This is the loan that never ends…

It has been a while but it has been very crazy for me. Not because of Christmas, New Years, long breaks from school or sick kids; although all of those things have been going on. I have been enduring the worst home refinance ever. We started the process a week before Thanksgiving, didn't sign until just before Christmas and didn't get all the details straightened out until just last Friday! I will never do a loan over the phone again, I know people who have loans through Countrywide who have had no problems at all but this has been a nightmare.

I can't think of one thing that they got right; she sent the wrong address to the appraisers, and in a HOME loan the location of THE HOUSE should be an important detail! When the loan processor contacted me the phone number she gave me to call her back was wrong and the other lady wouldn't give me anyone's number to contact them she always just put me off, leaving me to deal only with her. When I called her around the time she had said we should be signing on the loan she said that she had received a note from the processor and read it for the first time right then and realized she had all the information they were waiting for right there! Then the loan processor insisted that my tax forms weren't enough for my home daycare business and I just don't have fancy paperwork because it isn't needed. So then they decided to do it with only John's income listed and she stopped talking to me all together and wouldn't answer my calls, only picking up from our number in the evening when it was John. After that we spent several weeks waiting because the processor didn't want to pay the fee to get John's employment information from the company that his work contracts through and basically held our loan hostage until he let them use his personal log on.

We finally were able to sign on it on the Friday night before Christmas (at 8:30 at night!) At that point we realized that the numbers were off from what we had been told. She kept telling John over and over that our payments would be the same even with escrow (he kept asking because it didn't add up to him) she was either incompetent or lying. When we signed on the loan we gave them the information to have the money wired to our account, because it had taken so long it wouldn't be until several days after Christmas before the loan finalized.

We kept waiting and waiting but no money came, she had called John and said the money would come in two days before what we figured it would come in and that made it worse. Then the day after the loan had funded the money still wasn't there and so I started calling. She actually talked to me once and told me it was probably my bank and to call her back after I checked with them. I called the bank and verified that nothing was processing and they asked for more details so I called her back requesting that info. She didn't call back after repeated calls. I tried calling her manager and just got voicemail there too and no return calls ever. Finally in desperation I called the main number and pushed the button to just talk to someone. The guy who answered gave me more help than anyone else yet and I was able to find the number of the title company in the loan paperwork, not where he had told me but at least it was close enough for me to figure out on my own. When I finally contacted the title company they said that the information to wire the money had been mislaid and the check was being mailed. She said she would put a stop in the check and wire it. It was 2:30 by then on the Friday before New Years and so the odds of it getting in that day by then were almost none. After being on pins and needles and calling the bank constantly on Saturday I called them back and found out that there was no visible record of the money being wired that they could see but that it can take 24 hours for the check to show up and so it wouldn't come that weekend. When the money finally did show up in our account it was in the same hour that the other checks arrived on our doorstep!

Oh did I mention that instead of paying off our debts directly they mailed us checks written out to the various companies and we were supposed to send them on, just one more delay. With many promises to the bill collectors who kept calling through all of the long delays we sent the checks off but they were all for the wrong amounts. So after they were credited to our accounts we had to find out exactly how much some were shorted and pay the rest off and two of the credit cards were even overpaid!

So we settled down to try and get on with our lives but then our old mortgage company started calling. We tried to figure out what was wrong and asked if they had a remainder that needed paying too but they were very confrontational and treated us like we were trying to cheat them out of something. Everyone we talked to seemed to thing we owed something different for different reasons but they all agreed that we still owed them. After several contacts there were at least two people who said that our loan was still active and that we were now behind two payments! So we started to try and contact the countrywide people again and no-one would return our calls and the option to talk to a generic person seemed to be disabled into an endless loop. Out of desperation I looked up the title company again and was referred to someone who looked it up and found that the loan had indeed never been paid! So now the one thing that you never expect to go wrong had gone wrong the guy said that he was going to try to find out why it hadn't been paid and would take care of any additional fees that had now been incurred. But then, after a week there was still money owed on the old mortgage. When I tried to call the guy back I got voicemail and no call back. I called the main number and the person who answered told me that the original amount had been short by $750.00 and that it had been automatically rejected (and no-one had noticed that?) but that they were working on it and it was scheduled to be paid soon.

The old loan was finally paid off on January 18^th more than seven weeks from when we started what was supposed to be a two week process! I am truly irritated and as much as I try to think the best of people, this has tested my limits. The sad thing is that I have a hard time believing that this is over and I will be looking over my shoulder figuratively for some time until I can truly relax.