Double take

Sarah and I were talking the other day about the hilarity of trying to do things in community.  It all started when we decided to get rid of our car a couple of years ago and share their car, the camry.  Many of you know the story - we sold our one and only car and they wanted to try to cut back on their drive time, too, so decided to sell us "half" of one of their cars.  It worked out great, to this day we still share that poor camry.  The funny thing about it was that our insurance company did not know what the heck to do with us!  Ultimately, we didn't do anything.  Not because we didn't try to give them our money and do everything legally, but because neither one of our insurance companies could figure out how to add us both on since we lived at different addresses, etc.  Everything stayed under their name and we just paid them for half of everything.  Shhhh - don't tell anyone!  This came out last year, so at least in theory it should make things like car sharing easier to do:

http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/09/california-takes-a-giant-step-toward-personal-car-sharing/

I just went to our Farmers agent and got everything - house, all of our cars - put together with all of our names on it.  That was another feat, and as I was reading through the paperwork I saw that they named Jeremy as the head (since we had the original account) and added Sarah and BJ on as Relatives in residence.  I suppose that's good enough.

Another thing that was funny and different was opening our joint bank accounts.  It was just something you could tell hadn't really been done before and it took a lot of patience and time to get it all right.  We walked away with 4 functioning debit/credit cards, all with our own names and pins, so that was positive.  We did finally receive our checks and even though they told us that we could get all 4 of our names put on them, they didn't arrive that way.  Thankfully at least one of us from each family made it on as signers, though - officially Sarah and I are officially the couple.

Small things come up here and there, like the dog stuff.  According to the vet, they keep switching owners every other time we take them in =)  I don't even know who Vetco has on file as their owners at this point.  You can't co-register for a vons club or albertsons card, either.  Netflix does have their "queue", so that works well.  People's Market is set up to have a household card, but that doesn't count because they're a hippie store. We haven't gotten the pink slip to the trailer yet, but I am sure that's another one that will have to just have one name from each family on it.

It's been difficult to try to figure out ways that we could refinance or take out loans or all get added to the house.  Jeremy's brother did figure out some info for us, so we need to take those next steps on all being on the title here.  I guess we've found that in general, our society is not really set up for people to do things in community.  It's not impossible and people aren't "anti" in any way, it's just not easy and streamlined, which is unfortunate.  It might turn some people off, such as the car-share situation when we really were, I guess, illegally driving that car half the time.  I mean, people who "borrow" your car are still insured, but it makes it very complicated if you like to do everything by the rules.  I wish that more things were set up to make the process a little easier.  It would be nice if Jeremy could write a check to someone out of our account, too.  All of the gratification and support that is coming out of this community is definitely worth the small inconveniences that it's created, and we definitely got a good laugh when the first official piece of mail arrived addressed to Sarah C and Kimberly B.