Huh. Now I’m feeling incredibly grateful that our mortgage went so smoothly. We used a small local bank, where I had the email address of the person who was personally handling the whole thing. Not a single hitch in the whole process.
Send this to the Consumerist (consumerist.com) - they love to post this kind of stuff, and sometimes it gets results.
We went through SunTrust. They confirmed that everything was in order *26 minutes *before our closing deadline.
Just as we were about to get off the phone: “Oh, and you’re going to need $16,244, not $9,244”.
Through sheer ridiculous luck - I was also buying a car that week, so I happened to have my $5k down payment in my checking account - we were able to come up with $7,000 extra with 12 minutes’ notice.
On the other hand, our loan had been sold to WF before our refi, and we’ve never had a problem with them. I’ve got lots of equity, though, so no escrow and we pay our own insurance and property taxes.
Our refi was a bit more complicated than most since part of our loan is with my father-in-law, and there were some is not dotted given this and our trust the last time we refied. We were complicated, but the lack of response was annoying.
On the bright side, having this mortgage with them somehow qualifies us for a checking account that pays all kinds of interest. We became high class customers all of a sudden.
Our old home loan got sold to those WF wankers by GMAC and it was fuckery on top of stupidity, covered in a gravy of laziness with a side of fried incompetence. So much so that never again shall I do business with the bastards. Not even if they go into the handing-out-free-money business.
Hummm, I love WF. But the last time I financed a mortgage through them was a decade ago and that was just a refi.
I do have to admit, I’ve never had any trouble with WF’s servicing of the loans we’ve carried. The closest thing to “bad” was their online website got funky for a while and I couldn’t change my payment amount (we were prepaying a little each month), or some such ridiculousness.
Oh - and with the latest refi: I track everything in Quicken, and entered everything from the settlement sheet, and everything balanced to the penny.
A month later, we got a check for about a hundred dollars - for the money remaining in our old escrow account.
As I had accounted for every penny, including the old escrow money (which was credited to our new escrow account), I had a major WTF moment and double and triple checked every single figure.
As near as I can tell, Wells Fargo sent us a check for 100 dollars that did not belong to us in any way shape or form.
Yeah, we kept it. Sort of - I immediately paid an extra principal payment against the new mortgage.
Get a credit card through another bank. Now. Do it today if you can. If something happens and WF fucks up your accounts horribly you will have access to nothing while they sort out the error. We actually have had threads on this board about things like this happening to people before. Do not put all of your eggs in one financial basket if you can avoid it.
A slight variant on that advice: don’t do that until your loan is approved. You don’t want 'em to see an additional line of credit opened recently and give them ammo for turning you down.
Once it’s all settled, though, that’s always good advice! Our corollary to that is if you’re married, make sure each spouse has one card in his/her own name, in addition to any shared accounts. I misplaced my wallet one time the day before we were to go out of town, and if we hadn’t had Typo Knig’s single card as backup, it would have been a more challenging trip.
I just had some lovely dealings with WF a couple of days again. I refi’d in February and my mortgage just got sold to them. A few days later, I got a bill for property taxes, due by December 5, indicating that only one payment had been made from the escrow by October 29.
The exchange went something like this:
*Me: Could you please tell me if you’ve made the payment for property taxes for July-December 2009.
WF: That should have been included in the closing.
Me: I don’t think so-I closed in February. I’m talking about the payment due now, for the second half of 2009.
WF: Ma’am, I’m telling you that this was included in the closing.
Me: I’m confused. Are you sure you are talking about 2009? I know that the payment for the first half of the year was paid from the escrow account. I have the month by month details here.
WF: No, it wasn’t.
Me: Yes, it was paid in July (gives amount). Now when the loan was transferred to you there was XXXXXX amount in the escrow account.
WF: No there wasn’t.
Me: I’m reading the paper you sent me and it says actual escrow amount.
WF: Ma’am, we make a projected amount to make sure you’ll have enough to pay the taxes.
Me: I know that but I am not reading the column that says projected escrow amount; I am reading the column that says actual escrow amount.
WF: You don’t understand how it works.
Me: Let’s try this. How much is in the escrow account right now?
WF: YYYYYYY (roughly equal to XXXX-tax payment)
Me: And how much was in the account on October 1?
WF: XXXXX
Me: Well, where is the rest of that money?
WF: All the money is there, Ma’am.
Me: But XXXXX does not equal YYYYY. Was there another transaction?
WF: There was a payment for taxes on November 2 for ZZZZZZ.
Me: So you did made the payment I was asking about?
WF: No ma’am, I told you that it was included in your closing.
Me: But you just said that there was a tax payment made on November 2 for the exact amount on the tax bill. That is what I was asking for all along.
WF: No Ma’am, the payment you are asking about was included in your closing.
Me: Just to double check here. Did you actually make a payment for taxes on November 2 for ZZZZZZ dollars.
WF: Yes.
Me: Thank you so much. Goodbye.*
:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes:
Ok, I’ll be the scape goat. We’ve had 6 WF mortgages or HELOCs in the last 11 years, and we’ve never had any trouble with them. None. That includes 3 new home purchases.
