Finances & Money

Our mortgage payment has decreased!

This morning, I opened up a mailer from our mortgage company and found a nice surprise. As a note, I fell asleep at 6:30pm last night and didn’t wake up again until about 6:45am today. I wasn’t really tired, so I’m not sure what happened. Stacie thinks I did it to get out of cleaning in preparation for her parents visiting tomorrow. Hmm.

Anyway, back to the mortgage payment. Through a combination of a lower homeowner’s insurance premium (by $100/year) and the bank holding too much in escrow, we got the following two “presents”:

1. Notice of a lower payment by almost $85 per month
2. A check for $284, which is reimbursement for what they already have in escrow

I almost overlooked the check, and now I worry whether we’ve gotten checks in the past. It really blended in with the overall statement. I don’t think we have, because this is the first time our payment has gone down instead of up in the 3 years we’ve owned our house.

So you may ask “What will you do with that extra $85 per month and check for $284??”. Well, the check is going into our savings to pay for what I expect a hefty income tax bill. The monthly savings, well, that’s the exact same amount our health insurance is going up each month! We have a really nice medical plan, which covers 100%, with no deductible, but they’re really ratcheting up the rates next year. I had considered dropping to a lower plan, or checking my wife’s employer’s plans, which I still will, but this makes the decision a little easier.

Right now, we’re in open enrollment for my employer, but I’m waiting to find out the plan changes for my wife’s plans. I don’t know when their open enrollment begins and ends, and I hope there’s at least some overlap so I’m not pressured to choose my plan without getting to compare. When the time comes, though, I’ll perform the same analysis that Shawn did in his “Choosing the Right Health Care Plan” series. However, for us, we’re not planning for any childbirth in the coming year, and I’m not a klutz, so we just need to investigate standard medical visits to do our cost comparisons.