HOME LIBERATORS

Me and Mom

Meet my mom (Kyungsook).   She has been doing a LOT of traveling over the past several years.  This is a picture of us at a Korean BBQ joint in Seoul, South Korea during the Summer of 2011.  It was my first time to South Korea ever and it was my mom's first time back since she left in 1975.  I happened to be working there for 6 months and so she decided to come pay me a visit for 5 weeks!  She's been back there twice over the past couple years for 6+ months at a time.  After she sold her home in 2010 for CASH, she decided to start living and has never looked back!  She's also had to battle with cancer, chemo, and macular degeneration over the past few years, but her new found freedom has given her energy and excitement to move on and tackle all of life's challenges. 

Mom and I have shared many a meal since she's moved from Philly to Arlington, VA in 2012.  This is pretty much our favorite thing to do--eat good food and have long conversations about life.  Since she sold her house, my mom's been pretty free to do whatever she wants whether it's hang out with her friends, take bus tours throughout Canada, flights overseas to Korea, or spend more time with her family.  Most recently she has re-established her South Korean citizenship to hop back and forth for months at a time and take advantage of the advancements in healthcare in her mother land, but when she's back in the states she lives comfortably with me in my home in Northern Virginia.

Humble Beginnings in a War Torn Country

Meet my mom (Kyungsook) and dad (Bongkook).  They were born in Korea prior to the end of World War II when there wasn't a "North Korea" and "South Korea" as we know them now.  When they were growing up, Korea would not have been associated with the industrial and technological achievement it's known for today (Hyundai, Kia, Samsung, and LG).  In fact, the Korean peninsula was still under Japanese occupation until it was liberated by the Allies in 1945 and then divided among the Soviets and the United States.  The Korean War (1950-1953) solidified the division of the peninsula into North and South and the future of the Koreas was not a bright one over the next couple decades.   Even though my parents were both college educated, the economic outlook for South Korea where they both lived was still quite bleak.  So in 1975 shortly after getting married, my parents immigrated to the United States in the search of opportunity and prosperity--they made the move in search of the American Dream.  

Humble Beginnings in the Land of Opportunity

The U.S. was a big place, so mom and dad decided to settle in the suburbs of Philadelphia in a town called Bensalem.  About a month after arriving in the country for a contracted position with a company selling work tools and construction equipment, my dad was laid off.  Due to the language barrier, my parents were not able to use their college degrees and found themselves working hard for several years at various jobs to pay rent and support themselves including the cleaning of office buildings at night.  Within 3 years of arriving in the States, my older brothers were born and lived in a small apartment along with my parents and grandmother.  Once the news broke that I was to be an addition to the family, my parents decided it was time to find a bigger place.  In January of 1980 for just under $58,000, mom and dad are able close on a house in Langhorne, PA about a month after I was born.    

The American Dream Begins

As naturalized U.S. Citizens with 3 American born sons, the future of our family is very bright with only the limits of imagination holding us back.  The wheels of the American Dream start to spin.  Eventually, my parents are able to find employment in the early 80's as machinists and work at those positions through layoffs here and there until retirement.  Because of my grandmom's living with us and taking care of my brothers and I, my parents are able to earn dual incomes in order to support their children and the family.  Having lived through war and poor economic conditions in their native country, my parents continue to maintain extreme frugality in their own lifestyles.  As a result, they are able to provide many benefits to their children.  My brothers and I are able to take baseball, soccer, and music lessons as well as celebrate Halloween and Christmas like any normal kid.  With the family van, we're able to take day trip vacations to the beach and amusement parks.  For longer excursions, we would pack the van with multiple coolers of food, camping gear, and fishing tackle in order to trek across multiple states to our hearts' content.  My parents are even able to send us to Catholic school to learn and celebrate the traditions of Christianity.  In addition to all of those great things, the house is just a fun place to grow up with my brothers whether it's playing on the swingset out back or sledding down the front lawn.  We are unlocking the American Dream.

"Into Each Life Some Rain Must Fall"

- The Ink Spots

In 1991, dad is diagnosed with prostate cancer.  He undergoes surgery, radiation therapy, and other treatments over the next 3 years.  In 1994, he loses his battle with cancer at age 70.  Mom loses her husband and the father of her 3 boys, but the American Dream continues on as her eldest son completes his first year at University.

In April 1997 at age 89, grandmom (who had lived in the same house with us since I was born) passes due to complications with her hip replacement less than a year prior.  It's another devastating blow for my family, but in particular for my mom.  Not only does my mother lose her own mother and closest friend of 54 years, but also, in a few months, her 2 younger sons will leave home in the Fall to attend their first semesters at University.  The house will become an even emptier space, but the American Dream lives on.  

The American Dream Lives On

It's the early 2000's and my brothers and I have all graduated university, looking to start our lives and our careers.  We are able to land jobs pretty quickly and have moved out of the house.  Whether our work and our lives took us to another country, another state, or to the county next door, the result was the same.  Mom was left, for the most part, on her own for the next several years working towards retirement in a machine and tool company trying to figure out what to do about her health and her home.  My brothers and I would always return home every couple of months for special occasions or during the holidays to check on her, share meals, and figure out the latest issue with her computer.  But as motivated individuals realizing our own chapters of the American Dream, we were simply too busy with our own lives--getting married, buying our own homes, having our own kids, and traveling the world. 

