responsible manner at the Lumpkin County waste transfer site. Glass is much more of a problem – we have finally found the nearest bottle bank, 20 miles away in Gainesville.
We have also started to do some gardening. The red clay in the long planting bed in the Great Wall of Dahlonega has been supplemented by nine inches of carefully formulated topsoil, so we have no excuse for not planting bulbs and other things we have brought with us from the rental house. And Lisa had ordered various bulbs online to get the garden started. We had a major gardening day on Saturday, and plans for lots more work outside are shaping up. To be able to do this, we made an expedition to Home Depot to buy basic gardening equipment as most of what we had in London did not cross the Atlantic with us. The US authorities have a near-paranoid fear of anything that has had contact with foreign soil in case it brings unwanted parasites to USA, and we didn’t want to annoy them.
One purchase that we made this week was a chain saw. Not the typical UK gardening implement, I know. But things are different here. As we discovered the hard way, not all the trees here are resistant to strong winds. The tree that came down on the driveway was about 40 foot high, and it snapped off halfway up. Examination showed that it was rotten inside. To shift what had fallen means that we have to chop the tree up into manageable sized pieces. I managed to cut off most of the branches using a pair of loppers, and those have been scattered amongst the nearby trees. But the bigger bits need something more oomphy. Hence the electric (battery) powered chainsaw. I recognize that this is probably not the most powerful tool, not suitable for massive trees, but should be just the job for tidying up after fallen trees. Since using a chainsaw is a novel experience for me, TJ is coming round next week to offer a few practical pointers.
On Wednesday night I woke to the sound of what I thought was the air conditioning/heating system running. It is a forced air system, typical of USA, and it was very noisy and I was confused as to why it was running then. Tinkering with the thermostat didn’t stop it. Then I realized that it wasn’t inside but outside the house. I looked out, and it was a brilliant moonlight night – it could almost have been daytime apart from the fact that everything was in monochrome grey colour. But there were huge trees being whipped about by violent gusts of wind. I could see trouble coming, and I was right. A few minutes later the lights in the house started flickering and then went out. It was about two hours before the electricity was restored – not too important as this was the middle of the night and we didn’t need power, just sleep. And the next morning we discovered a tree near the house had snapped off twenty foot in the air. I guess there’s another job for the chainsaw. And with now four power outages since we moved in, the need for that stand-by generator becomes even more pressing.
Robin’s Thoughts on America
Continuing my intermittent Thoughts, Likes and Dislikes section, here’s my personally opinionated thought for this week on life in USA.
Credit where credit is due
USA is a credit-oriented society. According to statistics I have seen (http://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/credit-card-data/average-credit-card-debt-household/ ), the average US household is carrying over $7,000 in credit card debts (not to mention mortgages, student loans and the like). And since half of credit card users don’t have any debt rolled over every month, there must be a terrifying number of households weighted down with more than $15,000 debt. You could regard this as pretty ominous. No wonder since the mortgage boom and bust of 2008, banks are getting more cautious about lending money to anyone. And this conservatism is probably a significant part of the causes of the (apparently) depressed state of the economy. Cash is not king here – credit cards are used for payment of fairly trivial sums (yes, people regularly swipe a card to pay for a cup of coffee). So, having credit is fairly important, even if you don’t borrow against it.
So, what has this to do with me on a personal level? This all goes back to credit scoring. Once upon a time, banks used to control to whom they would lend money on the basis of written references, personal knowledge and a modicum of experience and wisdom on the part of the lender. This approach, of course, was open to some abuse, especially if the lender was lacking in wisdom, experience or uprightness in evaluation the creditworthiness of applicants. And with the expansion of the banking system the personal touch was replaced by a more systematic approach. Now, in USA there are three credit monitoring services which (for a fee) will tell lenders whether an applicant is a good risk. So, if you want any sort of credit facilities, you need to be known to this triumvirate (Equant, Equifax and TransUnion). But US lenders can’t be bothered with lots of detail to plough through. So the rating agencies decided in 1989 to boil down all the information they have on you to a single magic number – FICO. The calculation of this number is complex and is based on dozens of factors, ratios and scores. The higher your number, the better your creditworthiness. Your FICO score is one of those things that it is not polite to talk about – if your number is high it seems like boastful and likely to upset less creditworthy acquaintences.
So far, so good. The personal problem I have encountered is that I don’t exist as far as the credit agencies are concerned. The Social Security Number of every legal resident of the USA is used as the identifier for a person in the credit rating records. No Social Security Number = no credit records. And I didn’t have such a number until I had my Green Card and then jumped through several bureaucratic hoops. That was a year ago, and I still am almost invisible to the triumvirate. The fact that I have had a US bank account and credit card (jointly with Lisa, and managed in an exemplary manner) for fifteen years does not mean a thing. Having a steady income stream from my pensions means nothing. Nor does the unencumbered ownership of our house and land. Nor, in spite of the fact that I have a credit record in the United Kingdom stretching back forty years and monitored by the UK arms of the triumvirate, can anything outside USA be considered relevant. There is apparently no way for unusual situations to be included in the big data scoring models. All because I didn’t have a US Social Security Number then.
All this may seem a fairly hypothetical problem, but it is not. Irrespective of whether you are seeking to borrow money or not, almost any service agreement means that my credit rating is examined (and the results of the search throwing up a “no records found” is far, far worse than having a not very good score!). No mobile phone, no electricity service, no Internet service, the list goes on and on of the things I have been denied – thank goodness Lisa has an exemplary record and is thus the name on most of our bills.
We are trying to do something about this difficult situation. After a lot of discussion at our bank in Dahlonega, we persuaded them to issue me a credit card in my name only. The credit limit is fairly trivial and guaranteed against our bank account. Now all I have to do, I was assured by a financial professional, is to use about 10% of the credit limit every month and make sure to pay it off fully every month. After six months or so, I may start to have some sort of rating. Once we did that, we looked at all the new agreements that we would have to sign before moving into our new home. And when we went to sign up for the electricity service, I was able to get the company to put me on the agreement, not Lisa. So, slowly and steadily I am becoming a recognized number. It may take years to get to the exaulted heights of a credit score of upper 700s or even above 800, but I am moving forward. And this makes me wonder what the average American adolescent has to do to get that vital first step on the credit scoring ladder leading to that magical $15,000 credit card debt.