Mortgage

I guess I imagined that the paying off of our mortgage would be something like the closing of our mortgage: Both of us meeting with a loan officer around a table in an office at the bank, signing a dozen or so documents, writing a check, shaking hands all around. But as it turned out, the paying off of our mortgage wasn’t much more than any other simple transaction: I was able to do it on my own, calling the bank that currently held the mortgage (the fourth) to get the various numbers and addresses needed to wire the final payment, going to our bank and giving those various numbers and addresses to a teller, who entered them into a computer and sent them off and then gave me a photocopy of the one page “Foreign Outgoing Transfer Request.” I had to sign one document. And the whole transaction took maybe 10 minutes – 5 minutes on the phone to get the necessary information from the mortgage bank, and another 5 minutes to wire the final payment from our bank (not counting the 5 minutes it took for me to drive to the bank). It was a bit anti-climactic. At dinner I told my wife that I’d paid off our mortgage, and she asked if we shouldn’t be having champagne or something to celebrate. I said I didn’t think champagne was something occasioned by a 10-minute “Foreign Outgoing Transfer Request.” I suppose we could have some sort of ceremony where we burn the documents we’re supposed to get in the next week to ten days officially finalizing our mortgage. But I think there’s an ordinance against open burning.