It’s nine am on Tuesday morning- do you know where your mortgage is?
Yesterday was the first of the month, and, as always, I logged in to pay my mortgage. All my information was there for my account, but for some reason the payment option was not available. Looked all over the place, and there was just nothing. Finally, after clicking through literally every hyperlink on the website, down at the bottom of a random page was a plain text statement that my loan had been transferred to another servicer, and this is the sum total of the information provided:
That’s it. I have not received anything in the mail. I have not received an email. I tried to call the helpline of my former mortgage company, and it found my account based on my phone number, had me verify with my last four, then told me my loan had been transferred and hung up on me.
So I guess I get to spend today trying to track down my mortgage so I can pay it.
The good news is that unlike Bush and Cheney in 2006-2007, I am completely confident that Trump and Pence are going to be able to handle the impending financial collapse.
*** Update ***
Got in touch with the new servicer, set up a new account on the new website, made her verify that the terms of my loan and the escrow and tax payment stuff was still taken care of, verified interest rate and loan balance, made my payment, and I am good to go.
Still irritated that they did not notify me, but at least this is settled.
PaulWartenberg
Jesus. Banks and mortgage holders should not be allowed to pull this shit on people.
Get some fucking lawyers on this. Failing to notify you of the transfer, failing to provide connection to the new payment service, failing to be decent fucking human beings.
Christ. The mortgage crisis was 15 years ago and the SOBs are replaying that shit all over again.
Emma
Our mortgage has been transferred — read sold and bought — four times since we purchased the house in 1997. SOP for the SOBs. But I will admit they usually sent a letter with payment instructions.
patrick ii
Happened to me too, more than five times. The good news is that it is illegal to charge a late fee now or give a bad credit report because of a late payment. The bad news is depending on the software being used the company it may not know it’s your first payment. We live in a virtual reality of business rules.
different-church-lady
Mortgage transfers are common. As far as I know, they are not allowed to change the terms of your mortgage.
Doing so without giving you a LOT of notice is very very wrong.
Juju
I found this in a quick google search. https://www.wintrustmortgage.com
That might help.
gvg
I think I would look up who regulates banks in your state. Your homeowners insurance may know since banks often want to know you have insurance for the property they are are lending you money for.
Was it a bank with a physical office you could drive up to? Sometimes face to face helps. Also you may want to start researching who might be a good bank to refinance with in case the new lender is a problem. It can help to keep calm if you have a back up plan. No use yet when you don’t even know who to buy out the loan from, but later it should be.
my credit union sold my loan, but kept servicing it so we just kept paying them with no hiccups. No idea who owns it, just that it was sold. Credit Union needs to diversify loans so they won’t go under if a big employer quits or something, but they keep managing the loan so I don’t see any difference. they also get management fees.
MomSense
@PaulWartenberg:
The fuckers we are up against never stop trying to screw us. There is no sensible, fair legislation that they will accept.
OzarkHillbilly
Yet one more reason I am glad we paid off our mortgage post haste.
Vhh
@gvg: John lives in WV. My guess is that regulation there v limited. (I live in TN).
dmsilev
Check the local regulations. There’s usually a requirement of written notice when a servicer changes, and substantial lead time.
Also, call the new servicer, not the old one.
Kirk
There are occasional bright spots to losing the house in the last fiscal fiasco.
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly: our reverse mortgage outfit doesn’t have accounts online
different-church-lady
@dmsilev: He doesn’t know who the new servicer is.
Another Scott
Bummer, JC.
One of the reasons why we chose the lender we did was that they “never sold their loans”. And they never did (we paid it off about 10 years early). Of course, these days, the servicer and the owner are often completely different (having more fingers in the pie makes everything “more efficient”, somehow)… (groucho-roll-eyes.gif)
I hope you get it resolved without too much more heartburn.
Cheers,
Scott.
