George Tsiokos’ blog

Countrywide wants me to believe that making more payments on my loan will benefit me. For example, with PayPlan/52, I could pay off my mortgage every week.

You may be able to save thousands of dollars in interest payments and reduce the term of your loan by several years, or just enjoy the ability to have your payment drafts occur when you receive your paycheck.

In reality, they take my money every week but hold it until they’ve accumulated enough to pay the monthly bill. So the fact I made weekly payments had no effect on the loan. In the event I paid more than what was due for the month, it went against the principal, consequently reducing the interest and term of the loan.

While other lenders may offer similar plans, they also charge significant up-front fees, which can add up to hundreds of dollars. With PayPlan/52, you pay nothing to enroll, and a nominal fee of $1.00 for each weekly transaction.

I can pay additional principal when I make my monthly payment, consequently reducing the interest and term of the loan. So where’s the benefit of spending an additional $52/year for this PayPlan service?

Back in 2002 I posted a question in Usenet about the IPAddress class being serializable, but not serializing in ASP.NET. I just found the post, and noticed that no one responded with the reason why. So, here it is:

There are two types of serialization in .NET: System.Runtime.Serialization and System.Xml.Serialization. Runtime serialization uses the serializable attribute while XML serialization does not. Since ASP.NET uses XML serialization, the attribute was irrelevant.

The error I received was “System.Net.IPAddress cannot be serialized because it does not have a default public constructor.” One of the requirements of the XmlSerializer is that the class it is trying to serialize must have a default public constructor.