Thanks, Jesse.

meara, as I understand it, it's typical practice with mortgages that you have to specifically direct them to put any additional money towards the principal.

I've found this to be true. My bank will "credit" anything extra I pay towards future payments unless I specifically tell them it's to be put on the principle.

My Tom Hardy whoa! for the day. At least I'm assuming I'm done for the day.

meara, as I understand it, it's typical practice with mortgages that you have to specifically direct them to put any additional money towards the principal.

I've found this to be true. My bank will "credit" anything extra I pay towards future payments unless I specifically tell them it's to be put on the principle.

I can't even pay anything except the exact amount online. If I want to put a little extra or make an extra payment or whatever, I have to call the Real Estate Dept at the bank.

Go Canada!

I can vouch that the onus of marketing has fallen to the author. You're expected to organize that shit and sell the hell out of your book and market it any way you can.

I did get one publisher to cover my travel expenses to Chicago to promote Lost in the Grooves, but otherwise the most I've gotten are some postcards to promote the book.

Fortunately, Kim's a genius at that shit so the first two books had lots of marketing oomph. And the 33 book is part of a series and had a built in fan base so it just sort of continues to sell as people discover it or figure out that it's a good size for a xmas stocking.

ION, serious weather!

(That's a photograph, not a painting or a digitally mocked up image. Montana.)

Dude, I'm fine if they put the money toward a future payment--as long as they don't mark all of it for escrow!

Yeah, I can confirm what brenda said. Any unmarked extra payments I send in go to escrow. If we want to pay on the principal it has to be specified.

And we did that same sort of thing with our property taxes. The first couple of years we were still paying on the empty land property tax, which was nice. Then the nice assessor man came out and complimented our house and I was all, "Thank you!" and the SO was all, "Uh, you don't want him to like your house!" So yeah, the taxes went up and we knew that was coming. So we paid the taxes, because we knew we didn't have enough in the escrow account. But then the mortgage company paid the taxes again, and spread out the amount over the upcoming escrow payments. Oh. We didn't know they'd do that. Fortunately, each of us only paid 6 months worth so I was able to contact the bank so they didn't pay again until the year was up. But then we had this whole deal where we had to pay a bunch of extra in the middle of the year to make the escrow amount normal again.

I was all hmph. See if I'm ever proactive again.

So we paid the taxes, because we knew we didn't have enough in the escrow account. But then the mortgage company paid the taxes again, and spread out the amount over the upcoming escrow payments. Oh. We didn't know they'd do that.

That happened to me too. I had to apply to the county for a refund of what I'd paid, and my monthly payments went up (way up, since by the next year the taxes had increased as well) to make up the shortfall. Ugh.

But it looks like my taxes this year have actually gone down by nearly a grand. That plus the shortfall being over should mean relief this upcoming year, thank dog.