Making a mortgage holder accountable

[SoCalDem]

The beginning:

We decided to pre-pay some mortgage payments.

In the "olden days" a mortgage holder gave you a coupon-book, with each coupon specified for a particular month. It was easy to pre-pay.. you just sent a check attached to each coupon, and it was credited.. If you paid Jan Feb Mar Apr, you could "skip" payments until it was time for May to be paid.

Now that they have switched to "statement" billing, it's so easy to get things screwed up, and boy did it ever..

MY records show we are paid up until August, and yet they keep mailing me statements that show that we owe for June.. That means they have lost or mis-allocated TWO mortgage payments.

I have called and written for a month now. I have faxed stuff, sent stuff through the mail.. and just this week they said they were "researching" it, and should have a resolution in 60-90 days.

Both checks have cleared our account..in FEBRUARY.. but the mortgage company does not keep track of the check number, and the date they received it is different from the day they credited us, which is different from the dates I mailed the check or processed the online payment, so my dates do not necessarily correspond to any of their dates.

Several months ago they even assessed us a late charge, even though the payment was on online payment well in advance of the late-charge cut off date.. we are in Calif and they are in texas, and yet they wanted me to believe that it took 16 days to receive & process the electronic payment.

From that time on, I wrote an actual check, so I would know exactly when they presented it for payment, but now they have managed to lose TWO payments.

This created a false shortage in our escrow account, and they then sent me a shortage statement, and billed us $544.00 or they would raise next year's payments by $72 a month.

Now the fun part:

I sent them another accounting along with another payment but I sent it certified (should have done that a long time ago:grr:..).. I mailed the check & copies on TUESDAY, and YESTERDAY (Friday) our check cleared our account.

so ..because they knew that I would get a copy showing exactly when they received the check, there was no way they could hold onto it..

It's a pain in the ass to have to go to the post office and to have to write a real check, but it does keep them honest :)

If they pull this stunt with even 100 people a month, they could be raking in big bucks.

[louis-t]

1. "it can take up to 7 business days for your payment to..."

Unless you forget to cover the check, which means they post it the next day. :eyes: Crooks, all of them.

[SoCalDem]

2. I know they take their time, but now they are losing it entirely

and then telling me it may take THREE MONTHS to "resolve" it..and Oh yes.. since WE did not credit your escrow account for two months, your payments are going up..and you owe $544 more..:grr:
of course the money left MY account (the online banking payments) in a nano-second..

and even the payments made by check cleared quickly too.. they knew they could not claim a late payment since I was 3 payments ahead, but hey.. if they managed to "lose" a few payments, they could get me to pony up more for the escrow account...

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

3. Can you check your mortgage online?

I have a giant file on my mortgage company because they do things like send me 3 coupon books with 3 different amounts within one week, send me giant bills for non-existant escrow shortages and then send me a refund checks for escrow overpayment, and so on.

Fortunately, they do allow you to check your mortgage online where I can clearly see dates, amounts credited to what account, etc. When my mortgage payment went up this year as usual, they said the new amount became applicable on February 15th. So is the February payment the old amount or the new amount? Naturally I sent in the higher amount just in case, BUT it turns out it was the lower amount! Ha! So they took the payment and credited the entire thing as an extra principal prepayment but NOT a mortgage payment and THEN tacked on a late fee. But, I was able to see the whole thing when I checked my mortgage account online and managed to get it cleared up with just 2 1 hour phone calls (the first customer service rep said it was all taken care of and deleted the principle repayment, but then did not credit it to the mortgage payment like she said she would. No, that took a second phone call to assign the money to mortgage.) But, like I said, I could see the whole clusterf!@#$ in the online record which I print and keep for my own records.

I bet that your extra payments were assigned to prepaid principal and that's why it looks like your mortgage is not paid. I personally also believe that the best record keeping and tracking is by making online payments. You can see when you made the payment and when it left your account and you can tell easily if they are monkeying around.

[DesertFlower]

6. you might be right about the principal.

when we bought our first house someone told us not to make extra payments. they said you have to make a payment every month.

[SoCalDem]

9. we were making three payments a month

there was no non-paying month.. I even called and made sure it was ok before I started prepaying. they assured me it was.....bastards

[DesertFlower]

4. wells fargo has our mortgage. they

send a monthly statement which also tells us how much was credited the past month and also the outstanding loan balance. i also have it set up on-line.

we don't make extra payments. we do pay extra towards the principal. there's a place on their coupon to show it. i also write it on the check.

we don't have an escrow account. we pay our taxes and homeowners separately.

