Instead of a new car
Aug. 31st, 2010 02:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carbonelLast year, instead of buying a new car, I had some major work done on the house. This year, instead of buying a new car, I'm paying off the house.
My mortgage payment comes out of my bank account automatically, so I don't usually bother to look at the actual monthly paper statements from CitiMortgage all that often. But this is around the time of year that the escrow amount gets readjusted, so I checked this month's statement. What I mostly noticed was that the principal balance had dropped considerably since the last time I'd checked. This isn't actually all that surprising, since the way the mortgage was structured (no bridge financing and most of the profit from selling my old house rolled into principal for this one) meant that my ostensible 30-year mortgage was actually closer to a 10-year one, and I'd tossed in some extra money toward principal from time to time.
I bought the house in 2003, and as of my most recent statement, my principal balance was $18,711.67.
Gee, thought I. That amount of money is in the same range as a new car, which I'd been muttering about getting this fall. And my car, while it's passed the 20-year mark (it's a 1989 Mazda 626 with about 150K miles), is still chugging along just fine, so the new car would currently be an indulgence rather than a necessity. And I'm not actually getting that much tax benefit from the interest payment at this point.
So I called the CitiMortgage customer service number, and got the usual set of numbered options, one of which (to my surprise) was "get a payoff amount." I selected that and gave it my eFax number, and a couple of hours later had a fax with the actual payoff amount (about $1,000 less than the principal amount listed on the statement, presumably because if I pay off the mortgage now, it's me that's on the hook for property taxes rather than it coming out of the escrow account). Now all I have to do is get a certified check for the $17,815.77 and send it to their payoff department before October 1.
The whole thing was a little anticlimactic; I'd expected to talk to a real human and receive congratulations and have to schedule something like the closing that occurred when I bought the place. But I suppose from their point of view, they're losing a customer, even though it's a positive milestone from my point of view.
Pat WINOLJ pointed out that it's a good excuse for a dinner expedition; I suppose that'll do as a celebration. I shouldn't be eating cake, anyway. I wonder if they'll send me a copy of the mortgage suitable for burning.
(In case anyone is grumbling about how lightly I take the issue of coming up with that kind of cash, I should mention that a) I've been incredibly lucky to have been almost continuously employed since 1990, b) I'm moderately paranoid about regular savings, and c) I've been lucky again not to have had any catastrophic expenses drop on me.)
My mortgage payment comes out of my bank account automatically, so I don't usually bother to look at the actual monthly paper statements from CitiMortgage all that often. But this is around the time of year that the escrow amount gets readjusted, so I checked this month's statement. What I mostly noticed was that the principal balance had dropped considerably since the last time I'd checked. This isn't actually all that surprising, since the way the mortgage was structured (no bridge financing and most of the profit from selling my old house rolled into principal for this one) meant that my ostensible 30-year mortgage was actually closer to a 10-year one, and I'd tossed in some extra money toward principal from time to time.
I bought the house in 2003, and as of my most recent statement, my principal balance was $18,711.67.
Gee, thought I. That amount of money is in the same range as a new car, which I'd been muttering about getting this fall. And my car, while it's passed the 20-year mark (it's a 1989 Mazda 626 with about 150K miles), is still chugging along just fine, so the new car would currently be an indulgence rather than a necessity. And I'm not actually getting that much tax benefit from the interest payment at this point.
So I called the CitiMortgage customer service number, and got the usual set of numbered options, one of which (to my surprise) was "get a payoff amount." I selected that and gave it my eFax number, and a couple of hours later had a fax with the actual payoff amount (about $1,000 less than the principal amount listed on the statement, presumably because if I pay off the mortgage now, it's me that's on the hook for property taxes rather than it coming out of the escrow account). Now all I have to do is get a certified check for the $17,815.77 and send it to their payoff department before October 1.
The whole thing was a little anticlimactic; I'd expected to talk to a real human and receive congratulations and have to schedule something like the closing that occurred when I bought the place. But I suppose from their point of view, they're losing a customer, even though it's a positive milestone from my point of view.
Pat WINOLJ pointed out that it's a good excuse for a dinner expedition; I suppose that'll do as a celebration. I shouldn't be eating cake, anyway. I wonder if they'll send me a copy of the mortgage suitable for burning.
(In case anyone is grumbling about how lightly I take the issue of coming up with that kind of cash, I should mention that a) I've been incredibly lucky to have been almost continuously employed since 1990, b) I'm moderately paranoid about regular savings, and c) I've been lucky again not to have had any catastrophic expenses drop on me.)
