Yesterday, due to a clerical error, Amanda and I came within a week of losing our house.
I.
From our perspective, it began with a letter in mid-November. TAX SALE NOTICE, the letter said. It was from our local municipality, and it said we owed $400 for “Utility”. If we didn’t pay it, they’d sell our house. Allegedly.
We almost missed the letter. Amanda and I were both traveling for most of November. Thankfully, I picked up our mail between plane flights and saw the letter. But several things about it were utterly baffling.
For one thing, I’d been meticulously tracking our utility bills since we bought the house. We had an autopay set up and everything. Nothing had changed on that front.
For another thing, when I checked the municipality’s website, it clearly stated that we owed them $0. Everything was paid. So whence came the letter? Was it yet another elaborate scam? Was it a mistake?
I was busy. I checked the alleged due date – late December – and set it aside for when we got back home.
In early December – while we were still away from home – an email arrived. TAX SALE – IMPORTANT, it said, in large foreboding letters.
This was predictably alarming, and upgraded my estimate of the original letter from “probably fake” to “probably real”. The obvious first step was to visit the municipal office in person to straighten things out.1
…which we couldn’t do, because we were a six hour plane flight from the municipal office. Also, their website still insisted we owed them nothing.
It wasn’t until the day after our plane touched down that we were able to begin piecing the story together. We drove to the municipal office first. But they, too, had a confusing story to tell us. They weren’t responsible for the bill, you see; it’s for the county office. The municipality only got the bill because it went unpaid too long.
Okay, but why is this the first we’re hearing about it? What went wrong?
They couldn’t say. We had better go to the county utilities office and ask them.
So we did.
II.
From the perspective of the county government, it began with a missed payment in 2024.
Our municipality has two utility bills for water and sewer. One is for the supply and wastewater removal, and is paid to our local utilities office. The other is for the wastewater treatment, and it is paid quarterly to the county utilities office.
“Quarterly? It’s been over a year since we bought the house,” I observed to the clerk. “How was it being paid before now?”
It wasn’t. It just so happened that the municipality only picks up unpaid bills once a year.
The bill had never been paid, because we’d never gotten it.
The county, it turns out, did not know we owned the house.
According to the county, the title company failed to inform them when we bought the house;2 so they were dutifully sending their quarterly bills to the previous owner at our address.
The previous owner had mail forwarding set up. The Post Office obligingly delivered the bills, not to us, but to the previous owner in their new home, where they presumably chucked it because they don’t live here anymore.3
So the bill went unnoticed and unpaid for a year and a half, until routine procedures kicked it over to the municipality to collect, via the tried-and-true method of forcibly selling our house.
III.
This was the second time in less than a year that we’d almost lost our house to a tax sale.
The first time, our mortgage escrow company accidentally sent several thousand dollars to the wrong municipality. We didn’t find out until we got the tax sale notice.
The escrow company begged us not to pay the bill ourselves. They swore up and down that they’d fix it, including any late fees. (Though they refused to send anything in writing.)
Weeks passed. Nothing happened.
Finally, at very nearly the last possible minute, I went to the office myself and handed them a check. As I was leaving, I got a phone call from the tax agent. They’d just picked up the mail, and the escrow company had delivered the check at long last.
IV.
Approximately everyone involved in each of these fusterclucks seemed to be doing their level best to uncluck it.
We got a written and an emailed notice well in advance of the tax sale, both times. This is exactly what ought to happen.
The clerk and tax collector at the municipal office explained the situation as best they could, given their state of partial knowledge.
The county clerk patiently worked with us to figure out what happened, and even removed the unpaid interest on the bill.
The escrow agent in Part III (the one I spoke to, anyway) immediately admitted fault and treated the problem with utmost seriousness.
And we, the homeowners, are a couple of financially literate, reasonably well-off human beings with good communication skills, attention to detail, and follow-through. We successfully picked out the concerning email from among an incessant deluge of spam and took the necessary corrective actions, even when that meant a frustrating and unexpected waste of half a day’s work.
And yet, even with the stars thus aligned, it was a near thing we still have a home.
We were fortunate that we identified the notice in time.
We were fortunate that we had the presence of mind to treat it as urgent and important.
We were fortunate that the clerks involved were patient and (reasonably) competent.
We were fortunate that we weren’t traveling for the entire month.
We were fortunate that we could afford to take three hours out of our day to deal with this mess.
And if any of these fortunate occurrences had failed to obtain, we might have a much more upsetting story to tell. The thought makes me feel frustrated, angry, and deeply disappointed in our society. Many, many others are not so fortunate.
V.
Our present bureaucracies suck.
Our civilization can and should build better institutions in which responsible, caring people find it much easier to live their lives and do their jobs. There’s no getting around the need for some kind of legible, scalable bureaucracy, but the kind of systemic dysfunction that risks driving people out of their homes not through poverty, but through sheer opaque and byzantine restrictions, is terribly wasteful.
It should not be this hard to pay a bill.
- One does not trust a phone call with this sort of thing. And indeed, it took an awful lot of in-person attention to untangle this mess. ↩︎
- Or maybe the title company did their job and the county failed at theirs. Who knows. ↩︎
- We think. It’s also possible we got the bill and forwarded it ourselves or marked it Return to Sender. We certainly never opened the bills; who opens other people’s mail? ↩︎