Posted by Kristine-CA on July 25, 2008 at 12:44:04:
Your story is more evidence for me to always send everything
separately and with separate checks. Doesn’t seem to matter what it
is: lumping two payments together for utilities or loans, or sending
two or more insurance claims in the same envelope…it’s about a
50/50 chance for me that it will not get credited properly or
something will get ignored. This is even true with the little guy. My
dentist and kid’s dance studio have been known to get it wrong unless
I send everything separately.
9 months sounds about right to get it straightened out with a lender.
It’s about 12-24 months for anything involving American Express.
Kristine
My payment for my investment property was lost by the USPS and never to be found resulting in a late payment for the month of May and June (30 days late) and was obviouly reported on my credit. Now the mortgage company Taylor, Bean, and Whitaker suggested that I write a letter asking for credit reversal. Just in case this does not happen how bad will this affect me…especially with trying to buy more properties? Thanks to all who help.
Your experience is why I signed up for the automatic draft payment plan each of my lenders offers. I can even specify that my payment is not to be drafted from my checking account until the 10th of the month, or the first business day thereafter.
Re: Credit Report and Mortgage - Posted by michaela-Ca
Posted by michaela-Ca on July 25, 2008 at 06:19:58:
Just ask them for a goodwill delete. You may want to send it through planetfeedback.com , which will later give them a ‘rating’ showing whether they handled a situation satisfactory or not. If this is the first and only time they will probably do A ‘GOODWILL DELETE’
the grace period ends. I have found this much more common once the foreclosures started to climb. I then typically research where the payment went, put stops on checks and reissue the check. Never had anything but cooperation from the lenders I have dealt with (WAMU, Citi, Wells, Greenpoint).
Hey Rich, I got one for ya! My lender, GMAC, acquired my loan from the original lender, and in the transfer, GMAC bungled my contact information and ended up with the wrong phone number for me in their database. So when I became delinquent for two months, they claim they tried to call me, but of course, never reached me because they had the wrong number.Then they filed for foreclosure, and by the time I eventually found out about it, I quickly paid up the delinquency but it still cost me about $2,000 in fees.
bungled, but they sent notification letters to the property address (I always file a change of address order on a new property because I have had both Citi and Wells fail to input or use the “mailing address”, which is in a different state altogether) so I did get the notices and make the phone calls. Even on a 60 day late, they reversed all charges because it was their error. If one rep won’t help, hang up and call back in and talk to someone else. The quality varies a LOT!
Usually there is a 60 day grace period when a new lender acquires a loan. As long as your payments were made to the previous lender, you should not have been in default to GMAC.
You were lucky, Rich, that they mailed letters to the property address. My lender, GMAC, apparently never even tried that. Duh! If I was a lender with a non-paying debtor, and he didn’t respond to phone calls, I would certainly spend 39 cents on a stamp to mail him a letter to the property address. If they had done that, my tenants probably would have forwarded it on to me or somehow notified me. Of course, I admit that I also screwed up because I wasn’t opening the pesky letters they sent to my PO box. I was knee deep in a remodeling project at the time and couldn’t understand why they were sending me stuff. I had recently signed up for automatic withdrawal for my payments so I “knew” that was being handled; so what was in the bank envelopes? Maybe those trivial “we respect your privacy, blah, blah” notices they like to mail out periodically. I threw it all on a pile to be opened later. Bad mistake. Turns out my auto draft sign up was not set in place like I thought…:(:(.
This happened several months after the loan was transferred. The payments weren’t received because I thought my bank was automatically drafting them, which I later found out wasn’t happening. Apparently there was one last form I forgot to send in or do something to officially make it active. What’s really pathetic is I had enough money in my bank account the entire time to make the payments. Even though I was not completely blameless, it still honks me that all this could have been avoided if they had simply had my correct phone number. Not only that, but this was a property that I’d owned only about a year, and had made a downpayment on of about $200,000 in cash. The bank’s exposure was about 42% LTV. Not exactly what I would call a high risk situation where the foreclosure action needed to be activated as quickly as it was.
I spent 20 years designing and developing (and replacing) software systems for big companies, including BofA and Wells. I would NEVER trust them to get anything automated correct. Too many things to go wrong. Even when I manually “bill pay” from WAMU there is an occasional transaction that needs to be tracked down and fixed. OTOH I always open all the mail, even the junk mail. Much gets opened inside the PO over their recycle bin so I don’t have to have it hide the real mail at home, but it does get opened the day received (even if I have to go to bed at midnight to accomplish that).
Some of the vendors used by the banks are pretty incompetent because contracts are awarded on how much of the spread remains in the hands of the bank (low bid) and many times the low bid is worse than not doing the work in the first place.
I had 8 loans with WAMU, and when I paid the quickbooks would add it all up on one check, which we attached via staple ALL the mortgage statements. WAMU put all the money towards one loan, quickly making it free and clear. Then they sent collection notices to the HOUSE addresses (that seemed to not be making thre payments), whereas all normal statements etc went to my PO Box. The tenants tossed them in the garbage I guess. 4 months later I am in FC on 7 houses, with no call and no letters to the address of record, my PO Box. And cancelled checks for all the money due in my office.
Ken, that is clearly a big mistake by the bank, and hope they quickly rectified things. I have had World Savings (now Wachovia) lump payments together like that improperly a couple times, and they were always good about fixing things once I notified them. By the way, imagine how you would have felt if you happened to be on an extended vacation at the time, completely out of communication with what was going on, only to arrive home to find out your seven houses had been foreclosed on and you were now the ex-owner. I imagine that would be a very stick mess to unwind.
Not quite. 2 of the loans were sold “in default”, so we wound up dealing with 2 different lenders before it was all said and done. 9 months total to get it totally back right. Even with my bank, which actually sends me my cancelled checks back so I had all that…still nine months. Needless to say I send one check per loan now.
Because I got tired of getting on the phone with the banks and correcting their errors. If they would pay more than minimum wage, they’d get better people.
(1) Get a paper copy of the bill. On my designated “bills day” if I don’t have a statement I get on their website and print me one.
(2) Stamp statements received on the date I get them. The stamp has spaces for recording all the payment info (which account, date sent, how sent, amount, etc.).
(3) Get on the website for my checking account.
(4) Issue one bill pay check for each statement.
(5) Print the online receipt for the bill pay check (some are electronic, especially mortgages, which means having them automatically deposited into the wrong account is a very high probability - WAMU tells you how it sends the funds either by mailed check or electronic deposit).
(6) Staple the confirmation to the statement and file.
If I do not have a new statement by the 15th of the month, I start looking for them
As to how quickly they get it resolved. With Citi I can see the change on their website within 48 hours, so I set a reminder in my calendar to go look. With Wells, it takes a couple of calls to find the minimum wage college student instead of the illiterate lucky to get a job person. I used to work for Wells, so the lack of qualified people is no surprise - the good ones only stay a few months and then are hired by other banks that pay more.
