Christ, what an asshole I am now.→[More:]Yup, I have officially graduated to adult for sure.

After steeling myself more and more the last few days, I wrote and delivered eviction notices for our two remaining tenants.

There's backstory. You recall my dad has dementia. Well, aside from the fact that he never, ever approached the rentals as a business, and has forgone something like a quarter of a million dollars in rents through various means, one of the things that he wasn't telling us as the disease progressed was that he was barely collecting rent from three tenants over the last year. In fact, we demanded information about their accounts and he stonewalled us.

The one couple goes back with us to the 1980s. She grew up on the other side of the townhouse I'm staying in. (All the while my dad never once raised her parents' rent. In 22 years. Sure, they were nice folks...) She's been a pretty high-maintenance tenant in some ways and I was always dutifully kowtowing to her. Well, some of that was actually her feeling guilty for not paying rent. My dad's records over the last year are so sloppy we may never figure it out. This is on TOP of the same situation of a rent they've had for eight years running. Two or three years ago her hubby, who used to have mowing and shoveling duties ostensibly as part of rent, had to quit those due to job requirements. I discussed with my dad how much to raise their rent to compensate for them not doing the work for us anymore. Well, he never did that.

So for eight years they've been paying 2BR rent on a 3BR, when they've been paying, which doesn't seem to be true for most of the last year. And in the middle of all this she has a third kid!

The other family is another problem. She was our church secretary and an acquaintance of my mom, and then her boys were in Boy Scouts with my nephew, and so generally there's a lot of entanglement. In fact I would classify them somewhere around "cousins" in intimacy with our family.

The boy, now all growed up, is in a relationship and has a kid with the girl who was living upstairs. Her mom was apparently managing rent with help from her son, who has since moved out, and again was allowed to just float by my dad. She and the downstairs family generously offered to move in together so that a) they could make one rent for sure and b) we could rent her place for real cash.

Well, right after that the first mom lost her job with the church. I mean, she was summarily fired, over what may or may not have been a substantive time record issue. So there goes her primary income (her only other job is with H&R Block and it's April).

Meanwhile, what has happened for us is that my dad's financial mismanagement has led my parents to bankruptcy. I am hoping to get into a Chapter 13 filing so that the real estate can be kept as equity and eventually turned into a Special Needs Trust for my nieces and nephew. (One niece just got approved for SSI, by the way, but we're going to have a tussle with her bio-mom and bio-mom's untrustworthy boyfriend over control of the funds.) It's the only way to save the assets in case of a future Medicare need by my dad. Running the rentals is also the only way to really pay off the $100,000+ in consumer debt my dad racked up (and that's not counting the $65,000 in loans he took out from the life insurance). We could shed everything in a liquidation and be done with it, but then my mom would be trapped in a house with approximately $0 equity she can't sell anyway, with our adjacent former properties turned into noise-infested slums and drug houses, based on trends in the neighborhood. It would be hell.

I think in Chapter 13 I can let her retire (at 72), and leverage into a granny condo or something. My dad is already so ill he'll be institutionalized or dead by then.

I just don't know that they'll even allow us to keep the property if we don't have tenants. I'm scrambling my ass off to get one of the empties fixed up nicely. But the rental market in this city may have had a big hole blown in it by the closure of our GM plant (of course we're not alone there, there might not be a GM by midsummer). I just don't know what it's going to take to get the five units that are in rough shape turned into cash flow. I'm already mentally marking down rents 20% under last year.

So it really really sucks to have to get rid of the only two tenants we've got, but if they're not paying, then they're actually a negative.

So, here we are. Because of my dad, I just had to man up and become an asshole. I had to evict a girl I've known since she was 8 (I still remember teasing her the day she and her parents showed up the very first time). Her deaf hubby. And their three kids including one less than nine months old. And I had to evict an old friend with a special-needs son whose job at Wal-Mart and whose "wife" and "mom-in-law" scrape together a living at Arby's.

Thing is, we think my dad felt like he was running a social service agency somehow. It was his gift to the world. And the banks would, you know, understand.