Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Refinance Update - Part 12

As I indicated earlier, our home mortgage (recently refinanced) has been sold to CitiMortgage.  I just spent 20 minutes setting up an online profile with CitiMortgage.  And while I have reviewed each and every FAQ, each section regarding payments and payoff, there is nothing on the CitiMortgage web page about how to prepay principal except for their own "Biweekly Advantage Plan" which of course has a charge associated with it.

While I am disappointed, I'm not surprised because Citi makes more money off of us if we don't prepay our mortgage.  So my plan is to make our first regular payment and then I will call about how to set up principal prepayments.  Its important that Citi know that I'm going to be making principal prepayments so that they properly apply them and so they don't assume I'm making some partial regular payment.

3 comments:

Jim R said...

I had Citi for a mortgage until a recent refinance. Making extra payments to principal was pretty easy. They had options under payments somewhere. I had it setup to do automatic payments including additional principal amounts. I'd find the exact spot, but now that its refinanced it is paid in full and I don't see payment options any more.

Sam said...

Thanks for your comment Jim, glad to hear you didn't have any trouble prepaying on your CitiMortgage.

At this point, I'm going to pay our first regular payment and make sure our real estate taxes are paid (we prepaid our taxes, which are due in Nov. when we closed) and then I'll worry about setting up way to prepay. At present, I'm putting the prepayment funds aside in our ING account.

FrugalCoconut said...

I also had CitiMortgage for a second mortgage on my property. Their website was awesome ... I agree with the previous commenter because they made it extremely easy to make extra principal payments on their website which was extremely user friendly. I was very happy with my experience with CitiMortgage ... up until one last little annoyance as I was about to pay off the mortgage. Even though there was officially no prepayment penalty, there was essentially some other fee (I think it was two fees, actually) upon payoff that smelled just like a prepayment penalty but just called by a different name. I never did understand it but I just wanted it gone so I paid the unexpected fee which was a few hundred dollars (I want to say $400-something).