Experiences pre-paying part of mortgage??

[Wes]

I'm looking at the best use for my income tax refund, and with the rate that I am paying on the DVC mortgage, I am thinking that putting it toward paying down the mortgage is the surest way to yield that big of a savings.

One of the things that is unusual about the DVC mortgage is that I never receive any statement of the balance still due. With my home mortgage, this comes every month, so that I can calculate ahead and do a $-to-$ comparison and know exactly what an extra payment of $X will mean: how much the new principal will be, how many months of payments it will take off of the back end, when I reach the point where my interest payment is finally less than my principal payment, etc.

So I have two clusters of questions:

1 - Have you ever requested/received a statement of your mortgage account history and balance? Is there any problem getting this from DVD?

2 - What experiences have people had on partially pre-paying? Was there anything that you did not expect -- difficulty, charges, anything -- bad or good? Was the payment posted as of the date you paid it (and thus reduce principal immediately) or did it not get applied until your monthly due date?

 

[KathyR]

I can give you my experience making extra payments. I have done this 3 times (paid it off in full on the third ).

My first time making an extra payment, I chose to send in a check. It took a while for them to say that they had received my payment. I had mailed it on a Friday, and they still said they had not received it the following Monday (10 days later). I was kind of freaking out thinking it was lost in the mail or something(LOL). But, all was well. They received my payment and it was put toward my balance. They had actually received it on Friday, but for some reason it did not post until Tuesday (day 11). Maybe they held it until it cleared, but it still would have been nice to know that they received it. If I would send in a check again, I would send it FedEx or use a similar service. Just so I would have a date of delivery and confirmation of receipt right away.

After the little prob with the first payment, I decided that this time I would opt to pay by credit card and pay it off when I got the credit card bill. This worked much better. The payment was charged the same day, and I was able to see it on my charge immediately. No freaking out this time

The third time I did the credit card again, and no problems again.

Those are my experiences with making extra payments. I hope it helped answer some of what you were looking for.

 

[Wes]

I called this AM and charged a partial payment. She said they take Visa or MasterCard.

I asked for a copy of my payment and balance history to be sent out after they post the payment, and she said with no hesitation that they will do that.

The balance they had was about $33 less than what I thought I owed. So once I receive the payment and balance history, I can reverse engineer it and create a spreadsheet to do the computations the way they do it. (I had set it up using the same method that my home mortgage company does theirs, but DVD is doing something different -- fortunately the difference is to my advantage.)
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[Wes]

It has been almost 2 weeks since May 2.

The charge to my credit card was posted that day. So my extra payment did go in promptly.

However, I have yet to receive the promised printout of my payment and balance history.

 

[Olaf]

I'm also getting ready to do this with our tax refund. Another benie to using a credit card is frequent flyer miles. Our card is an AAdvantage card and I get 1 mile for every dollar. Adds up.

 

[Wes]

It arrived May 15. I made the request May 2, and it was printed out May 3, but it was not post-marked until May 6.

 

[lsutigger]

Can you pre-pay on your mortage if you have automatic debit every month? You know, you don't write the check. I had wondered about that before, if DH and I won the lottery (LOL) and wanted to pay more on DVD. If so, would you suggest that I call and charge it to a credit card?

 

[Beth]

LSUTigger.

I have one monthly payment come out of a special savings account I set up for both my original contract and my add-on. That payment covers the scheduled payment for my original contract, and a little extra to principal for my add-on (at a higher interest rate).

About 3 months ago, I set up an "additional" payment to happen bi-weekly (payday) to go to my add-on. I initiated this through online bill-pay (set up on a recurring basis.)

I called Member Accounting after the first couple of payments to make sure they were being applied properly. Now, I'll probably just check up on them every once in a while.

Point of reference, though. If you <i>do</i> send in a check or electronic payment - instead of calling and talking to a rep from Member Accounting - make sure you make the payment payable to DISNEY VACATION DEVELOPMENT, and not "DVC." My first payment was credited to my dues, instead of my loan.

Hope this helps. The folks at Member Accounting have always been most helpful! If you want to add some extra to principal to come out with your monthly payment initiated by DVD - all they'll ask you to do is fax your request to them - it's real easy.

-Beth