Commentary: Escrow is just too stressful

I know why stress is bad for us. Stress is like sandpaper rubbing on our nerve endings.

Ouch! Our nerve endings get shorter and shorter until we run out of nerve and want to just curl up and atrophy.

Or maybe stress is like a yo-yo that goes up and down, up and down, until the string breaks and the round thing goes shooting off into the muck and mire, and glug-glug, down we go for the last time.

Maybe people who do yoga or deep breathing or tranquilizers have something. Turn that stress off!

I have just gone through the most stressful month of my life. Somehow I got myself tangled into three escrows on two properties (sandpaper), with escrow dates moving backward and forward (yo-yo-ing, if you will), and I felt like just curling up and/or rolling off. Or having a bourbon and water (tranquilizing).

Why is everything so bloody complicated?

You know what sounds easy if you’ve never tried it? Wiring money. Simple, right? Somebody looks at the outgoing money account to see if there’s enough, taps some keys on a computer, and whoooosh! Just like an email, the money is into the ether and will instantaneously float into the incoming money account. Right?

What do you mean, no? What do you mean the money leaves one account at 9:30 a.m. and lands in the other account at 3:30 p.m., when it’s too late to do anything with it?

So wiring money isn’t direct, like the crow, or the email, flies. It’s like those flocks of starlings fly, the ones that dip and swoosh in a beautiful but complicated ballet, a “Sleeping Beauty” of ballets (said to be the longest) — only more like several Russian ballets (said to be the longest) strung together.

You’d be surprised how stressful six hours can be (unless you’ve actually watched multiple Russian ballets at one sitting).

Is the stress then over? No, of course not! Wired money has to go through the same thing the next day if it is being relayed from one escrow to another! I’ll spare you the similes. You get the idea — many stressful hours.

But then it’s over, and you’ve sold one property and bought another and you get the keys, right? Wrong! Why would you think that?

The final precious document has to be recorded.

I didn’t even ask what is involved in that, but it takes a full day too.

And another thing — before you get that recorded deed, which will come at its own pace as a matter of course, you might get an official-looking “Recorded Deed Notice” from a rotten human being telling you that for just $83, he will provide you with a copy of that deed.

This scam really burns me. The only way these crooks get away with it is that there is so much info, in so many fonts, in so many boxes, on this two-pager that you fail to notice the disclaimer that says you don’t need to pay them money to get a copy of your deed and that their notice is merely a “solicitation.”

Beware of that, you escrow-closers! You’ve already paid for deed recording (and receiving)!

So, whatever anybody tells you about escrows and when they will close, don’t believe it! Escrows are an endless piece of elastic, stretching and shrinking back, but more likely stretching and then stretching some more. Or sandpaper or yo-yos, or any other stressful thing you can think of.

LIZ SWIERTZ NEWMAN of Corona del Mar is the author of “A Widow’s Business.”