Fire Strikes and Destroys My Childhood Home

In March of 2010, a house fire started in the garage from some ashes that were not completely out before being discarded.  The fire had spread quickly to the kitchen and mom narrowly escaped with her life only because a concerned neighbor was driving by and witnessed the outpouring of smoke from the garage along with my mom's car still in the driveway.  Of course mom was one the phone with a friend, so he had to nearly pound the door down to get her attention.  Thankfully, he did.  She suffered some smoke inhalation and spent one night in the hospital for monitoring before being released.

An interesting detail is that mom couldn't see or smell the smoke because she was in a bedroom by herself with the door closed (not to mention she had disconnected and never reconnected the smoke detector 3 years prior in order to paint the ceiling and maintain the home for potential resale).  The door was closed because of the space heater she used to keep herself warm during the winter months.  Sadly, a home that had at one time housed her husband, her mother, and her 3 boys was now only used by 1 person.  Mom had resorted to warming only 1 room for herself because it was too costly to run the heat for the entire house.  Incredibly, she had managed to pay off the mortgage over the years since her husband's passing as well as support 3 sons through multiple years of university by sacrificing on clothes, dining out, and trips for herself.  But after losing about 40% of her 401k savings in 2008-09 and ever increasing property taxes, mom was still cutting back wherever she could.  Not only had she extended her retirement age to 67, putting tolls on herself physically since she worked as a machinist, but also she had been looking for ways to spend even less money by cutting heating expenses.  Instead of finding new ways to cut expenses, we should have realized the home was much more than she needed and that it had been that way for a long time.  In retrospect, it probably would have been wiser to move her into a smaller apartment 13 years earlier when grandmom passed away and we moved out to college.

An Artificial Prison

Mom had stayed much longer in that house than she had to.  Maybe she thought my brothers and I needed a "homebase" when we returned from school or whenever we came to visit.  Maybe she thought we needed a space to store our things that had collected over the years.  But the fire taught us that most of the stuff piled up and collecting dust in that house was junk.  Though there were some items we had restored due to smoke and water damage for sentimental reasons, the rest was absolute junk.  Everything could be replaced.  And when it came down to it, we didn't replace anything but a laptop and a couple of sets of jogging suits and sneakers for mom.  In fact, we were relieved it was gone. 

Over the years leading up to the fire, we had discussed plans for the house which never really went anywhere.  The house had been a part of our lives for so long, I think we subconsciously believed it would always be there.  (The truth is the house is still there and it's providing tremendous value to its new owners and occupants.)  The real truth is mom didn't know how to get out and felt powerless to act.  Mom didn't know the first thing about selling her home or making renovations.  Neither did my brothers nor I.  We had always heard that if we wanted to sell, conventional wisdom stated renovations are necessary especially if the property is an older one.  But we didn't know exactly what or how to renovate.   Even if we did, we were too geographically dispersed across county, state, and international lines to provide any real assistance.  Additionally, we were all too preoccupied with our own lives to come up with or execute an escape plan.  Mom never wanted to burden us with her troubles unnecessarily and she stuck to that mentality to her own detriment.  

The house was something that nobody wanted to or knew how to deal with.   It seems silly that we held onto that property for so long and for no good reason since the home had lost any real value to us.  What were we thinking?  We could have gotten rid of that house easily had we only made the decision to do so.  Instead, we chose not to act.  Sadly, this indecision kept my mom from doing things she wanted to do and living a life she could have been living.  The truth is we created an artificial prison for ourselves based on things we didn't understand or had assumed to be true.  The fact is that mom ended up selling the house for CASH in its EXACT AS-IS condition AFTER the fire.  It had sustained fire, smoke, and a tremendous amount of water damage.  (The firefighters had done more damage to the house than the fire itself.  As part of firefighting procedure and safety, they had cut holes in the roof, in the walls, and broke every single window!  Then it proceeded to rain for the next 3 days!)  We didn't need to get any of our fire damaged junk out.  The buyer took it all and paid us for it!

We Are Set Free

The above story illustrates how my family (and my mom in particular) was truly liberated.  The cash offer to buy the fire damaged property was a tremendous value to my mom as well as to my brothers and me.  We were released from the artificial prison associated with thinking there is only one way to sell the house and the idea we needed the house after it had lost its usefulness to our family.  What we didn't know actually kept us stuck with the house longer than we had to be there.  The financial compensation was definitely welcome and necessary, but a very real value had been created for my mom in several ways:

1. Physically: Mom didn't have to physically rake leaves in the fall, shovel in the winter, pull dandelions in the spring, or deal with no A/C in the summer.  Mom no longer had to maintain the property in any way whatsoever.
2. Mentally: Mom didn't have to worry about the leak in the basement, worry about how to renovate for resale, worry about the heating bill in the winter, or which of her sons and neighbors to ask for help with maintenance.  She didn't have to worry about how the yearly real estate taxes were going to offset any of her social security benefits.
3. Emotionally: Mom didn't have to see all of the old items in the house to be reminded that her husband, mother, and sons whom had all lived there had now passed on or moved out.  She didn't have to be reminded of good and bad things that happened to our family while living there.
4. Spiritually: Mom was free to pursue life and the American Dream outside of home ownership.  She could visit her friends in neighboring states and her son in a foreign country--all indefinitely because she had nothing that she needed to get back to.  She could go and become a citizen of her native land again and see how much it had advanced while she was gone.  
5. Financially: Mom was compensated with cash!

The above is a true personal story by Gabe of Home Liberators, LLC.  (gabe@homeliberators.com)