SFAW
@different-church-lady:
Wintrust. John posted a screen shot of the “New Servicer” info.
dnfree
Way back in the early 1980s we had a problem like this. It was pre-email, but we got a letter from the supposed new servicer of our mortgage that they were taking over. We didn’t know if it was a scam or not–just send us your mortgage payment from now on, okay, thanks! We were able to finally get the previous servicer (our bank–we didn’t even know there was such a thing as selling mortgages back then) to confirm. And then we started sending mortgage payments to the new place and for months getting letters from them that we were overdue on our payments. We would call and be assured yes, they had our money, but it was in some kind of escrow account because our account wasn’t set up yet. Months of ever-more-threatening letters as we continued to make payments on time. Finally they even sent someone out to our house to post a notice on our door that we were delinquent, all because they were unable to apply our payments to our mortgage.
Anyway, TL;DR–how can failure to coordinate a transfer of a mortgage still be handled this poorly 35 years later? It’s not like this is a rare occurrence, unfortunately.
different-church-lady
@SFAW: Ah. I was going with narrative, instead of the screen shot.
JR
My mortgage has been sold 3 times in 3 years
SFAW
John –
You may already know this, and it may have already been noted here (and I missed it), but please make sure that the new servicer has all the info they need to (A) pay your real estate taxes and (B) pay your homeowner’s insurance. [Naturally, this assumes the old servicer also did that.]
It’s something that has bitten us a few times. Fortunately, no significant damage, but certainly annoying to get a dunning notice when the servicer should be handling those things expeditiously.
John Cole
@different-church-lady: Yes I do.
Elizabelle
So the new mortgage holder is “Wintrust” and the first thing they do is obfuscate the fact that they now hold your mortgage?
Trust, indeed.
meander
I have my own hazy memories of mortgage servicer chaos. According to the letter I got from the lender, the first payment on my mortgage was supposed to go to City X. So I sent the check to City X. And then a day later got my payment coupons in the mail that had an address of City Y. And, as is typical, the corporate address was a different city in a different state. Fortunately, although I needed to write a few letters, there were no problems in the end.
But really, get your shi|t together big financial companies!
(My loan was sold a year or so ago, but it was handled pretty well. Plenty of notice and correspondence.)
Just Chuck
@Elizabelle: Maybe I should rename myself to “Paysmortgage” so I can stop paying.
SFAW
@Elizabelle:
Is it Wintrust who’s obfuscating? Or his previous servicer?
My (perhaps incorrect) perception is that Wintrust is just incompetent (since they haven’t sent John any communication re: the transfer), and it was the old one who made it difficult for John to find what he needed.
rikyrah
Tell that truth, Cole.
Tell it.
sherparick
portant Phone Numbers
The Wintrust Contact information.
General Support
847-939-9500
Toll-free: 800-999-2649
Residential Loan Servicing Department
866-718-7899
Phylllis
Ours was sold before we could make the first payment. Another fucking scam.
Amir Khalid
Can the lender sell your mortgage and not be obliged to tell you where you need to make the payments? The mind boggles.
mac
Reason #ilostcount to thank my parents (a banker and accountant). When I got my mortgage, they made me do all the work myself but I clearly remember them telling me to make sure the lender wouldn’t sell the servicing of my loan. Didn’t realize at the time but wow, they saved me some headaches.
Gex
@dnfree: The failures inconvenience the customers and if they cost anyone anything, they cost the customers. The industry has zero incentive to fix this problem.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
What a shit show. We’re going to need to do this all over again. I guess we should just kind of take it for granted that we’ll have to do this every ten or 15 years. It’s a mistake to think that the law can keep ahead of the banks for more than a few years at a time.
different-church-lady
Holy god, people, it’s one mortgage transfer that’s screwed up, not a fuckin’ systemic economic collapse. Comparing this to 2006 is just displaying stunning ignorance of what actually happened in 2006.
sam
I went through this last year when citibank sold my mortgage to “Mr. Cooper” (the worst name in the history of bank names). They at least notified me, but when it came time for my first payment, they didn’t have anything ready/set up on their website, and when they finally did, half the information was wrong, so it was a giant mess. I spent hours on the phone and bitching very publicly about it on twitter.
https://twitter.com/verysimple/status/922166415108591616
https://twitter.com/verysimple/status/965598152526041088
Grover Gardner
@SFAW:
Ditto this. I’m on my third mortgage transfer.
kindness
My wife & I bought a house after the collapse in 2008/09. We’re in California and I was happy to rent while housing prices were so high. When the collapse happened we jumped as housing was now affordable. We went with a loan through my wife’s retirement plan with the intent of the interest we paid helped prop us STIRS balance sheet. STIRS promised us they would keep the loan just for that reason. Within 3 months of owning the home they sold the loan to BofA. Bastards. However, the joke was on BofA. We ended up paying off the 30 year loan in 9 1/2 years.
