Frustration

It is beautiful outside, it has been a very productive day and I am in a great mood. However, everywhere I turn today leads to frustration. As some of you may know, I have more reasons than just vanity and my weight loss contest to lose my excess weight. I have some health issues that are making it an absolute necessity for me to shed the pounds. So, I have a monthly checkup with my doctor to make sure that I am progressing. My monthly appointment was this morning and it didn't start off well. The nurse led me to the dreaded scale and guess what?!?! They got a brand new scale and it said that I weighed 3 lbs more than the old scale. You may ask how I would know this, well, I am of the school where I weigh every day. I do this because I know myself. If I get off for a day and I see it on the scale within a few days it makes me check myself and stay committed. If I only check sporadically then I get distracted and sometimes that off day stretches into days. By the time I see it on the scale I have gained several pounds and then I get frustrated and want to give up. So, I weigh myself before I go to the doctors office so that I will know how to adjust my weight at home to be inline with the doctors scale. Ok - that was a long explanation, but apparently their old scale was off. So I went in thinking that I lost 10 lbs this month for a total of 33, but alas I only lost 7 for a total of 30. Still good, but very frustrating.

My next frustration came when I called CitiMortgage. I am now going to join the finanicial institution bashing that has been popular on this site. In January I started paying all of my big bills (car, home, etc.) every 2 weeks instead of once a month. It is hard to get on this schedule because you basically have to pay ahead, but once you do I find that it is easier - and you save money on interest. I thought things were going well until I received a call from Citi last week stating that I was 2 months behind on my mortgage payment - even though I was technically 1/2 month ahead. It seems that they will not allow you to make partial payments unless you PAY THEM MORE MONEY to enroll in a special program. UNREAL! So, they had taken that 2.5 months of payments and applied all of them to my prinicipal and loaded me down with a bunch of late fees for not making my payments. Here is the best part, once I explained everything they had the audacity to tell me that they would do me a favor and waive the late fees for me as a one time courtesy. WHAT?!?! I paid you early and extra and you are doing me a favor? Even better - they didn't apply the payments to my principal when they received them - nope they waited until the end of the month when they had received the entire payment and then applied them to the wrong place, so I didn't even get the benefit of paying my prinicpal down faster. Long story short, I just made my umpteenth call and it is still not straightened out. I have paid for all of March and half of April and although that money is sitting in my account they will not apply it to my payments. I think I finally got someone to understand what needs to happen. I called to find out more about their bi-weekly program - $375 enrollment fee and then a $1.50 fee every time you make a payment. What a rip off! So, I promptly went in and changed my bill pay back to once a month. At least I tried!

Sorry for the rant, but I had to get that off my chest! I think maybe I will work from home for the rest of the day and try to soak up some sunshine and fresh air.