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I'm glad it worked out for you, assuming that was the true situation.

Close friends owned and lived on 60 acres for most of their lives. They were getting old and wanted a simpler life so they sold their property and moved into town.

They sold it to one of the next-door neighbor's kids (shared property line) who also grew up there. They bought at what was then the peak of the market (back around 1990). The seller (our close friends) carried the loan.

A few years go by, real estate prices had dropped about 20%, and the buyer decides to sue saying they paid too much for the property because it was in a "flood zone".

You see, the seller sold it to the neighbor (which happens to also be a Realtor) without using a Realtor themselves and didn't fill out a California Real Estate disclosure form. He didn’t know it was needed or required. He was selling the property to a trusted neighbor that dealt in property that grew up next-door and already knew everything about the property.

The flood claim was that water was flowing into their house when there were heavy rains. The house is a small old block house. The value is the 60 acres of beautiful forest in central California not far from the coast, not the old house. There’s a small creek in front of the house coming down the side of the mountain that the house is on that requires maintenance to keep it cleaned out. They didn’t do it.

They go to court. Our friends don’t want to call the neighbor’s parents or other children or even other neighbors as witnesses to say that it isn’t in a flood zone and that they were fully familiar with the property before they bought it or that its never had a flood problem before.

They assumed justice would be done.

They didn’t want to be rude...

Meanwhile while all this is going on the buyer stopped making payments on the loan the seller carried. A year or so later the judge rules in the plaintiff's favor and reduces the debt the buyer has to repay the seller by hundreds of the thousands of dollars (something like 40% of the total sell) and doesn’t make him pay the missed payments.

Our close friends had to file for bankruptcy and sell many of their possessions so they could keep their house where they retired. The house they built was based on what their retirement income should have been.

Their life was basically ruined. The stress and pain had changed them forever. They aged before our eyes. The husband died about five years later.

Did I mention that the plaintiff’s lawyer is also the sister of the buyer?

So that’s just one more happy court room experience where "justice" was being done that I've been witness to.

So does that "trump" you? I don't know. And I'm not so arrogant to say it does. But I do know that that isn't an uncommon experience. And a prime example of "free lunch" and "justice" which was the subject of my reply to the person making the high minded claims.