Screwed by Bank of America

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.

Roomba isn't saving us time

I hate to say it, but the Roomba isn't saving us time. I love the Roomba and Scooba, but the promise of time savings just isn't there. How can that be you ask? It is quite simple; my wife and I hate vacuuming and the cleaning crew we had wasn't doing a good job, so the house wasn't getting vacuumed regularly. While our house is usually "in order", we had dog hair all over the place and the carpets didn't get vacuumed as often as they should.

So now that the Roomba is handling the floors, our carpets look better, there is less dog hair on the tile and our house looks better, but it still isn't saving us time!

Lovely Core Data Issue; is it a bug or a feature?

I've had a few users report that they lost all their data when upgrading to the latest ReceiptWallet or DocumentWallet. This really concerns me as I don't like data loss (who does?). The latest version of both programs switched to using an SQLite database when users were running under Leopard as it is much faster. At the same time, I changed my object model as I was including lots of models that I didn't use (damn Apple sample code included all models in all frameworks). So the changes weren't minor, bug I did my testing and things were working fine. It was in beta for awhile and I had no reports of issues.

Today I decided to revisit the issue and try to solve the problem once and for all. In order to determine when object model I'm using, I add a model version to the metadata which gets written out to the database. I had code like this when I was setting up the data, at the end of the conversion.

[self generateMetadata]

New rate structure

I've been thinking about a new rate structure for clients. It would go something like this: