Today I reviewed my Bank of America mortgage statement to make sure that my payments were being applied correctly; I pay half of my mortgage twice a month on the premise that I’d cut time off my loan. Well, turns out that Bank of America’s automatic payment program deducts the payments twice a month, but only applies them once a month. I found the original documents and found the fine print that this is how it works. Why on earth would anyone agree to this if it didn’t apply the payments twice a month? I feel like such a moron for not catching this earlier. Now I have to go see if I can get it changed so that my payments are applied twice a month or change it back to one payment a month so that bank doesn’t get the float. While this seems quite deceptive to me, I agreed to the terms and that just makes me stupid for doing it.

Uggh. Yesterday I was going to write about the sub prime mortgage market where I think that borrowers should take some of the blame for the problems, but now the tables are turned on me. I’m a well educated consumer and knew about paying twice a month would cut years off my loan and I still got “taken”. All the fine print in mortgages screws over everyone including informed consumers.

If you have mortgage horror stories, please post a comment.