SFAW
@different-church-lady:
Look, it’s either discuss this, or talk about whether Merrick Garland can fill Kennedy’s seat. Winning!
Barbara
My mortgage was sold before I made a single payment, and then sold three more times. We did get notice, but twice they failed to pay property taxes as required (and which were being paid by us into an escrow held by them to make sure they were paid). When I called after making an emergency payment per the suggestion of the county employee who raised the alarm with me, they basically said that they had been very busy.
MattF
Yes, someone, somewhere has screwed up. Possibly multiple someones. They won’t want to admit it. They will blame the computer.
SFAW
@MattF:
Buncha amateurs. If they were smart, they’d blame Obama and Hitlary.
randy khan
When my wife and I bought our house, the mortgage company – Chase, as I recall – had a big spiel about how they didn’t sell mortgages, but kept them in their own portfolio. Within a year, they’d sold it to Countrywide. (Truth be told, I didn’t care, but it was pretty funny.)
The thing about making it hard for you to find the new company’s information is that it’s in nobody’s interest. Dealing with people who haven’t paid costs the mortgage company much more than just getting paid.
Ella in New Mexico
Every single time we’ve obtained or refinanced our VA mortgage it has been through one bank that later sold it to: you guessed it Wells Fucking Fargo.
Even though we went out of our way to go local and NOT use Wells Fargo because of their dastardly history.
All I can say is those fuckers never let a MINUTE pass in which we didn’t know we were going to owe them the next payment, and their online site is super easy to set up and use, so there’s that.
MoxieM
Oh yes! That happened to me. Sadly, or stupidly, or both: I mistyped the zipcode for the new payment info last January, so it took more than the 15 day grace period for my payment to wend its way to the new loan servicing org. Now I have a “delinquent” on my previously spotless credit report, and it has made quite a dent in my credit score.
I am writing write a memo (just learned about it) to the 3 credit rating agencies about this. Can anyone say if that helps your score, or just puts a note in the file? Thx.
MobiusKlein
@Barbara: Why trust the banks to pay the insurance and taxes?
Screw that, don’t muddy the waters.
dnfree
@MobiusKlein: For some borrowers, especially with a smaller down payment or a less stellar credit rating, mortgage providers REQUIRE that they handle the insurance and taxes, to be sure they get paid.
MoxieM
@Ella in New Mexico: For what it’s worth (not so much), a million years ago when my brother started his work life, he got a job at W-F. They were complete assholes to their employees as well. Most of his early career I could not really tell you about, but what stands out to me was that W-F forbade employees from putting any personal items in their workspace–at all. Brother was some kind of analyst or some damned thing, not in a loan dept., or consumer-facing (he was a white man going places); so, they treated pretty much everyone below the C-suite really badly. (He got out of there right quick.)
A business operation that treats its employees really badly, is most likely going to treat its customers like shit, too.
la caterina
Borrowers’ attorney here. The operative regs for this situation are federal. Feel free to email me. I will tell you hw to make and document the payment and send a nasygram to both old and new servicers.
Ella in New Mexico
@MoxieM:
“YOU ARE NOT A PERSON. YOU ARE OWNED BY WELLS FARGO. DO NOT CONDUCT YOURSELF AS A PERSON.”
phein59
@SFAW: And make sure your escrow account transfers!!! It took us almost a year to get our escrow account back from Taylor, Bean & Whitaker. This is one area where they will try to screw you, claiming the escrow balance was used against the principal balance or some such nonsense.
SFAW
@phein59:
Excellent point, I had forgotten about the games they play with escrow.
mattH
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
This is exactly how things were in the 1800s to 1929. Every 10 to 15 years the economy crashed and I am sure made someone at the top richer and many more of those at the bottom poorer. It’s funny how all the regulations and government-backed insurance programs started after 1929 helped make for one of the most stable periods the US ever experienced.
dmsilev
@MobiusKlein: Both of the mortgages I’ve taken out required escrow accounts for real estate taxes. The first one (which was originated & serviced by Citi, and sold on day one to someone else) allowed me to go off escrow after a few years of on-time payments. The second one (through a credit union, who didn’t sell it) requires keeping the escrow with them. Both servicers had no trouble paying the respective counties on time, so I was happy to leave them in place.
