HOA Woes

Whoa, HOA, whoa.  My goodness are these just scams of companies.  In the closing papers for our house, there was a fee for HOA docs.  I provided most of the docs to my realtor, who passed them along to the buyers.  Apparently, I was missing the most recent financials.  So the closing company got that one sheet for the buyers.  $193.  Holy stink.  That's outlandish.  The transfer fee for us leaving and the new buyers now being responsible for the HOA fee?  $275.  FOR WHAT?????  What a racket.

I have never really been a big fan of HOAs.  And it continues to amaze me that more and more neighborhoods are built with these governing bodies.  We are abdicating personal relationships with our neighbors for a ruling body that tells us what we can and cannot do with our property.  All so that my neighbor doesn't ruin my property value.  A faceless, soul-less group whose sole purpose is to enforce rules based upon some group's idea of what makes a desirable neighborhood.

And what is more enfuriating than someone telling me what I can or cannot do with my property, whether my property conforms to their sense of beautiful or not?  They don't hold themselves to those same standards.  They don't necessarily maintain common grounds to the same standards they hold homeowners, maintenance has gone entirely too long before being addressed.  And the letters they send out to homeowners take such an aggressive and hostile tone.

I will be glad to be done with this nonsense.

Bureaucracy

I was all excited when our youngest came home from the park bearing today's mail, because we had letters from the school district.  I was psyched because these should have been our, "we've received your paperwork" letters, but alas, such was not the case.  It was the, "hey, fill out paperwork" letters, which means what I sent them is lost or misplaced.  BUT, my favorite part of this whole thing is the fact that since I have five children, I received five letters.  It is so frustrating that I can't get one letter acknowledging my homeschooling of all my children.  School budgets are cut, people acknowledge the need to reduce our reliance on paper, but here we are, sending out five separate letters, five envelopes, blah blah blah.  I still get the emergency phone calls when a school my child would be attending IF any of them went to public school still, just cuz I'm in the system.  Such inefficiencies.  But I still fill out the surveys on the GT program, cuz I think that one sucks and I still let them know.  Honestly, why do I still receive these things?  Why can't they clump my family together in one envelope?  Why is waste mandated?  And don't say for privacy--all the letters are addressed to Bill and myself.  Grrr....