We've all heard the old saying: No Honor Among Thieves. Judging from our experience with two of America 's premier mortgage lenders, Wells Fargo Home Mortgage and the federally-established Freddie Mac, that saying could read: No Honor Among Lenders. You might think that, after lenders' abusive and unwise practices, fueled by their greed, helped to trigger a financial near-disaster last year, leading lenders such as Wells Fargo and Freddie Mac might have learned something but that appears not to be the case.
What is particularly galling is the blend of incompetence and arrogance exercised by these two giants, who took multi-billions of federal tax dollars from all of our pockets, while dragging their heels on federally-supported and mandated loan modifications and other legal requirements such as the deletion of so-called Private Mortgage Insurance at once when a mortgage loan reaches eighty percent of the full initial value of a home.
Because we still had our former residence in New Hampshire to sell, in a very slow and down market, we tried to apply with Wells Fargo for a loan modification on our new home and residence in Georgia . After four calls to their customer (dis)service staff, none of which produced the requested loan modification application, we finally demanded that their corporate level follow the law and let us apply for a modification, and we finally received the needed application. Still, the Wells Fargo staffer assigned to us tried very diligently to discourage any better loan terms for us, with meaningless statements that there was no plan which would work for us, endless stalling, and imaginary snags.
We finally approached Freddie Mac after we discovered, by accident, that Wells Fargo actually had sold our mortgage to Freddie Mac. We managed to get Freddie Mac toutilize the new federal loan modification program, but they demanded that we extend our mortgage from fifteen years to twenty five years in order to get a reduced interest rate. In other words, Freddie Mac would make up for our reduced interest rate by squeezing payments out of us for another ten years! That is, indeed, a dishonorable act.
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