Well, we're still getting the shaft and we're still being ignored. The Federal Loan Modification is nothing, if not a complete joke. Now that the country has moved on to Health Care and Obama's birth certificate we've been forgotten like yesterday's newspaper. No longer useful political tools, we wait for the next shoe to drop...
I never really was interested in being a "homeowner". In fact, I was pretty much against it unlike my husband who dreamed of owning a home. That dream was realized via a set of circumstances I couldn't even make up if I tried. My Mother had a massive stroke in January of 2005. I am an only child so we rushed to Florida to care for her and her home while she was in the hospital for five months and later for over a year I was her full time caregiver. I'll save that very long, very sad story for another diary as I'm not prepared to face my grief at this point in time.
Mom passed away in October of 2006 after a gallbladder surgery run amok. I was not working as she needed 24/7 care, she was partially paralyzed so my Husband worked to pay our bills and Mom's SS and retirement paid her bills. When she died we now had a mortgage payment that needed to be paid and of course Mom's income was gone. I applied for a mortgage which turned into a nightmare of lost documents, lawyers and general incompetence. I jumped through hoop after flaming hoop and finally secured an awful ARM at 10.22%. They cited my lack of rent/work history for the past two years as the reason. I knew it was an awful loan, but for some reason the idea of losing Mom's house was unbearable to me at that point. It was all I had left of her. The hand painted walls, the carefully placed appliques, the hours she spent designing and painting the rooms...I just couldn't let it go. Not to mention the shock of yet another move, was more than I could take. We took the "deal".
Flash forward two years to a recession only equaled by the Great Depression and my husband being laid off from his job for six months. I am a bartender so I am a tipped employee so as you can well imagine, my tips haven't exactly gone up either. I'm down about 35% in my pay right now. We burned through all of our savings to keep our payments current in that time period. I won't even go into the fight we had with Florida just to get his Unemployment payments. It took two months to get our first check, even though he had been working full time and they had paid in for his UE. They couldn't seem to find the records they needed. We were never reimbursed for those two months either.
My real estate taxes tripled last year and we had to wait til the last moment to pay them, which was the end of May. I called Saxon Mortgage, my mortgage company (subsidiary of Morgan Stanley) and informed them I might be a couple weeks late with June's payment. They suggested I apply for a loan modification after I explained our situation. They sent me a package with a checklist of documents they needed and papers to be signed. I gathered all the tax returns, pay stubs etc. and mailed them off over night to them on June 29th as I was told they needed all the paperwork by July 1. I also made the new "trial" payment by phone so it would be on time as well. I was told to not make my June payment at all and that the trial payment would be my next payment. I thought perhaps our luck was changing and maybe just maybe we'd make it. That all changed last night.
I received a phone call about 9pm last night from Saxon, informing me they hadn't received my package yet. I immediately found my receipt from the USPS and called them back with the tracking number. It took three phone calls and almost an hour to just get that information across to the obviously untrained people manning the phones. I was told they would check into it and try to find the paperwork. This morning I got another call, a robo call, informing me I am delinquent on my mortgage. I again called Saxon, this time they had me on hold for over an hour while a "supervisor" tried to track down the documents. They were signed for by an employee of Saxon on June 30th at the correct address. After an hour I was finally told they would send me a new package and I would need to resubmit all of the tax and employment information. I was shocked! Who has my information? Whoever it is has my banking information, my tax information, social security numbers of myself and my husband, phone numbers, addresses etc.! I was angry to say the least so I did some digging today and this is what I've found. I am NOT alone, in fact, it appears this is fairly common..
Still, some Saxon borrowers have endured long waits. Diana Wiles, a 54-year-old lab technician in Fremont, Mich., was approved in February for a modification on a $113,000 home-equity loan which cut her interest rate to 1.75% from 6.75%.
She says Saxon told her not to make her March loan payment and it would send her documents to sign and return. But the documents didn't arrive -- and Saxon charged her a late fee for missing a payment. Ms. Wiles made another attempt to modify her mortgage, and this time, Saxon screened her to see if she qualified under HAMP. But when the firm requested she put property taxes and insurance in an escrow account, as the U.S. program required, she balked. "I didn't trust them after all we had been through," she says.
Over the next six weeks, she resubmitted her financial information twice and called Saxon weekly, without a clear answer.
After The Wall Street Journal inquired about Ms. Wiles's case, she received a package confirming terms of an approved loan modification, setting her mortgage rate at 1.75% for five years beginning Aug. 1. A Saxon spokeswoman says her financial documentation only recently had been completed.
But more confusion followed. After her loan package was confirmed, Ms. Wiles received a letter dated June 24 from Saxon that said her first new payment was actually due July 1. Ms. Wiles phoned to clarify and then received another letter dated June 25 that told her to disregard the June 24 letter and that in fact her new loan package would begin Aug 1.
It appears Ms. Wiles and I are not alone, the BBB in Ft. Worth was getting a huge volume of calls about this.
He's been deflecting criticism from some watchdogs. In April, for example, Saxon executives convened at the Fort Worth unit of the Better Business Bureau. The agency, after receiving a spike in complaints from Saxon customers, had given the company an "F" based on the complaints.
Sitting in a small conference room, members of the bureau told Saxon executives of complaints about service, billing and miscommunications during refinancing, according to an agenda for the meeting. More than 300 people had lodged complaints in the year ending early 2009. Mr. Meola says complaints spiked after Saxon took over a portfolio of 80,000 loans from a troubled rival in 2007. The bureau has since upgraded Saxon to a "D."
Uhm, okay, so they get a D now? From where I sit not a whole lot has changed and now I have to sit here and sweat for how many more months to find out if I am approved? Will I ever find out where all that sensitive paperwork is and who has it? Do I trust them enough to resubmit all those documents, knowing it might very well be "lost" again? I'm beginning to think they really don't want to modify the loan, what they wanted was another customer in default that wasn't before. You see, I'm not underwater in my mortgage, not yet anyway so there is little incentive for them to modify my loan. I think perhaps the whole program needs to be looked at again and re-evaluated. The current version is NOT working for homeowners at all. What angers me the most, is my Husband and I are the exact people this program SHOULD be helping. We've tried very hard to make our payments on time, we both have jobs once again and we CAN pull ourselves back up given the opportunity. We just want that opportunity...