Posted on: 13th Jul, 2010 07:07 am
I have lived in my home for over two years now. It was a new construction home.
My mortgage payment was 781 with a 291 escrow. Total=1072.
Now, suddenly my payment has gone up to 781 with a 769 escrow. Total=1550.
So my MONTHLY payment went up almost $500 which is a 50% increase. I called the county treasury and they said my taxes went up because they had been taxing me on the land and not the house. The mortgage company is playing "catch up" for the past two years.
It took them two years to figure out that I had a house on that land???? I feel like they are scalping me. Is this legal?? This increase alone ensures that I will not be able to make my mortgage payments at all.
What can I do? Please help.
My mortgage payment was 781 with a 291 escrow. Total=1072.
Now, suddenly my payment has gone up to 781 with a 769 escrow. Total=1550.
So my MONTHLY payment went up almost $500 which is a 50% increase. I called the county treasury and they said my taxes went up because they had been taxing me on the land and not the house. The mortgage company is playing "catch up" for the past two years.
It took them two years to figure out that I had a house on that land???? I feel like they are scalping me. Is this legal?? This increase alone ensures that I will not be able to make my mortgage payments at all.
What can I do? Please help.
This is legal to do, as your taxes have increased from the time you purchased the home. Your lender should have noticed earlier, but they didn't, so they are now charging you more than the actual increase in taxes in order to bring the account even. You can offer to pay your lender the back owed taxes in a lump sum and that will reduce your mortgage payment down to what it would normally be, but it would still be higher than your original payment due to the higher taxes.
Thanks for your response. I called my lender and he offered to remove the "cushion" payment of $76/mo, and to spread out the back taxes over 36 months instead of 12, which would reduce the extra payments to $300/month instead of $500. I made sure there was no charge for this and went ahead and had him do it. However, I'm not sure what this will do to my payments next year. I will pay extra when I can, though. This has been a hard year for finances.
