Mortgage Companies and Taxes

Mortgages ugh. I wish we all had unlimited funds to buy and sell what we need in the housing world but that just isn't realistic. So we rely on Mortgage Companies to help fulfill our wish of home ownership. We purchased our forever (fingers crossed) home about 8 years ago. We had a good down payment and some gifts from family but we still needed to secure a mortgage for a close to $200,000. My husband busted his ass to get our house paid off in 7 years (almost exactly), double, triple payments a month. He rocked it and I am so very proud of him. Now we own the house outright and have zero dealings with the mortgage company anymore. Or so we thought. Fast forward 11 months to our Sunday afternoon return home from a family vacation. Going through the mail we find a letter from our township saying our 2016 taxes weren't paid. Um what? Our taxes were taken out of our mortgage escrow account right? Wrong..... It seems that our Mortgage Company (as well as others) hold the taxes basically the whole year paying them at the very last possible moment. Since we paid off our mortgage in August it was just the "right" time of year that the Mortgage Company could collect our interest all year long and then just not pay the taxes. Now you may be wondering where that money went. Well we did get the money back last year after payoff. It was only marked Escrow, no explanation, no tax bill, nothing but "escrow" in notes. We assumed (yes yes Ass U Me) that it was over payment for early payoff and went about our business. Sigh. Now we owe about $10,000 in taxes instead of $5,000. So heads up everyone. If you didn't know before you know now, and if you knew already great for you, wish we did. Happy house hunting and payments y'all!!

ARC review of Worth the Wait by Lori Foster

Worth the Wait by Lori Foster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Worth the wait is a follow up book to Don’t Tempt Me, which was first released in July 2016. I happened upon Don’t Tempt Me after completing a book by another author. I loved it and was hungry for a continuation of the Guthrie Brothers story. After waiting for months and months its finally available to read to be transported to Clearbrook once again. Lori Foster, honestly, is one of my favorite authors. She has the ability to put you right in the middle of each and every book she writes. You feel the emotions each character feels, you can hear the sounds, almost smell the smells, and picture each character by her incredible descriptions of people and their surroundings. Worth the Wait is about main characters Hogan Guthrie and Violet Shaw. We met both characters in Don’t Tempt Me and got a muted sense of their attraction to one another. While I loved the characters of Hogan and Colt in Don’t Tempt Me, I don’t know if that transferred over to Worth the Wait where Hogan is concerned. Colt is a dream kid, funny, helpful, loves his family. But I found myself wishing I knew more about Hogan, overall his back-story seemed rushed along.

As with most Lori Foster novels we find ourselves getting involved in secondary characters and stories both separate from or including main characters. Some we hope to see get a book of their own (Barber, Colt) and some well maybe we don’t. Worth the Wait has a possible don’t with a secondary romance between Nathan Hawley and Brooklin Sweet. I enjoyed Nathan’s brief introduction in Don’t Tempt Me but I felt like his story was just randomly inserted in the book as a way to fill the pages. After finishing the book I feel like I know a little more about Nathan but mostly that his story was just a way to fill the pages between Hogan and Violet’s dance around each other. I know Nathan wasn’t a main character for this book and I know he was a friend of Hogan and Jason. I also know his story with Brooklin ties in to the story of Hogan and Violet, I just don’t feel like his time was in this book.

Seemingly I felt like the story between Hogan and Violet dragged on a little long with some interactions taking a long time on mundane things and speeding through things that may have set up a bigger connection between them. I think more time could have been spent on Violet’s family life, her connection with her uncle etc and grow that a little more for her back-story. Both main characters fell a little flat with detail on the who/what/why of their pasts. Don’t get me wrong, they definitely felt right for each other, I just didn’t get swept away by their romance as I normally do with a Lori Foster novel.

Overall I enjoyed Worth the Wait, even the parts that bug me like being able to see someone roll their eyes behind big ridiculous sunglasses, but it probably won’t be one book I go back to read and read over again (i.e. Rowdy, Trace, Zane to name a few). Sadly this book just didn’t grab my uninterrupted full interest, this time. But I know Lori Foster will grab my attention over and over again with each new book she publishes. I received Worth the Wait as an ARC in exchange for an honest review (watch out because blunt is my middle name). Hope this review helps now hurry and buy your own copy of Worth the Wait to prove me wrong, everyone loves to be right!!

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