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Comment by alexpotato | Hacker News Reader

My favorite was the following:

- I still have a mortgage on a property but don't live there so the mortgage bill gets sent to a different address (b/c rental property)

- Company A originated the mortgage and sells it to Company B

- Company B completely ignores the mailing address and starts sending bills to the original property address

- only through blind luck did I realize that the mortgage bill was being unpaid

This seems like basic, basic bookkeeping but I guess it's also a reminder that "reality has more detail than people realize" and that there are plenty of opportunities for improving systems.

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Ar some point I had all the bills on my calendar and a event to check if the company confirmed the payment. It saved me at least a handful of times. I confess that I am not that diligent anymore, but I also have scheduled things in a more reliable way that always notifies me on payment. But the other day the bank skipped one of the payments because some information on the destiny account have changed but nothing was shown. It is always annoying to stop what you are doing to do this

One of those myths too many programmers believe: All street addresses can accept US mail. Not necessarily the issue in this comment, but when somebody gives you both a shipping address and a mailing address and you send mail to the shipping address, the fault is yours if it doesn't arrive.

Another: A particular street address only maps to one person, entity, or family. Counterexample: Giant skyscraper with a zillion tenants, each in a different suite. Or a giant apartment building. Etc.

Still another: One particular suite address only maps to one person, entity, or family. Counterexample: Any of thousands of commercial mailbox-rental / package-shipping stores in US strip malls, which tend to have suite numbers (within the mall) and possibly hundreds of tenants, all at one suite.

One of those facts that mortgage owners refuse to internalize: the party responsible for the payments is not necessarily living on the property. There is absolutely no reason in this century to assume that the mailing address for real estate mortgage related correspondence is the address of the property. Related: the assumption that if there are two names on a mortgage with given names that are commonly understood to be gendered, the parties are legally married.

I own the duplex I live in. The actual property address is the rental unit. Every time the mortgage gets sold my tenant gets mail about it until I can change the mailing address back to my actual address (next door). It’s absolutely infuriating because the carelessness of my mortgage servicer who I don’t even choose makes me look bad.

You should be able to go to the USPS and do a change of address for yourself. That way every time mail for you is sent to your tenant, it will go to you.

https://moversguide.usps.com/mgo/move-combined-mobile will let you do it online.

It's a pain that you have to do this because of their incompetence. But it will save you the embarrassment.

This is actually a great idea.

go to the *private company the usps sold the captive market to.

It may be harder to do that now.

One of the changes USPS made in recent years is that they are securing mail forwarding. That type of arrangement may not be possible.

I just moved. Moving a business address was hard. For an individual, the only requirement ai saw was that I pay a small fee with a credit card registered to one of the addresses.

Doesn't that only last for a year? I remember it being just for temporarily catching mail you haven't changed the address for yet.

It lasts for a year by default. You can pay for up to three years. But I see no reason you couldn't then do it again.

This is a great idea. I'll try it but I'm not sure it will work. I believe there is a time limit on the forwarding and it looks like not all mail is forwarded, including financial documents.

https://www.usps.com/manage/forward.htm

If the world were just, the consequences for that would be the morons owning the mortgage having to eat a missed payment.

(They'd stop fucking this sort of thing up pretty quick if they faced financial consequences for it.)

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