Here’s a story to demonstrate what I’m talking about – there once was a woman who was trying to obtain a much needed loan modification from Bank of America. She has been given the runaround for TWO solid years !!! You heard me . . .
This woman owns a 2 bedroom home near the USC campus. Her mortgage payments were running close to $2,300/mo. – not an easy amount of cash for her and her husband to come up with every month. She works as a housekeeper, her husband is a truck driver. Several months ago, they had to opt out from getting some medical and dental treatments that they and their kids needed – just so they could pay their loan on time. Even with these challenges, they religiously made their payments every month.
In 2009, her employer caught wind of the Making Home Affordable program, an Obama initiative, and helped his housekeeper in filling out all of the application forms. Then… things went downhill from there.
B of A put this woman through a terrible time – they repeatedly misplaced documents and repeatedly required her to submit the same information over and over, going on for months. She was finally given a trial loan mod lowering her monthly payments to around $1,500. In May of 2010, she received confirmation of a permanent loan mod that required a monthly payemnt of almost $2,000 – not the $1,500 she believed she was getting . . . but at least better than the $2,300/mo.
During this whole process, she continued making all of her payments on time, usally a week or two before they were due. Here’s where the story gets really BAD. BofA’s records say that she made her May 2010 payment of $1,500 as per her trial loan mod. BofA applied the check to her loan balance, but didn’t notate it as the 1st payment under the now finalized loan mod. Rather, they sent her a notice a few weeks later saying that she was late with her May payment. There are gory details and her employer sent correspondence to BofA to try to work it all out, but BofA just couldn’t get their story straight. Sometimes they would say that the situation had been dealt with and all was OK and sometimes BofA would say that a payment was still due. Sometimes the fault was hers, sometimes it was the lender’s fault, Fannie Mae.,
Suffice it to say that the horror story continued on and on -with no one from BofA able to explain or pinpoint the problem – instead, they just kept blaming her. Finally, BofA took responsibility . . . after two years of this utter nonsense and incompetency, and went back and credited her account with a full payment having been made as of May 2010a and all subsequent months. They also offered to try and clean up her credit record which was damaged as a result of this whole inane mess.
How many other horror stories are out there like this one??? Seems like BofA doesn’t want to spend the time and money it takes to clear up misunderstandings like this. And we’re letting them handle our money??? With our savings and checking and credit accounts??? It’s a scary proposition. With BofA reporting a $1.4 billion in profit last year, sure seems that they would be a little more on the ball.
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La Quinta buyers . . . and buyers across the Palm Springs Valley – Mortgage rates have fallen to record lows for the third straight week in a row. Home-buying and refinancing are more affordable than ever . . . for those who qualify.
