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5. Due to a bug in _your_ code, accidentally have your mortgage payments bounce because of lack of funds, and get evicted from your home.

With great power comes great responsibility. The number of times you say 'perhaps', 'unless', 'so if', or 'could' is so high that you would have to thoroughly review your code before trusting it.

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To get to that point though I'm sure the bank would be calling you for their money, sending you letters, serving you with legal documents, ect and I think most people should notice if their account suddenly had extra unbudgeted money the size of your mortgage payment.

So yeah, be careful but I don't think you could lose your home.

Don't be so confident that the right thing happens always. I had a friend that was told he could delay a payment and they tricked him into paying late and they sold his home already... after many legal battles he eventually won but the bank said that they already sold the home so that we're in a losing situation either way. They picked the lesser of two evils. Form what i understand it was because two branches of the bank were working independently and they didn't properly relay information.

That sounds like intentional malice rather than an accident. If you can't bounce a cheque safely, you don't really have a bank; you have a loan shark.

Was a legit large bank. They did lose the case, and forked over for it but still... Had nothing to do with who was right or wrong and made shit very complicated. NEVER go 3 months without paying your payments no matter what anyone says the risks are way too high. Oh and always have a friend that is a lawyer ;)

Never attribute to malice what can be explained by sufficiently entrenched bureaucracy. Often they are indistinguishable.

Especially when interests are aligned.

To be fair, your original comment: "was told he could delay a payment"; namely, "a payment". One. The limit for danger with any credit is 3 monthly payments. Technically a single missed/delayed payment can affect your credit bureau, though many credit providers are nice enough not to report 30 and 60 day faults.

Anyone who thinks they can get away with 3 months of not paying back any kind of credit product, let alone a mortgage, is going to be in trouble. If your friend skipped 3 mortgage payments in a row, I'm surprised they won the case in court. They must have had concrete proof that a bank employee truly misinformed about what it means to miss multiple payments in a single year, let alone 3+ consecutive payments.

Maybe it was indeed one payment and then the bank asked for something unreasonable, further delaying other payments.

It happened to me once. I received an unreasonable bill for building maintenance fees, didn't pay, they sent me a lawyer making more unreasonable demands, I told them to fuck off (after consulting a lawyer myself). The thing is : because I didn't know how much to pay, I didn't pay for several months in a row. I only paid after everything was sorted out. It never went to court BTW, the guy responsible for the mess has been fired and his successor did a great job cleaning it.

You are right... They asked him to delay the payments, and said everything was OK. He paid but then he later found out that the bank had other plans in mind.

This is why he eventually won the case... But the bank was already aware of this, and they were just going through the motions. Either way, be careful.

He did not get his house back though...

Mate it's called a sandbox and reviewed apps... We're not talking about hooking up some PHP script to your bank account... and I'm not even affiliated with them!

Mate the entire point here is that it's your own code, not reviewed by anyone else.

Hey andrewflnr, he's pretty right. We've also worked on some mechanisms to prevent accidentally making unwanted/mistake transfers :)

You mean you actually are leaning on packaged, reviewed rootcode to prevent errors? That seems somewhat inconsistent with your stated mission.

Nope, never said anything remotely close to that :) I said there are ways to prevent mistakes, like confirming transfers before executing them, etc

Well obviously. That's not actually what curryhowardiso said, though, which was "sandbox and reviewed apps". The sandbox is obvious, so I ignored it, and you're still telling me that reviewed apps aren't a major factor either. So, what are we talking about again?

I imagine open source projects emerging out of this. Those would hopefully be well-reviewed and -tested, and give you simpler access to common features.

It could be in the form of frameworks/libraries, but also full-blown clients. Even if it wasn't your custom code, you could still chose which software fits your needs best.

Well, sure. But lots of people write code that involves doing things money for a living. (I do.)

...If someone wants to say, "well sure, but that's not my money", I hope they'll also name the services or apps they work for, so I can avoid those.

They generally have a team behind them, rather than an individual.

...And?

Teams tend to promote good practices, such as code reviews and thorough CI setups, which are hard to achieve as an individual.

Maybe don't use this for paying mortgage or anything high risk?

So just set it that every money movement made by a script when going over a certain threshold must be validated before happening.

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