Not all servicers do this. Mine doesn't and previous ones didn't. They probably prefer to not be thought of as thieves.
Or you just couldn't figure out how.
The alternative is keeping the money in your demand account at 2.5%. Though I'm sure the reality is that in your locality, behind the Great Firewall of Idiocy, you had to work pretty hard to find that. If you ever get your phone outside the exclusion zone, you may want to see what other financial institutions are available. I, too, would not trust Vinny on the corner with my future mortgage payment, as I'm sure he's unable to schedule ACH payments in advance, and, boy, if he ever sees an extra couple mortgage payments in the rainy day funds he handles for you, he'll probably kidnap your dog to see if he can get it out of you. Not to mention the obvious, that if he gets hit by a car your money disappears. If you're ever out of the gulag, look for an FDIC-insured bank that will allow you to schedule ACH payments in advance: not only should you get a better rate than that, but if they fail, you'll get your money in two days and your payment will happen. Without those, though, you're right, keep giving your mortgage holder free money in case you can't pay them. It's obvious.
It's better to tell the servicer how to apply the money you sent when you send it. This is why mail in payments have a coupon that you send along with your payment.
Sure, the servicer does allow you to schedule payments, but there's a reason I didn't do this: I wanted to guarantee that the money would already be there in case anything unexpected happened that would prevent a transaction while I was gone.
I never said it didn't work the way you think it does.
No, you just plain don't even know how any of this works, you just like to pretend you do. You've made yourself look incredibly stupid so many times now, and you know it, which is why you post anonymously.
You seemed to have ignored how your definition of hedging allows your S&P ETF to be hedged by soup. The least you could do is observe how Heinz Kraft is in the S&P 500, so hedging that ETF with cans of soup is a valid but extremely inefficient hedge by my (and everyone knowledgable's) definition.
While a can of tomato soup is technically an asset, it depreciates until consumed, at which point it has no salvage value. The same can't be said for shares of Heinz, which are not a consumable good. This is accounting 101 dude...