Mortgage Payoff "To Do" List

In a recent Q&A column, attorney/syndicated real estate writer Benny L. Kass gives this "to do" list when paying off a mortgage:

1. Make sure that your mortgage/deed of trust is formally released from the land records in the county where your house is located. Ask your former lender to confirm that they arranged for this release (If you are having trouble determining whether the release/satisfaction was filed, the local recorder of deeds may be of assistance.),
2. You should get your original promissory note and deed of trust returned to you, marked "paid and cancelled;"(1)
3. Advise your county real estate tax office to start sending you the real estate tax bills;
4. For those who had automatic bank withdrawals to pay your mortgage, make sure to stop these payments immediately.

For those of you looking to take advantage of the current low fixed rate mortgages available and are thinking of refinancing, you might want to keep the foregoing points in mind.

Source: Real Estate Mailbag (last Q&A in the article).

(1) I wonder how many homeowners actually realize that they are entitled to get back their original promissory note. Also, I wonder how many would be successful in getting back their original note nowadays, given that many of the geniuses in the mortgage industry (ie. lenders, servicers, securitizers, Wall Street wizards, etc.) never bothered to physically keep track of the loan documents after the mortgage was consummated, and have no clue whether they actually lost them, or merely forgot where they stashed them (possibly in a dumpster).

For an example of how clueless some in the mortgage industry are, see The Associated Press: American Home under fire over loan files, where a mortgage lender, through its legal counsel, makes an idiotic request of a bankruptcy court for permission to actually dump the original documents for 490,000 mortgage loans. KappaMtgDocsMissing