Slow Cleaning
Apr. 23rd, 2008 09:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livingdebToday I put away several things that are hard to put away properly such as:
* the gas and utilities bills (which I had to pay first)
* the extra battery I got for my pedometer (I had to find tape and find a place in the freezer--I'm taping it to the door behind the bag with the extra spices--because I heard these kinds of batteries run down just as fast whether they are in use or not if you leave them at room temperature)
* the free fluorescent bulb I got on Earth Day (remind me: I do not need any more light bulbs for the next five or fifty years and I do not have room to store more anyway)
* my pumpkin butter recipe (where does it go? Sides? Vegetables? Do I need to make a new Condiments section? If I did, should salad dressing go there, or can it stay in the Salads section?)
* my Annual Escrow Account Disclosure Statement (after analyzing it, see below)
I know some people can just go around cleaning up their house--whoosh, whoosh, whoosh--but if I have a pile of crap lying around, it's there for a reason.
**
I've heard you can get rid of escrow accounts, but I still have one. (This is where the bank collects a constant amount of money from you each month--in addition to your principal and interest--which it then uses to pay your taxes and insurance on time so they don't lose their collateral to Uncle Sam or Mother Nature.)
It seems all very straightforward, but escrow accounts are strange. For example, I think I've written before about the second-year weirdness. My payment increased much more than most rents increased because lenders have to predict that next year's taxes and insurance will be the same as this year's. But usually they're more. So at the end of the year, they are short by the difference.* So they can collect that difference from you in a single check at the end of the year or (at least sometimes) you can choose to pay it back over the next year in equal payments each month. The latter seems wiser.
* (minus the cushion they are allowed to add on)
But the new estimates are now higher, because now they are using the numbers for this year, not the first year. So your payment goes up to cover that, too. So your total payment goes up by twice the amount of the increase (or near to that, depending what the new allowable cushion is).
Last year my payment went down for the first time, which I also think I wrote about. And that's because my taxes and insurance went up by less that year than they had the year before, so the new shortage-catching-up part of my payment was lower than for the previous year: enough lower that my total payment ended up lower.
This year is even weirder. My taxes actually went down. Although the city estimated my property value to have increased over the year before, they reduced taxes per $1000 value by so much last year that my total taxes decreased. For some reason the city feels guilty charging people more taxes for increased property values even though we have a law that limits these increases to 10% a year for your own house (not houses you're renting out to others). Then they wonder why they don't have enough money to maintain services like they'd like.
Anyway, even though my insurance costs rose, they didn't rise as much as my taxes decreased. So I don't have to pay any catch-up money this year. Which means my monthly payment is going down again. Not only that, they are sending me a check for the overage. That is weird. I suspect that next year I will get another double-whammy increase like I did my second year.
(In case you're curious about the amounts involved, my catch-up amount last year was $10, down from $24 the previous year, and this year it's zero. This year my monthly payments will be $20 lower than last year. And the check I am getting is for $179. So these windfalls won't change my life, but they're mildly interesting.)
* the gas and utilities bills (which I had to pay first)
* the extra battery I got for my pedometer (I had to find tape and find a place in the freezer--I'm taping it to the door behind the bag with the extra spices--because I heard these kinds of batteries run down just as fast whether they are in use or not if you leave them at room temperature)
* the free fluorescent bulb I got on Earth Day (remind me: I do not need any more light bulbs for the next five or fifty years and I do not have room to store more anyway)
* my pumpkin butter recipe (where does it go? Sides? Vegetables? Do I need to make a new Condiments section? If I did, should salad dressing go there, or can it stay in the Salads section?)
* my Annual Escrow Account Disclosure Statement (after analyzing it, see below)
I know some people can just go around cleaning up their house--whoosh, whoosh, whoosh--but if I have a pile of crap lying around, it's there for a reason.
**
I've heard you can get rid of escrow accounts, but I still have one. (This is where the bank collects a constant amount of money from you each month--in addition to your principal and interest--which it then uses to pay your taxes and insurance on time so they don't lose their collateral to Uncle Sam or Mother Nature.)
It seems all very straightforward, but escrow accounts are strange. For example, I think I've written before about the second-year weirdness. My payment increased much more than most rents increased because lenders have to predict that next year's taxes and insurance will be the same as this year's. But usually they're more. So at the end of the year, they are short by the difference.* So they can collect that difference from you in a single check at the end of the year or (at least sometimes) you can choose to pay it back over the next year in equal payments each month. The latter seems wiser.
* (minus the cushion they are allowed to add on)
But the new estimates are now higher, because now they are using the numbers for this year, not the first year. So your payment goes up to cover that, too. So your total payment goes up by twice the amount of the increase (or near to that, depending what the new allowable cushion is).
Last year my payment went down for the first time, which I also think I wrote about. And that's because my taxes and insurance went up by less that year than they had the year before, so the new shortage-catching-up part of my payment was lower than for the previous year: enough lower that my total payment ended up lower.
This year is even weirder. My taxes actually went down. Although the city estimated my property value to have increased over the year before, they reduced taxes per $1000 value by so much last year that my total taxes decreased. For some reason the city feels guilty charging people more taxes for increased property values even though we have a law that limits these increases to 10% a year for your own house (not houses you're renting out to others). Then they wonder why they don't have enough money to maintain services like they'd like.
Anyway, even though my insurance costs rose, they didn't rise as much as my taxes decreased. So I don't have to pay any catch-up money this year. Which means my monthly payment is going down again. Not only that, they are sending me a check for the overage. That is weird. I suspect that next year I will get another double-whammy increase like I did my second year.
(In case you're curious about the amounts involved, my catch-up amount last year was $10, down from $24 the previous year, and this year it's zero. This year my monthly payments will be $20 lower than last year. And the check I am getting is for $179. So these windfalls won't change my life, but they're mildly interesting.)