Of drinking and driving

My bestfriend's husband P was caught drunk driving last weekend. Apparently, he and my bestfriend, M were bar hopping and they were on their way to yet another bar when M started getting sick. She wanted to go home but P wanted to go to the bar anyway. So, they had an argument in the car and that's when P started driving erratically. A cop saw them and pulled them over. It must have been obvious that P was drunk because he was immediately ordered to the backseat of the cop car. M was left sitting in the passenger side of their car when the cop started talking to her. She pretended to be sober and carried on a decent conversation with the cop. Just when she thought she fooled him, he asked her to step out of the car. "No problem", she replied, except that all of her efforts to look and act sober went into waste when instead of stepping out of the car, she rolled out of the car instead!

Needless to say, P spent the night in jail and M was driven home by the cop. Of course, driving violations do not end that painlessly. He will have to go to court in a couple of months and we're guesstimating the fine to be around $1000 and another $1000 for the required driving school, counselling, and stuff.

Lesson of the story: DO NOT DRINK AND DRIVE. It's f*cking costly. M and P got off pretty easy actually. They could have crashed their car and paid the ultimate price, their lives.

We are in the red

E and I set up our mortgage payment to be automatically deducted from one of our bank accounts. Well, the stupid Bank of America took more money than they should have and we now have a negative balance. That's right, we are broke.

E doesn't understand why our mortgage would suddenly go up when we have a fixed interest rate. The only reason I could think of is that they have to replenish our escrow account. The escrow account is what pays our property tax and home insurance and all that good stuff. The bank has to keep it at a certain amount each year by law. Since California's housing market soared and home values increased, our property tax also went up. I think that after a few years of paying a higher than expected property tax, our escrow account is now below the minimum. In order to bring it back up, the bank would have to raise our mortgage payment.

Whatever the reason is, it still would have fine if we were only informed ahead of time. But NO, we didn't get any notification at all. In the past, B of A has been very good to us. We have a Premier Account with them which gives us a lot of extra services for free and the people at our local branch are very friendly. The thing is, I don't really care for all these little perks they give us if they are going to mess with our hard earned money. They better reverse the fines they tacked on to our account or I'm taking our business somewhere else. Come to think of it, maybe it's time to look at those refinance offers I get in the mail.