For both loans, on the advice of the realtors, I paid the insurance directly rather than using an escrow.
Scout211
Just a note: if you have an escrow account for your taxes and homeowners insurance, be sure to inform them of the change in mortgage companies. This happened to us last year and we finally got an emergency alert from USAA that our former mortgage company was not responding to the attempt to pay. And my daughter and SIL had an even worse experience (with Wells Fargo, of course) who kept TAKING payments from USAA for an entire year!
The mortgage companies used to take care of this but they don’t anymore, so be sure to inform both your county and your insurance company.
Scout211
@Scout211:
Oops, sorry. Just saw that this was covered while I was composing.
Cermet
Poor, poor Jackals; only now do you realize that fucking bankers own both parties and write the laws themselves. AS the saying goes – you are fuck no matter how it ends up and they are the ones screwing you.
Tsukune
@Ella in New Mexico: Wells Fargo bought my mortgage right after the ink from the closing was dried. Fuckers. I refuse to use their online service because I will not agree to their terms and services (and actually hit Decline when prompted). Wells Fargo is stuck with me sending in paper checks for 30 years at 3 and 3/8ths.
Manyakitty
@sam: You got stuck with them, too? I HATE THAT COMPANY! PNC (who I also hate) sold my mortgage to Mr. Cooper’s Used Car Lot and Collection Agency, gave me adequate notice, and then double-billed me for the first month. They actually sent my payment to Mr. Cooper, who then spent over a year sending me nastygrams about my allegedly late payments. I took it to Twitter and someone from PNC was competent and able to help me resolve the problem, but it still took MONTHS for them to admit they had my money. UGH.
Scout211
@sam:
Ditto here.
Mr. Cooper (actually Nationstar, DBA Mr. Cooper) was a mess when they purchased our mortgage last year. Nothing was set up from the get go and I was on the phone for a long time with them as they refused to talk with me about my account because it was supposedly only in my husband’s name. Our house and our mortgage is actually in the name of the trust that my husband I have together. I kept demanding to talk with someone who could help me. I did get moved up the ladder and finally talked with an administrator who actually looked at the digital papers that were sent over from our previous mortgage company. She saw that the house was owned by the joint trust and she updated our account so I could talk with them and ask them how to send in my payment–that was due
They still send emails to my email account addressed to “Mr Scout211” but that’s fine with me. Sigh.
Origuy
I’ve had my mortgage through Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage) for several years, refinanced a couple of times. They’ve never pulled this on me.
Haroldo
@mattH: There is money to be made for a select few in times of chaos. This is a game to those few. Fuck ’em.
Rob in CT
@different-church-lady:
This.
It’s an annoyance for John, and that sucks. But having your mortgage sold to a different company is a normal thing that means nothing in terms of the broader economy. Mine switched earlier this year. Though, unlike John, I got advance warning in the mail from my prior servicer and then, repeatedly, from the new company.
Suzanne
@Phylllis:
So when we bought our house eight years ago, we were pissed at Bank of America and we knew we wanted a different lender. So we used Nova. Nova sold the mortgage to B of A before we made the first payment. We were stuck with them until we refinanced earlier this year. Fuckers.
Rob in CT
Huh, just read the comments about Mr. Cooper. I have them now too. I do recall that right at first setting up my online account wasn’t entirely smooth, but I got it set up and doing fine. The name is cheesy, but so far I haven’t had any significant problems. I hope this continues.
narya
My original mortgage was with 5th 3rd, and I re-fied with them three years ago; had to do the taxes through them/escrow to get a 2.875% interest rate, which was fine w/ me. I’ve been happy with them and hope that the recent merger/sale doesn’t mean they screw up my mortgage or sell it to someone.
