Saturday, March 15, 2014

Boring Tax Tale

I was at the city building the other day paying my utility bill.  Thankfully one of the ladies there knows who I am (and my name) and told me that some of my taxes were not paid.  WHAT?! I was SO glad she told me because I had no idea.  The perks of living in a small town.

Our lot is split up into three lots.  Two lots are just "land" and the lot in the middle is the house with some land.  It's pretty funny that our lots are even split up as our total land that we are "buying" is about .18 acres.  Small.   Anyway, somehow the bank that we have our taxes escrowed through--US Bank--only has the lot with our house on the record.  That lot is taxed more because the house is on it, and thankfully that bill was paid to the county and the town. 

But I received other bills for the county and the town back in November for the other two lots that are just land.  I called US Bank in November and they said to just fax them the bills and they would take care of it.  So Lee did that.  I figured the bills were paid, end of story.  Like I said, I found out that the town bill wasn't paid so I called US Bank today and straightened that out.  I figured I should check on the county taxes as well.  Nope, they weren't paid either.  They were due December 5th and now it's March 13th!  Amazingly I got the exact same person on the phone that I had talked to earlier at US Bank.  He wrote up a report and what not to find out why these lots aren't showing up and is going to have the taxes paid.  You might laugh because the taxes are very minimal.  The total for the county taxes and the town taxes on the two lots is $70.  It was less, but of course interested has accrued since December 5th.  I asked if US Bank would cover the extra charges because I did what they told me to do, and I don't want to foot the extra fees out of my escrow account.

Seriously, borrowing money bites.  Once we own this house and no longer have that account with US Bank I will do the taxes and I won't be late! The whole reason why I did an escrow account was so that they would take care of taxes and insurance for me and I wouldn't have to worry about it.  So much for that.  Now I will have to be double checking it.  Granted I should have done that anyway, but I figured it would have been done properly like they said! I will definitely be checking up on them now around tax time.  After this mortgage I never want another one again.  Stuff like this drives me CRAZY and makes me so frustrated.

1 comment:

Cardiganwearer said...

The bank did that on the taxes for my house too, only I didn't find out until I saw my name was in the paper for not having paid my property taxes! I get the feeling that this happens a lot after buying a home.