« Home | Artist Detecting Part 2 » | Bernice Sequin - Artist Detective » | How dee do »

Bye Bye Money, Money Goodbye

Just yesterday I received a delightful letter from the City stating that I owe them nearly $1000 within the next two weeks or I will face major penalties. I could accept such a hard handed letter if I had actually been negligent in paying taxes, bills and what have you (which I occasionally am and when it happens I expect nasty collection letters) but to my knowledge I have been completely responsible. So I call ten people, who transfer me to twenty other people and it turns out that even though I am currently paying almost $120 a month into my property taxes lumped in with my mortgage payment, apparently until the end of 2006 I also need to pay a second payment of almsot $120 to the City. Double the property taxes between now and December, yippee! The reason- well it seems that the bank that my mortgage is through will not begin paying the taxes without first having all the money from me up front, despite the fact that they practically own me with this mortgage. So what they do is collect my money for the next eight months to be sure that they will get paid back once they have paid the city. This is stupid since the very nature of my relationship with this bank is one of me owning them money. If I am allowed to owe them $120,000 then surely they can't be so concerned about $1200 per year, that is being withdrawn automatically every month from my bank account.

I can't believe that no one thought to mention this information to me prior to the nasty letter I received yesterday. When I call the bank, the CSR told me that someone had screwed up and I should have been informed about this. So I called my lawyer, who blamed by mortgage broker and she hasn't called me back (probably because she's smart).

Luckily I do have some savings right now and can afford to make the payment but I hadn't planned on spending a chunk of my savings to pay my property taxes twice.

When things like this happen I get really angry and want to cuss someone out- preferably the person who messed things up in the first place. I am really hoping that person is the broker and that she calls me so that I can get this off my chest. Goodbye $1000.