Dear John: I hope this mail finds you in great health and spirit because l need a bit of your attention.
I am a lowly medical-care worker who heavily bet on the American dream. I greatly believed the notion that hard work inevitably pays off.
In fact, this became my mantra. Coming from a culture where self-fulfillment and attainment as a woman is very rare, I completely internalized this belief and quadrupled my efforts at hard work as soon as l came to America.
This belief in recent times has become so challenged that l feel emotionally, physically and spiritually hollow.
I have made too many sacrifices and endured untold hardships. l truly feel emptied out and very bone weary.
Sir, I am one of the victims of the 2008 housing debacle. My loan for a three-family home was closed in November 2005 at a rate of 6.75 percent, plus a second equity line by National City Bank.
I believe now that the loan was closed under dubious circumstances. As you might have figured, I bought at the peak of the housing bubble.
The bank literally promised to refinance my loan in six months to pull out enough funds to do the big renovation needed. My house is beautiful, but it needed $40,000 in work.
Considering the ever-skyrocketing prices of houses then, I figured l got a decent deal.
After six months, I approached the lender — PNC Bank — for the refinancing, but I was told that the interest rate had gone up to 7.25 percent. I was advised to wait awhile and come back later.
My household was barely surviving, but we all understood that there was a bigger benefit to this sacrifice, so we kept at it. Unbeknownst to us at that time, that would be the hellish nature of the nightmare dance that I would be locked in with the bank for years to come.
Please, sir, you are my bottom line, my last resort. I do not seem to have any time left. R.N.
Dear R.N.: I contacted PNC for you a couple of weeks ago but a spokeswoman for the bank said she never got my e-mail after we had a phone conversation. So I sent it again — and again, she says she never got it.
Now I understand that you and she have made contact.
I’ve encouraged the bank to work with you and I hope things go well. I will continue to monitor the situation. Good luck.
Dear John: I might, just might, have found a way to save you, me and everyone in the sound of our voice gazillions of dollars.
In the latest round of US Postal Service price increases, which raised the cost of mailing a one-ounce No. 10 envelope to 49 cents, there’s a bit of relief for users of postal meters.
Instead of 49 cents, businesses that use postal strips instead of stamps can send their standard first-class mail at the bargain rate of just 48 cents.
Now it turns out that the automated postal kiosks in post office lobbies, in addition to their other options, will let you print up any value postage strip you want. For example, you might ask it for some 21-cent strips to cover the second ounce of a multi-page letter.
So I figured I’d have it print out a bunch of 48-cent stamps. I attached these to a bunch of envelopes, mailed them out, and they all reached their destinations with no problems.
That’s a full 2 percent savings over the 49-cent “forever” stamp.
I think I’ve solved our budget-gap issues. D.B.
Dear D.B.: And you’ve created new problems for the US Postal Service, which I happen to like.
In fact I like my letter carrier so much that I was tempted not to publicize your little scheme to cheat the post office out of that extra penny.
But in the end, I liked your ingenuity. So here’s the letter.
And, yes, I did receive the letter from you with just 48-cent postage on it. So your plan worked.
But depending on how many of these “test” letters you sent out, it’ll probably be 2016 before this scheme actually turns a profit for you.
Be sure to send me a Christmas card with the discounted postage and we’ll see if postal officials have figured out a way to stop this inadvertent discount.
Dear John: You suggested that colleges should kick some money back to the athletes that earned them the money.
How about the $125,000 scholarships that these “student athletes” are going to school on?
I, like most parents, paid the whole shot . . . and probably a piece of the athlete’s scholarship too.
Just another birthright of the entitled generation. RHS
Dear RHS.: Look, I paid for three kids to go through college. So I sympathize.
But if one of my kids could throw a football well enough to fill a stadium, I would expect him (or her) to be compensated justly.
I’m not saying that college athletes need to get million-dollar deals. That can wait until they become pros.
But I am saying that they shouldn’t get screwed.