After much debate (on this forum and IRL), my husband and I decided to aggressively pay down our mortgage principle. Our plan: Make a one-time extra payment of $20,000 on July 1st (when the mortgage payment is due), then a recurring additional pay down of $700/month starting in August. Now, how difficult could this possibly be? Well, I started the process on June 9th and I am still holding the bank's hand as it were, doing my very best to keep them from screwing up yet again!
Timeline:
June 9th: I go to our local branch office (same bank that holds our mortgage, but different division). I tell the branch manager our plan. She says I should write down our request along with all the required information, then she will fax it to the other branch and they will set the payments up for us. So, I craft this letter, being very sure that I am crystal clear as to what I want. (I specifically say that the $20,000 is a one-time only extra payment and the $700 is a recurring payment, for example. I also leave a phone number where they can reach me if there is any problem.) I asked the branch manager to read it over herself to see if it was clear enough. "Perfect!" she said.
Well, ha ha ha!
June 16th: I go back to the bank to make sure that everything has been set up correctly. Nope! Someone has made the $20,000 a recurring monthly paydown. (Yikes! If we had that kind of money, we'd just pay off the mortgage right away and have done with it!). Nothing at all had been done with the $700. So, she suggested I go on-line myself and just set it up the way I want it to be. So, with her looking over my shoulder, I changed the $20,0000 monthly pay down to $700. I figured one thing at a time. Get the recurring extra payments set up first. Then try to do the one-time thing.
June 23rd (i.e. yesterday): We had been away for a week and as I was going through the accumulated mail, I saw a letter from our bank dated June 10th stating that an additional $20,000 will be paid toward the principle on July 1st. I assumed that since the letter was dated before I made the change on June 16th that everything was probably still OK. (I was still a little miffed though that the letter from Suntrust did not specify that this $20,000 was to be a recurring charge.) Well, just to be on the safe side, I thought I'd check the on-line account we'd set up for me last week. And guess what? The $700 recurring charge that I had put in had disappeared. At least they hadn't put the $20,000 back. That would have been worse. But still it was disconcerting enough that I called the mortgage division of our bank directly to see what was up.
The women I spoke with said that the $700 recurring charge had been cancelled because "just today we received a letter with conflicting instructions from you." Me: "What do you mean, just today? I faxed that letter over to you two weeks ago and in fact received a letter from you dated June 10th that the requested changes had (supposedly) been put into effect?" Well, never mind that. Let's just set up the recurring $700 extra payment again. So, we go through the appropriate menus together until I get to a menu requiring me to enter the routing number for my bank, my account number -- all that jazz. "Wait" I said. "I didn't have to do all of this last week (when I originally set up the extra $700 payment online). The rep: "Well, you don't have SurePay set up" (SurePay is their automatic bank withdrawal/mortgage payment program). Me: "Yes, we do! We've had it for years!" The rep: "No, you don't!" At this point I officially lost it and I started ranting at this poor woman on the phone (I apologized later when she did her best to straighten it out). Me: "What is going on here! This is absolutely and totally screwed up! This is entirely your (i.e. the bank's) responsibility and you (i.e. the bank) are going to fix it! And now!" She tried to explain that when there was this supposedly conflicting information they just cancelled everything including the already set up normal automatic payment for our mortgage. So, if I hadn't check the situation (for the 2nd time!) we would have been late on our regular mortgage payment since we thought we had SurePay when we actually did not. I told her that this was an incredibly stupid policy (particularly since they did not bother to notify us of the fact).
It turns out that she couldn't actually re-set up the SurePay for me (although it is the same bank and theoretically she has access to my account information). Besides, I thought it was probably best to do it myself or else it would probably be all screwed up again. So, I did that. Then she suggested that I go ahead and make the 1 time payment of $20,000 over the phone then and there. I went for it because at that point I just wanted the whole thing over and done with.
But now I am starting to worry again. Let's say they do make the $20,000 payment as requested, but then go ahead and take out a second $20,000 on July 1st as originally requested in the letter they now have in their possession. How do I make sure that they are really disregarding this letter now? Should I go back to the bank and fax another letter specifically asking them to disregard the first one (or part of the first one). Or with this just create more havoc (i.e. screw up the recurring extra $700 charge I've set up twice now)? Or maybe I should just log in to my account every day from now to July 1st to make sure things look OK. The whole process seems very opaque to me.
Suggestions?
BTW, it would not be a total disaster if they did withdraw $40,000 instead of $20,000 since we have about $83,000 in cash. It would just be scary, frustrating and uncomfortable. (I'd be really worried about what would happen in August, for example).