The Check is in the Mail!
Decatur Metro | January 28, 2010For those with mortgages at Bank of America, take note! Robert just wrote this into the Oakhurst Message Board…
For any of you un-lucky enough to have both BANK OF AMERICA as lender and DECATUR your city, you may be getting a collection letter from Decatur saying you are delinquent on your property taxes even though you have been paying into an Escrow account with BOA that should have automatically paid your taxes with Decatur.
I was blessed with this letter today
After calling both Decatur and BOA lender couple times, here is what I found out:
> As there are many Decatur residents that use Bank Of America as their lender, BOA apparently sends one big check to Decatur to cover all residents property taxes
> There are at least 11 or more Decatur residents affected
> Although BOA claims to have sent the check, Decatur claims they have not received it so all affected homeowners are showing as not payed on property taxes
> BOA Tax Department is supposed to be working with Decatur to determine if check was received and will send another if needed (ETA: 10 or more business days)
I’ll be checking back in about 10 days
There was a similar miscommunication between our (former) mortgage holder and City of Decatur last year. Our tax bill was overestimated and the bank issued a $450 refund to the city, which was never passed on to us. Took us months to A) prove that the bank had issued that refund, B) that the city had received it, and C) to get them to issue us a check.
Not sure if electronic payments would have made things better or worse, but it’s kind of laughable when a huge bank and a major municipality both throw up their hands and play the “it got lost in the mail!” card, especially when we’re the ones on the hook.
Q: What do the last owners of Crescent Moon and Bank of America have in common.
A: Both withhold taxes but don’t pay. That is really lousy company for the largest bank in the country to be keeping.
(A) Is this true about Crescent Moon/Thumbs Up? I’ve always heard this as the explanation for why they only take cash, but is there any evidence?
(B) Our mortgage is with BOA, so this is slightly scary to me. Could this error affect one’s credit rating?
Don’t confuse Thumb’s Up with the ownership of Crescent Moon in its dying days. Absolutely nothing in common, other than the space. Thumb’s Up’s good people.
Should we link to that thread? I’m kind of frightened to even go looking for it.
Yes, please don’t confuse them. I love Thumbs Up, and the original owners of Crescent Moon were fantastic, fantastic people. It was only the people that bought it from Rob that were the problem.
One way to avoid this is to not escrow your taxes. I haven’t done it in 30 years.
But that requires, like, planning and stuff.
and a stiff fee from the lender….. for the privilege of doing their work for them.
I’ve never paid a fee to a lender to not escrow.
When we refi’d our lender wanted $3,000 fee for us to do our own escrows.
Most mortgage comanies require an escrow in order to cover their asset.
I guess Steve is so rich he doesn’t have to have a mortgage!
Like nearly everyone else, I’ve always had a mortgage. Most people don’t ask about not escrowing. You’d be surprised what happens if you do.
I don’t escrow and I don’t pay fees…..
I don’t escrow either. My mortgage balance is a good bit lower than my home value and our credit is good. They TOTALLY screwed up our escrow, so I just called and kvetched until they agreed to get rid of escrow all together just to get me to shut up… and to keep me from refinancing with another bank who was going to give me a slightly lower interest rate and no escrow.
I’d rather not escrow my tax + hazard insurance, but I didn’t want to pay the 1/4 point fee to waive out of it.
You should file a complaint about your mortgage problem with the body that regulates national banks, the Comptroller of Currency: http://www.helpwithmybank.gov/complaints/index.html. Any folks who have their mortgages with Georgia-chartered banks can file complaints with the Department of Banking & Finance: http://dbf.georgia.gov/00/channel_createdate/0,2095,43414745_74339866,00.html.
Make sure you cc the bank with your complaint to the OCC. They tend to be a bit less intractable when they know you’re going “over their heads”…
If a lien is placed on your property by Dekalb Co, it is EXTREMELY difficult to get it removed from your credit. Even if it is due to a clerical error. This happened to me and it was a nightmare.
Russ addressed this issue on the new Decatur Tax Blog…
“We received a large check from Bank of America on Dec. 21 that covered 119 of their Decatur accounts, and we posted that payment in December to all the accounts that the bank listed. We did not send late notices to any customer whose account was paid by that Dec. 21 check.
However, we did not receive any other major checks from Bank of America in December or January for any of their additional customers. We have been communicating with Bank of America to find out what’s going on. No check has cleared our bank with the check number, check date, or check amount that Bank of America has provided.
A final note–if you’ve received a late notice in error, please accept my apology. Your payment may have arrived just after we printed out the bills. If you believe that your lender, our office, or a bank somewhere in between, has made an error, and that your taxes are actually paid, please call us immediately at 404-370-4100 so we can start to rectify the situation. To ensure the best service possible, please have a copy of your tax bill on hand when you call.”