Pence Fine
How To Use A Mortgage Calculator
Everyone in my family, and everyone in the village in fact (which is about 150 people altogether if Maud the butcher made it through last night), knows that I’m not the sharpest pencil in the box when it comes to numbers and especially if when it comes to money. I was the kind of kid who used to leave money under my pillow for the tooth fairy and apparently I once asked the fish and chip shop man to please take some of chips back as he’d given me too many for my money (I really thought you paid per chip and even I could see there were more than ten pence worth of chips in my packet). Uncle Harry used to find it very amusing to say (loudly and repeatedly) “Pigs don’t fly, I’m not Irish, and two and two don’t equal five, unless you ask Annie over there of course”. He would usually guffaw unrestrainedly at his own wit at this point. So by the time I was old enough to move down the road (you couldn’t go much further without actually leaving town and no one did that) word had got around and I was generally regarded as the village idiot when it came to matters financial. I went along with the whole half-wit thing as it seemed cruel to deprive everyone of so much fun at my expense but it could get a bit tiring. When I started looking for a house (not that there was much looking involved – I stood at the end of High Street every morning until the morning a hearse pulled up outside Agnes Jones’s house and I was glad that she had a view of the park) there was lot of joking about how I’d be liable to give away all my savings for a shack, but I knew I’d strike a fair deal. After Agnes’s funeral My Aunt Maud took me aside and said she was there to help me in any way she could and did I rightly know what I was doing? I assured that I was not completely feather headed and would be fine, but she suggested that I consult a mortgage calculator anyway.
I didn’t know quite Aunt Maud thought the services of a special mortgage calculator would be necessary, but after battling for a while to figure out my mortgage payments using my little calculator I decided it was time to cast off my pride and consult the professional. I walked next door to the bank and Mr Smith put on his little badge that said “village banker” and asked how he could help me. I said “I’d like to speak to a mortgage calculator please”. Now I’m no stand-up comic so I knew that he wasn’t rolling around on the kitchen floor (the actual bank was a small safe under the kitchen table) because of my dazzling wit and I waited for his convulsions to stop so that he could explain. Eventually he paused long enough for me to repeat my request for a mortgage calculator to attend to me, but of course that juts set him off again.
“My dear girl” Mr Smith chortled (would the man ever stop laughing enough to talk to me?) “a mortgage calculator isn’t a person, it’s a something on the Internet, and you simply enter the cost of your property, your interest rate, and the term of your loan, and the mortgage calculator tells you exactly what you’ll be paying every month”. I started laughing too as I realized how very silly I must have sounded and Mr Smith and I went to find a mortgage calculator on the Internet. I had very strong feeling that I would never live this one down.
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