Bureaucracy

So yesterday I fully filed for my legal name change.

• $175 to the Oakland County Clerk, to file the petition. Credit card was OK with no fees.
• $93.80 check made out to Legal News but given to the county clerk, to forward to the publication once the records check comes back. Legal News will then publish the notice of my name change prior to the hearing so I cannot dodge my creditors.
• $15 to the Oakland County Records Unit (attached to the jail) for ink fingerprinting (RI-008 form). $2.50 fee for credit card use.
• $43.50 check made out to the Michigan State Police, to be sent with the RI-008 form for a state and FBI records check.
• $8.12 in miscellaneous postage for the large-document mailer (the RI-008 is most of a standard US Letter page and must not be folded) and shipping to Lansing.

All told, $335.42 to file. Now I wait 3-ish weeks for MSP to send the records check results to the clerk. At that point, the clerk will schedule a hearing date 4-5 weeks out from then, notify me, and get Legal News going on the publication (at least Oakland County does that for you, and mails you the hearing dates; other counties make you do all that yourself...).

Then, once the hearing comes, I go and make sure I am on the docket. If not, the clerk may have to reschedule within 3 weeks (but under 91 days of petition or the whole thing starts over again because of course it does).

If the hearing goes through, then I get the opportunity to buy certified copies of the order ($11/ea currently) and uncertified ones (like a dollar or so). Hypothetically, the places that require certified copies will send them back, but...not only do they often take months to do so, they sometimes never do. So my guess is probably at least half a dozen certified ones, and a full dozen or so uncertified ones for banks and such.

Yay.