refinancing fun

[cellio]

When you refinance a mortgage, you have to go to a closing just as if you were buying the house in the first place. Odd that there's no way to expedite that. We even refinanced with our current mortgage company.

So we had our "closing" this morning (ironically, 10 years to the day since my closing on my first house). It took about an hour, which wasn't bad. Despite correcting these things in the paperwork they sent in advance (the original application, I guess), they still had our martial status and Dani's SSN and citizenship wrong. I wonder if the corrections will stick this time. I wonder what bad things happen if they don't.

There was a huge accumulation in the escrow account, so we didn't need to bring as much money as we anticipated. Property taxes are due in January; I really hope that this doesn't mean that each loan "assumed" the other is paying that bill, even though it's all the same company. That is, if the new loan assumes that's been paid and the old loan pays out the escrow before paying the bill, we could be screwed. I mentioned this to Dani, but I suspect he'll blow it off rather than check up on it.

It then took me 45 minutes to get from Parkway Center to work, which should have been 15 minutes tops, because of inadequate signage on Pittsburgh roads and irrevocable hidden on-ramps. Whee. It should have been trivial to cross the Fort Pitt Bridge heading downtown and get onto Forbes outbound, but it wasn't. Sigh. "Doing the driving" is one of the chores that Dani agreed to do when we split up all the responsibilities, but he flat-out refused to do this and told me we would drive there separately on the way to work.

Comments

escrow

[cellio]

Each time I've gotten a mortgage (three times now, if you count today), the escrow was set up automatically at the closing. They took money from us to populate it for N months. I got the impression the amounts were all mandated by the state or some such. Then each month part of your mortgage payment goes into this account; it should be broken out on your mortgage statement. (P&I will be the big part, and then there should be a smaller line item for the escrow deposit.) The mortgage company pays your property taxes and homeowner's insurance out of this escrow, as it's in their interest to ensure that these get paid.

Once a year the mortgage company is supposed to look at the escrow account to determine if you're paying in too much or too little. If it's too much, they send you a check to bring it down to where they think it should be, and they adjust your monthly payment. If it's too little, they ask you for a check and raise your monthly payment.

Is this the check that they sent you? If so, it sounds like your escrow account is fine and your payment will go down a little. Or did you do something like accidentally double-pay (pay a bill that they also paid)?

Re: escrow

[fiannaharpar.livejournal.com]

I just got off of the phone with Washington Mutual, and they tell me that it's my refund. I explained that the wording is not clear in the letter, and she agreed and passed this along to Customer Service. It'll probably die there, but it was sweet of her to do that.

Thanks for the information.