Ruckus
Cole
When I lived in OH my mortgage got sold about every two years. But I always got updated payment info. Those bastards wanted their money. And they wanted it on time. Every month. Can’t believe they aren’t treating you the same way.
cursorial
Our mortgage transferred to Nationstar shortly before it became Mr. Cooper, and we got notification of the transfer weeks before information on where to send the next payment. Useless. Their online payment portal looked like something you might encounter by clicking on a link in a spam e-mail, too.
Subsequent mailings we got when they were changing their name were funny, too. Reading between the lines, I could picture the executive meeting “We could spend money to substantially improve our customer service department and upgrade our website. Or we could change our name to Mr. Cooper in this friendly font and call it a day. All in favor?”
grubert
I’ve stopped worrying about this since refinancing from Chase to a local credit union I trust.
Wonder, are there any strong reasons why Cole or others don’t just do this? Are credit unions not available everywhere?
Chris T.
@Elizabelle: They’re not Win-Trust, they’re Wint-Rust.
Chris T.
@Barbara: This mortgage service transfer stuff is why I pay my real estate taxes and insurance myself.
thebewilderness
I was shocked when my mortgage was sold when I owed less than $10K. Like Wintrust the buyer off my mortgage was a foreclosure mill. The scam is that they charge you lots of fees for payments they receive but do not log.
When I researched the company and the criminal acts they had been guilty of in one state after another always two steps in front of the law I got a loan at the bank and paid off the mortgage before the transfer to the scammers was complete.
sam
@Manyakitty: (and others) – ugh, my twitters really spell out my frustration with Mr. Cooper, but the “folksy”name is just the icing on the cake. I don’t want my giant faceless mortgage company to have a folksy/friendly name. I want it to have a name that really emphasizes the fact that it is a giant faceless mortgage company.
Everything was a struggle with them – citibank transferred my loan, but it took FOREVER for my account to actually show up properly or for me to actually be able to register/log in at Mr. Cooper’s website, which made it really difficult to do things like…check my account or make payments. Not only that, there was a period of time when you could just access a certain amount of account info by typing in someone’s name (even though you couldn’t actually register for a login yet), so that was an ID theft nightmare. I spend hours calling them about that one, because (shockingly) I didn’t want to advertise that giant issue on the internet.
And the escrow thing was a major issue. First, they basically lost my escrow account in the shuffle, despite the fact that there was money in it and my mortgage payment included my property tax escrow payments. Then, at the end of the year, my interest/tax statement didn’t say anything about my property taxes. When I contacted them to find out where my property tax statement was, they spun some bullshit about how it was entirely voluntary for them to provide me with the tax information, and they…volunteered not to. It was my job to add up all the payments or contact the county tax department – my county being, of course, Manhattan.
CMo
By law you must receive a transfer notice 15 days before transfer. This is a duty of both the transferor and the transferee, commonly called the Hello and Goodbye letters. I’m sure it was sent. Servicers are in this business and that’s a key step in servicing.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
This happened to me about 3 times with my student loans. Was not a huge fan of the surprises or the effort it took to pay my new creditor, but after 15 years or so they’re almost gone.
HeartlandLiberal
I am struggling to imagine how the old AND new service provider can legally NOT have notified John of the change. But then, I watched the major institutions doing lending and mortgages literally get away with grand theft in the billions if not trillions in 2008, so I guess I should not be surprised.
I must admit that paying the mortgage is not something we have to worry about, we were fortunate to have enough squirreled away seven years ago when I retired that we paid off the house, and entered retirement mortgage and almost completely debt free otherwise. I keep a line of credit on the house open in case I need to quickly borrow some money, but it only has a few thousand debt in it, just enough to keep it open if needed.
I know this luxury is not what the vast majority of Americans deal with in their personal finances. We often wonder how people get by anymore working their way towards retirement, today. All the forces seemed aimed at hindering retirement savings through the businesses people work for, except for some holdouts, like major universities. And even they are becoming suspect. I got an email from the one I retired from after 25 years, announcing they were looking at alternative retirement options. To which I replied why the Hell would you do that? TIAA-CREF is one of the most honest, reliable managers of retirement investments, they do not reap you off, they advise you for your good, not theirs, so you end up retiring with enough saved to live on through retirement.
I just do not understand how we got into this hell in a handbasket world I see crumbling around me.