Crystal Groves

I received my first tax notice for Fiscal 2009 on Friday. I wasn’t sure what it was at first and then realized that in PA you have to forward your property tax bills to your mortgage holder to pay out of your escrow account if you have one, which I do.

Right now my escrow account has like $1600 in it, and this bill is for $503.97 if paid by April 30th, which is a 2% discount. Normal price is $514.26 if you pay by June 30th, and the penalty price is $565.69 if I pay by December 2009. Naturally I want the discount so I mailed this off Monday.

I’m very very new to property taxes and escrow though, being as this is my first time owning property. I’m curious, does the $1600 currently in my escrow account mean that I have over $1,000 overpaid in it? Or should I expect another tax bill soon for some other crazy PA tax that would take over the $1,000. Or do they split property tax bills into several payments throughout the year and this is just the first quarter or something? And even so, I’m still paying into my escrow account every month, so the account is just going to keep getting bigger and bigger, so that wouldn’t make sense.

These may just be questions for my mortgage company, but if anyone has any insight, I’d be all the appreciative for it.

Silly PA taxes.

I’m going to set up a reminder on April 1st to verify the payment was received from my mortgage company because 1. I don’t trust mortgage companies to do anything right, and 2. The tax collector does not send a receipt unless you mail a stamped addressed envelop with the payment, which I can’t because I’m not sending the payment.

I checked my credit report on Sunday since I hadn’t checked it since last spring, though technically I was given a copy from my mortgage lender in September. Regardless there’s been a lot of activity lately with buying the house, the identity theft, etc, so I was curious.

For those of you that don’t know, you can get your free credit report with Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion at annualcreditreport.com. It’s the only place you can get it for free unless your bank offers you the ability to send you your credit report, which I know some do. This doesn’t give you your FICO score, those you have to pay for, but it does give you a list of credit items in your credit history.

I personally suggest checking one of those every 4 months, instead of all 3 at the same time once a year. That way you can keep tabs on your credit throughout the year. A lot can happen in a year, and a lot of damage can be done in a year.

Anyway, I can’t check Equifax until the end of April (my big one), so I decided to check Experian, that way I can check Equifox sometime this summer.

Everything looks kosher, still only one negative item on my account from 2004, which probably won’t drop off till 2014. But I don’t need credit for anything right now, or maybe even ever again I don’t know.

Dad and I have been trying to contact the construction company that owns the huge wooded lot behind us for weeks now. They’ve never called us back, I don’t know what their deal is. I’m trying to be polite and ask permission to haul dead wood out of there to cut up for firewood.

I’m going to keep trying, but in the mean time I told dad to just start pulling wood out with the tractor. Heck if anything maybe that will get their attention faster. They’re just going to develop it anyway.

Once spring hits we usually like to start preparing our wood stockpile for the next winter, in addition to our normal gardening.

Going to be a busy spring. New cords of wood, whole new garden, whole new set of pens and chickens, almost complete restart of an herb garden.