The Junkmail Deluge

One of my recent first time home buyers called me the other day, asking about the mounds of refinance, home equity lines of credit, and credit card offers piling up in her mailbox, whether they were important or not.

Usually - not important.

In Pima County, home sales are public record, which means that companies can take a feed of those records, see that you just bought a house, for how much, and send you a bunch of junkmail, offering you loans or refinances and whatnot. By and large, you can ignore this stuff.

However - it’s worth at least a quick look to make sure that the mail is really junk and not your existing lender telling you that they’ve sold your loan to some other company. Many times, the company you make your monthly mortgage payment to changes fairly quickly after you buy a home, so you need to watch for a letter from your existing company, and a letter from the new loan servicing company with your payment coupons.

Because you don’t want to be digging through 3 days of trash to find that payment coupon you ripped into pieces without even opening the envelope, so that you can tape it all back together and mail in your mortgage payment to the new loan servicing company when you realize your loan has been transferred. Not that I’d know from experience or anything.