LOOOOOOOONGGGG Post incoming. Just needed to get this off my chest.
Good advice, Bodhi, unless you are dealing with a mortgage company. Those coniving thieves will not do anything to work with you. Here is a little background on the happenings of my particular experience.
When one purchases a new home, you receive a mortgage. In order for your lender to make more money, they sell your loan to another company who, in turn, assumes your loan. This can happen at any time during the life of your loan and it can happen numerous times. Well, my girlfriend and I's loan was sold twice in the first six months of owning our home and here is where the problems began.
Our second lender sold our mortgage to CitiMortgage in April. Now our payments are due to CitiMortgage. No problem. We pay our payment on April 14th and move on with life. When we call CitiMortgage, their automated system tells us that we are now due for our June 1st payment. O really?! How did we skip a payment? We hit 0 to get to the operator and they confirm the same thing the automated system told us. SWEET!! Knowing that this may be too good to be true, we continue to call from April 15th until May 15th only to be told the same information.
Around the 16th of May, my girlfried started to receive calls from their automated system telling us that our May payment was late. Upon hearing this, we called a manager. The manager informed us to ignore the phone calls because we were definitely due for our June payment.
On Wednesday of this week, we received a letter from CitiMortgage informing us that they had made an error and the May and June payment were now due. As you can imagine, we flipped our sh'it. I called the number provided and asked to speak to the person listed on the letter. And this, my friends, is where I almost lost it. As it turns out, the woman currently on the phone was in a different department than the person on the letter. The woman I was conversing with was in...COLLECTIONS! It seems that our May payment was now 30 days past due and they had reported this to the Credit Bureau.
I then asked to speak to a supervisor and was put through to an "Account Manager". After 30 minutes of speaking with him I realized this person was not going to be able to help me. I asked to speak to his manager and, to my surprise, he patched me right through. After another 30 minute convo, she regrettfully informed me that she could not help and that it was our fault. The only thing she suggested was speaking to collections to try and set up a payment plan. Soooo...back to collections. I must have received the dumbest person in their department because he had no idea what was poppin'. I try the manager route again and am transferred to an "Account Supervisor". (What is with all these fancy titles.) It my nicest voice I tell him that I would really like to speak to a manager. He transfers me and 30 seconds later I hear a message letting me know that "this number is no longer in service." <Click>. An hour and a half of speaking to people, only to get disconnected.
Not one to be deterred, I call back and get a rep in collections again. I told her the spiel of how I was speaking to someone in her department and I was disconnected and if she could please transfer me back to them. To my surprise, she had never heard of either of those people because she was in a different location. At this point, I feel completely defeated.
To wrap things up, I was pretty much told that it was our fault and that we needed to make both payments, or else. We finally came to the compromise that the negative credit would be removed if we paid our mortgage up to date. I tried nice the entire time, complementing them on how they were handling the situation and letting them know that I was not angry with them, just the way their company handled things. I know this is partly my fault because you cannot just skip a mortgage payment, but when a manager and every other CSR that you speak to tells you to not worry about it, it tends to make you believe it.
The moral of this story and how it applies you to Dak: no matter how right you think you are or how wrong you may be treated, corporate America is the man and the man always wins.
Edited, Jun 9th 2006 at 11:41am EST by Mearyk