Can't Undo This One...

Most of you know that Hubs and I bought our first home last year, right about this time. I gotta say: I’m still in love with my house! I’m not in love with our heating and cooling bills-but that’s another blog post. We’ve been taking special care to pay our mortgage payment on time, and have even sent in extra payments. We figure we’d rather get a bit ahead than have extra money-so anytime there is extra we send it in.

So imagine my surprise when Hubs calls me Friday evening when I’m driving home from work and says that we each got a letter in the mail from our lender.

I dunno what the legal stuff is in regards to telling you who that lender might be. In the interest of not angering the powers that be--lets’ just say that the name rhymes with Butt Face.

Arriving home an hour later than usual, already having had a nasty day at work-I’m greeted with a nice little “Intent to Foreclose” notice.

Um….Wha?!

Now I should be honest and tell you that we get paper statements from them, but I don’t look at them. I file them away and rarely open them. I keep my own records of our payments and know where we are, what we owe, etc. So I guess this all could have been avoided by my opening those stupid statements. Also, by reading the fine print-but we’ll get to that later.

I immediately get out all of my records, pull up my bank records and grab the phone. The first customer service representative can barely speak English and won’t listen to a word I’m saying. After 45 minutes he attempts to connect me to his supervisor and accidentally hangs up on me. I call back, and surprise of all surprises-the same thing happens again. By this time, it’s really hard to be nice to the third person I get in touch with. Luckily, I didn’t have to stay on the phone with him for very long. I couldn’t understand a word ‘John’ was saying. I hung up and called back. Same story with ‘Martha’, the fourth person I got after wading though the automated bullshit once again. I hung up.

I had a smoke, yelled at the Hubs, slammed some doors and grabbed a glass of iced tea and settled down for a fifth call. This time, although the accent was thick-I could at least grasp the essence of what the girl was saying.

She couldn’t help me though, but I finally got transferred to a supervisor who-while was not a native English speaker-could help me.

She looked back though our entire payment history with me. I told her when we made payments, she told me when they received them.

Then we find the problem. All our extra payments had not been applied as payments. They had been assigned straight to the principal. Nearly TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS WORTH! Oh yeah-2effinggrand of payments were not counted as payments.

Whatthesweetbabyjesusfuck?!?!

Finally, she tells me this: Every time a partial payment (the extra I referred to earlier) had been made, it was applied to the principal. Also, once a payment has been made for the month, anything additional is applied to the principal. So, for instance-in February of this year I made two mortgage payments-only one was counted! When march rolled around I made our payment on the 6th instead of the 3rd, thinking that I was “ahead”….only Butt Face didn’t agree-so they took $40 of what I sent in and put that toward LATE FEES! Yeah, late fees. Through the life of our loan we had been charged over $250 in LATE FEES! That's a quarter of a payment that (had I opened the statements...) I didn't realize hadn't been applied!

Then we got into the discussion of our credit. Butt Face had been reporting late payments on our credit history for months! We had no idea that our credit history AND scores were being TRASHED, in essence, because we were ahead on our payments! I lost it. I went off, I yelled and cussed and nearly cried. There is no way to fix this one. You can’t go back and retract those bad reports, fixing our scores is impossible! Hubs and I had been discussing buying a car next year-we can’t do that now! What if we needed to apply for credit? What about things like jobs, career moves that check your credit?! She apologizes profusely and told me that while she couldn’t change it, she could send out a ‘retraction’ to the three big companies. This, she said, would show up on our records stating that the negative marks were not our fault and should not be counted. I accepted this offer, but let her know that while I appreciated this, it didn’t change the damage that had been done.

At the end of the call she tells me that she’d like extra time to analyze every single payment we’d made and make sure that every single penny we’d sent in was correctly accounted for. She asked to call me back on Monday and I agreed. She promised to provide me with letters, documentation and anything else she could to help mitigate the damage. She also told me that the only way to avoid another mess like this is to pay the exact amount on the exact date due. No more, no less, no extra. (Here's where that fine print thing comes in...)So much for trying to get ahead I guess.

You know the irony of the situation? Because of our now hosed credit scores, we can’t even refinance to get away from these douche bags.