{"id":1735,"date":"2009-06-26T14:43:51","date_gmt":"2009-06-26T14:43:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/06\/26\/mortgouge_payments\/"},"modified":"2009-06-26T14:43:51","modified_gmt":"2009-06-26T14:43:51","slug":"mortgouge_payments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/06\/26\/mortgouge_payments\/","title":{"rendered":"Mortgouge payments"},"content":{"rendered":"

My husband and I bought our first house just over three years ago. We were complete newbies at this “proper grown-up” thing, and set up the mortgage in a way that makes our biweekly payments 100% predictable. We knew at the time that this might not be the optimal way of doing things, but agreed to go this route until we got used to the concept of fiscal responsibility and adjusted our budget to match the size of the payments.
\nSo, fixed rate it is, despite the bank trying to persuade us to go variable. We no doubt missed out on some savings there. And we also decided to break our property tax payments into installments that get added to the biweekly mortgage payment, to avoid the scramble to find a big lump sum to pay to the city every six months (we were planning our wedding at the time and knew we’d be completely broke until that was over).
\nWe had been planning to renegotiate all these factors when our initial five year fixed term ends in 2011, but the letter we got yesterday might accelerate that schedule. Here’s the first snippet:
\nWe remitted a total of on your behalf for your property taxes due this current year. On Jun. 19, 2009, the balance in your Mortgage Property Tax Account was a surplus of .<\/code>
\nThis has happened before. I called to ask whether the surplus would be taken off our next mortgage payment, off the principal, or be transferred to our current account. They told me it would stay in our Property Tax Account, but they would not be reducing our future property tax payments. I told them this was not acceptable, and made them transfer the surplus into our current account (we used it to pay the wedding caterers). This necessitated a visit to my local branch, and the signing of a couple of forms. It took more paperwork to get them to reduce our property tax payments to avoid having a surplus the following year.
\nBack to yesterday’s letter:
\nCurrently, we collect bi-weekly toward your Mortgage Property Tax Account. Effective Aug. 28, 2009, that amount will be + 9. As part of our annual review of the tax portion of your regular payment, we assume that next year's taxes will be the same as this year's taxes.<\/code>
\nErm, what? We have a surplus at the current level of payment (a surplus that I’m going to have to work to get back into an account that we can access), the total sum needed will stay the same, so you’re going to increase<\/em> our payments??!! (And no, this isn’t to offset lower interest rates – I looked back at our original paperwork and that’s not how they calculate it).
\nAre you just sitting there in your offices, collecting interest on our money and laughing at us????!!!!
\nWe’d already planned to see a financial adviser some time this year to discuss mortgages, savings, pensions, and investments, but I think that after reading this letter we’ll be making some calls this very weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My husband and I bought our first house just over three years ago. We were complete newbies at this “proper grown-up” thing, and set up the mortgage in a way that makes our biweekly payments 100% predictable. We knew at … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1735","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1735\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}