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President Josiah "Jed" Bartlet: Why did you leave the White House?
Deborah Fiderer: Well Mr. President, if you wanna talk about getting screwed with your pants on...
President Bartlet: Charlie!
Deborah Fiderer: ...I guess I got pretty well doinked.
—The West Wing, "Posse Comitatus" (5/22/02)
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Many school districts offer ways of taking care of teachers' income during the summer. Some school districts simply pay their teachers year-round, giving you twenty-six checks. Some districts will pay you for only ten months, but the last check of the year (at the beginning of the summer) will be much larger, basically trusting you to be able to budget your expenses until the first check comes a couple of weeks into the new school year.
Baltimore City Schools offers neither of these. If you work for ten months, you get paid for ten months. Period. A teacher's pay gets broken down into 20-1/2 pay periods. So the last check isn't bigger; in fact it's not even the same. It's smaller than all the others you've gotten. And the income stops until sometime after the school year begins.
So as a result of all this, back in August I was late with a payment on my house. Knew all about it, wasn't much I could do at the time. So I compensated by changing my payment pattern. Instead of paying the whole thing at once each month, I sent a half-payment to Countrywide every two weeks. In fact, I paid more than half every two weeks, hoping I could nibble into the backlog of money owed. Between that and the third check in December, I figured I'd have the whole thing made up by the end of the (calendar) year.
This, as it turns out, was not the case. Now, let me tell you why.
When you pay more on a mortgage (or any large loan, it appears) than you're expected to, the overage goes "to the back end" of the loan; that is, it gets applied to the principal. It doesn't matter if you've got a late payment that needs to be rectified. The only way that they'll apply it to the late payment is if you let them know in writing that this is your wish. As it happens, I was absent on that day when I wasn't enrolled in business school, so my record on the account had me for what they call a "rolling 30", meaning that after August I was in a constant state of being 30 days late: The August payment came in September, the September came in October, and so forth. And all the extra money went to the back end, until I refinanced the house in February. (This also explains why I got a few hundred dollars less than I expected from the refinance. They took their late payment at that point.)
This, it seems, is what killed my mortgage back on February 23rd. The screwed-up part of all this is that my new mortgage was going to be with Countrywide, the same people who are holding my old mortgage. They could easily have looked at the payments themselves rather than the credit report with its half-dozen "rolling 30s" and seen what was up. Naïveté, not malice or laziness or anything else, did us in.
And we wound up going back to the bank that had us in the first place, with the incredibly high interest rate and god help them if they give us any "I told you so" crap. Our new closing date is March 15, assuming nothing else bizarre happens.
I'm thinking we wait a year or so and refinance both mortgages with another bank entirely.
That is totally screwed up. My check occassionally gets late in the mail because I cut mailing it too close. I pay the late fee the next month and it all goes away. There is something wrong with the way that got processed.
Sorry that happened to you.
Posted by: yellojkt | March 04, 2007 at 06:48 AM