[SoCalDem]

5. As soon as we get this mess straightened out, I'm going to try to get

them to remove the escrow account. I changed insurance companies since they were ripping us off.. I paid a year in advance last week, and now they will owe me a refund from the Hartford insurance they had us on.. It's anyone's guess how long it will take to get that refund..and to get them to remove the insurance from our account..

I am starting to think I am going to have to take a trip to texas, and demand to see a person ....in person :)

[DesertFlower]

7. we made it clear when we bought our

second house that we did not want an escrow account. when we had the first house the payment amount kept changing because of the escrow account. sometimes it was lowered, other times it was higher.

good luck to you. BTW. which bank has your account?

[SoCalDem]

8. AHMSI.. our mortgage has been sold no less than 4 times since we refi-ed in '03

This outfit has only had it since 2-09 (they bought it from Citibank)

[FarCenter]

10. Generally, paying ahead on a mortgage doesn't mean that you can skip a payment

I think that any early payment would be credited to the principal.

AHMSI is a servicing company. They aren't the actual holder of the mortgage. Most likely it has been securitized.

https://ahmsi3.com/servicing/ahmsi_aboutus.asp

"AHMSI is based in Coppell, Texas, with servicing operations in Irvine, Calif., Jacksonville, Fla., and Pune, India. It is funded by Wilbur Ross & Co. LLC., a private equity firm based in New York,"

[SoCalDem]

12. The statements they did send us showed that it was being

credited properly. It's just that they LOST two payments, even though the supervisor i finally talked to admitted they had, and she "found" them, but she could not "fix" it. I still had to go through the proper channels..and until I sent it certified, they just ignored me.

We are not "skipping" payments...just making extra payments. Once the mess is cleared up we will just pay extra on principal.

I am just sick of playing robot-phone-tag and pressing 1 or 4 or 6 or whatever.. and finally when I get a person, they put me on hold and then I get disconnected and have to start all over..

Right now they have about $4k of our money (incorrectly applied PLUS the $544 I sent them...and they owe me 6 months worth of insurance that was prepaid last november ($588)= $5132.00 that I am out-of-pocket ..plus the recent payment I sent them which was really for Sept, but they claim it's for June..

[FarCenter]

13. Doing anything out of the ordinary is sure to get screwed up

Mortgage payment processing is a very high volume operation. These are one of the largest processors in the country.

I was assuming that you were considering that you were making payments ahead of time so you could omit payments for some months?

You said "If you paid Jan Feb Mar Apr, you could "skip" payments until it was time for May to be paid."

It's doubtful whether they would be able to consider money received in Jan as payments for future months instead of just crediting the entire excess to the principle. So even if they receive 4 payments in Jan, they would be looking for another in Feb.

[SoCalDem]

14. they got 3 in feb and 2 in march and 1 in april

after the 2nd one in march is when I realized that they had lost two.. I kept paying every month and their latest statement we got in late April showed a "next payment due date" of June 1.. That's why I only sent one in april and another one this past Tues ..

they are only getting one-a-month until they find our missing ones and credit them.. :)

Even Shitty-Bank did a better job:)

[DesertFlower]

11. that's probably why you're having problems.

they don't know what the hell they're doing.

our house was custom built so we had a construction loan. when we closed it was with the same bank. we wanted a 15 year mortgage. they would only give us a 30 probably because they had already sold our mortgage. our first payment went to a different bank. i think it was WaMu -- then after a few years they sold it to wells fargo. they make more interest on the 30. i didn't want to refinance and pay all those costs so we just decided to pay extra on the principal every month. it's been 7 years and the mortgage is down to half of what we financed.

talk about screw ups. there was a woman here in arizona who had a CD for years with wells fargo. it was worth almost $100,000. when she went to cash it in she was told that they had no record of it. it was taken out with first interstate bank which was bought by wells fargo. she went to the news. right after she was on tv they found the CD. after that another couple who saw her on tv came forward. they were having the same problem. they put them on tv and again they're CD was miraculously found.

i hate banks. i think they're evil.

good luck to you. if you can't get it resolved you might want to contact your local tv news station.