Ironic Mortgage Shuffle

I think you mean taxes? Had that happen. Ever since, we’ve done PI only, pay T and I ourselves.

It’s not just the banks that are regulated, it’s a whole swath of financial instruments. RRSPs, for example, or the right to unlock funds from a LIF are all under federal regulation. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, a federal body, has important regulatory power over these things.

In the USA, many mortgages are originated by ordinary banks. They’re who you sign all the papers with, etc. They are the entity you owe and will pay monthly. Then a month later your bank sells your mortgage, and all the others they originated that month, to some financier company for cash. At which point the (largely unregulated) financier company hands servicing off to their subcontractor and your relationship with your bank as to the mortgage is ended.

Doing this greatly improves the appearance of your bank’s balance sheet and lets them originate far more mortgages per year than they could if they actually had to own all that debt themselves. Since mortgage origination has lots and lots of BS fees attached, that’s where they make their money; the fees for assembling the paperwork package and getting you to sign it.

Definitely seems like a commercial that would play on daytime TV between episodes of Divorce Court or something.

Sure, but it’s still the case that financial institutions like credit unions and trust companies are under provincial regulation, not federal.

Mortgages are also under provincial jurisdiction, not federal.

So are insurance companies.

So when a federally chartered bank offers insurance on mortgages, it has to comply with provincial insurance law.

If a federally chartered bank acquires a trust company as a subsidiary, the trust company remains under provincial jurisdiction. It does not come under federal regulation just because it’s been bought by a bank.

But how does one dance ironically? I’m not up on the latest dance moves.

I think I got my mortgage through Washington Mutual in 2003. I think WAMU sold the loan two weeks later. I refinanced from a 30-year fixed-rate loan to a 15-year fixed-rate loan in 2010. (Hey, kids! What year is it?) The refinance would have been through my credit union. All this time, my monthly payments have been made automatically from my credit union. Yesterday the credit union called me, and today I received a piece of mail from them, and another piece of mail from the mortgage-holder, saying that effective 21 October, TruHome Solutions will be servicing my loan on behalf of the credit union. That doesn’t really make sense to me. The CU could cut out the middleman and just transfer my payments to themselves. Since I have automatic payments, the woman from the credit union said I don’t have to do anything. They’ll change the payment destination on their end.

Here’s the funny part. My outstanding balance is $897. My mortgage payment on November 1st is $730. :laughing:

Not a thing here in Canada really. We have 5 major banks across a population of 40 million people.

What’s even more fun is there are sub-servicers, acting for a bank. So you might be told that Bank X is servicing a loan, get all your correspondence from Bank X, but actually it’s Contractor Z handling the servicing.