Dumbest purchase: Vinyl siding from a traveling salesman
Posted
Apr 08 2008, 05:12 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Congratulations to Randall at Credit Withdrawal for winning the dumbest purchase ever contest held by "Debt Kid." Randall won a Nintendo DS Lite for sharing his story about how he bought vinyl siding for his house for $20,000 from a traveling salesman.
Here's why this was such a stupid purchase: Randall did no research on the siding -- "They could have put up wallpaper on the outside of the house for all I knew from siding," he says -- did no reference checks on the contractor, and financed the entire job with a 14% loan without reading the fine print. He didn't find out until he tried to refinance his house years later that the loan amounted to a second mortgage on his home. Ouch.
Randall's house had a "drive-by" paint job -- a shoddy effort by the contractor who built the subdivision where he lives. By the time houses in the neighborhood started looking tacky, the vinyl-siding salespeople showed up.
Randall said the siding he purchased is pretty good but the workmanship was not. Unfortunately he never asked the siding people for references. "The horror stories you hear about construction teams causing more damage than they fix are all too common to forget this step," he writes.
While he wasn't aware that he'd used his house as collateral for the financing, he did have the sense not to buy the credit insurance, which was included in the original finance contract. "I made them take the contract and get that stricken," he says. "Strangely enough, they had a copy of the contract already ready without the credit insurance out in the truck. Go figure."
