Last updated on March 19, 2013
My mortgage was recently purchased by Green Tree Servicing from GMAC Mortgage; a fairly common practice in the banking world. This doesn’t bother me, but Green Tree’s refusal to process an on-demand online payment without a $12 fee has me frustrated enough that I’m looking at refinancing. It’s possible to pay without a fee by sending in a check + payment coupon or setting up automatic withdrawals, but I don’t want to do this. For larger payments I do not like having them automatically withdrawn, just in case needs vary and I have to miss a payment or want to make one early.
I guess I’ll just have to stick to those 1990s (and earlier) standbys: paper checks. Up until now the only reason I needed them was to pay the water bill, as Shelby Township’s Department of Public Works charges a similarly-stupid $6.50/transaction fee to pay one’s water bill online.
Don’t you have a system like our Direct Debit system? It’s automated withdrawal, but with guarantees against them messing up. And whether you pay extra or not is unrelated to the monthly payments you set up.
Cheques, service charges and the fear of automatic withdrawals is 1980s thinking, not 1990s :-) our only remaining bit of banking rubbish is 2% service charges on credit card transactions in shops.
I bet your bank transfers still take an amount of time to happen, rather than being instant too.
piku: We do, but the only way to do it with this company is on an automatic schedule. I don’t want to automatically pay the base amount every month; I want to pay more than that, with the additional amount being variable.