Lesson

“Old age is not for sissies.” ~ Bette Davis

“Monkey Trouble” – Hollis J. Works

We set the alarm this morning so we could go to the bank and the court house before meeting our friends for Lunch Bunch.

We received a letter from our reverse mortgage people several weeks ago saying we were in arrears on our taxes for the year 2015, threatening us with all kinds of dire actions if we didn’t pay up.  I dashed around looking for my receipt, but was unable to find anything. I called the assessors office and they confirmed they hadn’t received any payment from us. We leaped into the car, went to their office and paid our taxes – plus interest  – plus penalty. :0(  We copied everything and sent it certified mail to the reverse mortgage people. I apologized to my husband, saying I must be older and more doofus than I even knew, having forgotten to pay the taxes! My confidence was really shaken.

Yesterday I was doing more on our prep for taxes and FOUND the receipt for the tax payment from February, with a confirmation number from my online payment.

We went to the bank with the receipt and the other paperwork. The lady called somewhere, finally finding out that the electronic payment had been returned, due to a bad address on BillPay. She said they had sent me an email about it, and that it also should have shown online the next time I signed into BillPay.

The end result was that I had entered the address wrong into BillPay, picking up the physical address of the assessor’s office, rather than their post office box. DUH.  I also didn’t see their email or notice anything on BillPay. I had found where the payment was listed on my bank statement, but hadn’t picked up that they had returned the money to my account when the check was returned on that same statement.

So – I feel better than I HAD paid the taxes when I was supposed to, but hadn’t been careful enough about the address I put in BillPay, missed the email, and hadn’t seen the detail on the bank statement. I haven’t completely lost it yet, but I’m playing with a less than full deck….

Bette Davis hit the nail on the head with her quote.