Now, I will add that we seem to have found a great loan officer, and we keep going back to him. He’s always on the ball. Heck, he showed up at our last closing (he didn’t have to, just wanted to say hi) with a bottle of wine for us.
I’m happy for you - I wish we had your Wells Fargo…but we don’t.
We have the Wells Fargo that Psychobunny has. Here’s a transcript of a conversation my wife had with WF just today, as we still try to get the loan paperwork complete:
WF: We just need one more thing and we’ll be finished.
The wife: You said you were finished two hours ago.
WF: Just one more thing.
Wife: Whatever…
WF: We need you and your husband to initial right by where we wrote in your bank’s address.
Wife: You mean right there, where we already wrote our initials when you asked us this last week?
WF: No, right there by the BANK’s address. The one we just wrote in by hand.
Wife: That’s not the bank’s address. That’s our address.
WF: No, that’s the bank’s address.
Wife: That’s our current address. I know my own address. I’m standing in the stinking apartment right now. You wrote in the wrong address.
WF: Are you sure that’s not the bank’s address?
Wife: Yes, I’m sure.
WF: OK, let us look into that. We’ll get back with you…
And so we wait for their heads to come on out from whence they’re stuck, but I just don’t think it’s going to happen soon.
This is the sort of story that makes me never ever want to buy a house. The idea that I have to make an offer and provide a deposit based on nothing more than sunshine blown up my ass by some mid-level bank lackey, then sit around and hope that some other, loosely affiliated bank lackeys don’t decide to fuck everything up for shits and giggles, then hope that they don’t just decide to tack on an extra $7000 in bullshit at the last second (probably pure profit for them), is sickening.
Sorry they fucked it up so badly this time.
A little late to tell you now, but that was the point where you should have, without telling Wells Fargo, gone to another bank, told them the whole story, and said “is there any possibility that you can arrange financing by the closing date? We’d gladly switch to your bank if you could.”
The other bank will probably work real hard to do this. After all, you have all the documents handy, since you have been supplying them for WF. And WF already found you loan-worthy, that usually influences another loan officer. In this economy, most banks are really looking for business. And finally, doing this will let them stick it to a competitor. Bank workers are human too, and would enjoy doing this. And enjoy telling other bankers about this, especially when WF bankers are present. Plus they know you are likely to repeat the story to all kinds of people, thus bad-mouthing WF and good-mouthing them.
It would have been worth a shot. And think how good you would have felt, on closing day (after closing!) to have called the Wells Fargo people and say “oh, forget about that loan thing. We went with Bank x instead, they got it all done and we closed earlier today. Bye.” Actually, some friends who did this actually went to the bank office in person, just to be able to see the bankers face when they said this.
Seconding (thirding?) this - we have a chequing account at one bank, our mortgage through another, and two credit cards (one in each of our names) with two more different banks. Through the magic of automatic payments and online banking, I make payments to each through the same account, but it is much more difficult for banks to start taking money out of another bank’s accounts than it is for them to start taking money out of an account at the same bank (there was a thread about that not too long ago).
After we finished all our mortgage wrangling, the bank that held our original mortgage called to check how happy we were with them; my husband happily told them that they got their early payout fee, but they lost the hundreds of thousands of dollars in interest because they wouldn’t waive the early pay-out fee and retain our new mortgage. He said they didn’t sound too happy about it (that makes all of us, then, you jerks).
I’ve heard horror stories of people who find their account has been wiped out by their bank. They were behind on a credit card payment, the bank saw they had the money, and grabbed it. Much check-bouncing ensued.
My wife is a realtor and absolutely hates dealing with Wells Fargo, which she says is easily the worst of a bad lot. Aside from the ridiculous fees, they have absolutely no sense of urgency and couldn’t give a shit about meeting closing deadlines. She’s tried two or three times (both as the seller and buyer) to complete a short sale and has never been successful—they claim they’re interested in doing it, but require *weeks *to respond to any sort of request, which sends potential buyers running. If any bank deserves to have been obliterated in the recent financial debacle, it’s them… too bad they weren’t.
There was one here just last month, in fact, although IIRC the poster was behind on a mortgage rather than a credit card.
This is good advice. In fact, if you are still trying to get a loan and deal with the seller (rather than the deal being permanently blown up), it’s probably not a bad idea to try this now–since getting a loan sooner will be better to getting the seller to agree to the deal–and since WF doesn’t seem to be on your side–even if the deal fails, I’ll assume you still want to buy a house–and so talking to another bank can help you find a lender that is far easier to work with–which you will definitely want when you make another offer.
So I’d call some other bank ASAP, and just see what they can do for you. Not a lot of cost there, and the possibility of quite a lot of benefit.
Ha! I did this when I bought my first house. My loan officer went on vacation, and after dealing with a few phone calls with her driving down the highway while talking to me and her cell phone breaking up, I said screw it. Took all my documents to a local lender, sat down with a very nice gentleman, and had a new loan in no time. Warmed the cockles of my heart, it did.