Mortgage scare this morning....whew!

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-05-2004
Mortgage scare this morning....whew!
1
Wed, 12-14-2005 - 8:59am


I just set up my mortgage to be paid online as of last month. It's our new refinanced mortgage, and I wanted to have online payment records for it. Chase Home Finance has a feature called "Alerts" where you can set up email alerts when payments are late, a payment has posted, etc. It worked great last month, and my payment was paid on time.

This month, I'm waiting for our December 16th paycheck to pay my mortgage (because we currently have about $638 in our checking account). So imagine my surprise when this morning (December 14th), I wake up to an email alert from Chase saying "Thank you for your recent payment of $1,509.43"!!!! I just about had a heart attack. First off, I never authorized payment! Second, that's more than my monthly house payment amount! LOL! We were just about to start homeschool lessons when I saw it. Just to have the room silent for me to figure out what was going on and make neccessary phonecalls, I quickly told my son he could go play his Madagascar game on his Xbox (which left him looking shocked because he knows that Xbox is only for 'after' school and only 30 minutes at that! So he knew it was serious. LOL!)

I sat at the computer searching the Chase website, talking to myself out of fear and frustration ("what is this...I don't understand how this could happen....oh god, should I move money from another account to cover this in my checking account so I don't overdraft?!....I've got my anniversary and christmas coming! I'll have no money for either!....how could this happen?!?") and I saw a notice saying that a refund to my escrow account had been made for that same amount on the 13th of December. Hmmm.....that was money for my property taxes...so were they not paid due to the refinance? That set off a whole new set of worries.....did this credit to my escrow come from my bank account? Did my property taxes not get paid?? Are they going to auction off my house on the courthouse steps?! Why didn't I get a notice in the mail if they weren't paid?? My mind was just a fury of worry this morning. LOL!

A call to Chase told me that it was a payment to escrow, like I'd seen online, and the customer service agent assured me that this was a refund from an outside source, and not from my checking account. To make double-sure of this, I called my county property tax office and found out that the local Title/Loan company that handled our refinance for Chase had paid our property taxes on October 12th, just 7 days after we closed on that new loan. Apparently, Chase, themselves, paid the bill a second time in November, and that money was refunded back to them, hence the credit for $1,509.43 that I saw in the alert email.

Whew!!!! My heart is still pounding. Thank goodness this worked out alright. I was imaginging identity theft, someone in Chase's offices moving money out of my account, etc etc.

Nothing like a major overdraft scare to get your heart pumping in the morning. LOL! Time to get my son off his Xbox and back to the dining room table for school. :-D

Pat :-D

Avatar for cl_beckymk
iVillage Member
Registered: 03-19-2003
Wed, 12-14-2005 - 11:36am

I'm not laughing per se until I got to the end!