If your financial affairs are automated, pay close attention anyway!

Prior to moving from PA to NYS, the mortgage company asked for our checking account # in order to autodraft our account. I very extremely reluctantly agreed to do so because if you ready my book, I have issues with the fact that we’re so busy we don’t have time to manually handle our own affairs; and so we allow entities to access our accounts and take care of it for us. Despite its obvious advantages, what happened before automation became available? Anyway, I reluctantly agreed because of the quarter percent interest rate reduction off of our mortgage. Well—twice in a row the mortgage company deducted the wrong account! Long short, we were on the verge of closing out the PA banking account until we could get settled into our new community and open up a new one, in which case I immediately called the mortgage company with the new account info. It just so happens that I had sent money back into the anemic PA account as a precautionary measure (cover yourself!)

The situation finally got resolved by me simply filling out a new form provided by the mortgage company, as rendering the information verbally to the rep was insufficient. Understood, but…

I promised myself to post this incident for the simple reason that should a payment with the mortgage company, credit card company, or any other entity bounce for whatever reason, they will waste no time placing a “red check mark” against James’ and my credit history. No questions asked. And it’ll take numerous phone calls and paperwork on our part before it all gets straightened out.