Mortgage

Once upon a time I refinanced my house and ended up with a mortgage with Chase. I wanted a mortgage without an attached escrow account, but that would have cost $400 more, so I bit the bullet and said, fine, I’ll take the cheaper mortgage that comes with the escrow account. I am not sure why I was so opposed to it at the time. They got to hold, on average, a couple of thousand dollars or my money, which presumably they collect the interest on, which might amount to a hundred bucks a year. I guess that back then a hundred bucks a year was worth squabbling over.

In any case, there was an escrow account, and every year they adjusted the payment amount. Taxes went up, or insurance went up, or they changed the way they calculated the amount. If I had paid proper attention I would not have had any trouble, but I had the mortgage set up for automatic payment and when the bank changed the payment amount I didn’t pay any attention. So for the next couple of months my payment was short, which led to all kinds of hassles. Permanently soured my view of Chase, as if my view of big banks wasn’t already thoroughly soured.

The last few months we’ve been getting credit card offers in the mail from Chase. Big fancy packets packed chock full of Styrofoam and reams of paper. I wouldn’t be surprised if they spent $100 mailing me this junk. I throw it right in the recycling bin, except for the foam filled ones. Those I feel obligated to disassemble so the foam goes in the trash and the paper goes in the recycling bin. Space in the trash can is expensive.

The last time I refinanced I my mortgage it ended up at Countrywide. You may have heard of them. They were one of the big players in the ongoing mortgage crisis. Bank of America bailed them out, took on their obligations, scored a coup, or got the short end of the stick, depending on how you want to look at it. They picked up the pieces when Countrywide collapsed. At first it looked like a pretty good deal for them, but then the full extent of the disaster started to become apparent and things started to look not so good for good old B of A.

Now a lawyer from Texas has secured an $8 billion dollar settlement against B of A (okay, not really now now, but sometime in the last six months, except I am not sure that the deal has been finally settled). It’s not that they did anything wrong, it’s a simple matter of enforcing the terms of some contracts. What the lawyer did was round up all the parties involved and get them to sign on to the complaint. After that it was pretty straight forward. It appears straight forward to an outside observer, after the fact. I am sure they spent a great deal of time getting all the ducks lined up.

Back during the time of the Viet Nam war, Bank of America was one of the villains in the anti-war demonstrations. I suspect B of A wasn’t really any more evil than any other American corporation, they were just cooperating with the government in their foreign policy, foreign policy directed by politicians who want to be re-elected by people who don’t care about anyone else as long as the price of gas stays at a nickel a gallon.

Since B of A has taken over my mortgage, they have been mailing me a statement every month. Included with the bill is a request for my email address. I throw them straight in the recycling. All I want from them is the annual IRS form that shows how much interest I paid, and that just goes straight to the accountant. 

So what if B of A is spending a couple bucks a month to send me some useless information? Well, multiply that by twelve months a year, and then by a 100 million mortgages and you end up with a couple of bucks. It's not 8 billion dollars, but it ain't chicken feed either. It's just sloppy. The thing is, it is just one more indicator of the downward path we are on. Banks send out e-mail that doesn't need to be sent. Securities analysts skip reading the fine print. Electronic widget makers release widgets with half-baked code that works some of the time. Remember when people were chanting the word "quality" over and over again? Maybe we need a pay a little more attention to "quality".