Oklahoma mortgage bill comes with chest pain, courtesy of Wells Fargo
A missing digit caused a series of house payments to be applied backward, instead of forward, until the lender fired off a notice of default. Or did it?
For want of a zero, could a house be lost?
One digit missing from my checking account number, either because I remembered it wrong, or punched it in wrong, or said it wrong, or someone on the receiving end heard it wrong or typed it in wrong, caused our house payment not to be paid in July.
That caused the payment made in August to be applied to the bill due in July, and so on until the payment made the other day was applied to the bill due in October — and then it caused Wells Fargo Home Mortgage to cough out this heart attack on letterhead, which came in the mail:
“YOUR MORTGAGE LOAN IS IN DEFAULT. CALL IMMEDIATELY TO RESOLVE THIS VERY IMPORTANT LETTER.”
Ignoring the chest pain, I called Wells Fargo, then talked to my wife, then called the credit union, then called Wells Fargo again, then talked to my wife again, then called the credit union again, and then pieced together what happened.
My wife made the payment by phone, using my checking account number, which I'd written down for her. Somewhere along the line that zero fell out of my seven-digit account number. So, when Wells Fargo tried to electronically access my account, it wasn't actually my account, or anybody else's, so the credit union answered back with the electronic version of “You have the wrong number.”
And so began the series of payments applied backward instead of forward, and because life is messy and busy and my personal bookkeeping habits and skills are not the best, the mistake went undetected until Wells Fargo saw fit to send me a heart attack via the U.S. mail.
It's dealt with, but what a mess — and the thing is I like Wells Fargo.
Right here, on April 16, 2000, as Wells Fargo was taking down the Norwest Mortgage sign after buying the company, and our home loan, I waxed historic about “the dusty, sepia-toned image of those first Wells Fargo cross-country stagecoaches that comes to mind when someone says ‘Wells Fargo.'”
And I ended with: “Nowadays, Wells Fargo Co. is a diversified company providing banking, insurance, investments, mortgage and consumer finance. But the name will always conjure images of spreading civilization and stability in a wild country. And that's not a bad notion to have when you sit down to write out a house payment.”
How ironic. But I still have no complaints other than over this headache. My wife was ready to hang somebody from a tall oak tree, but the fact is I'm not sure where that zero fell out.
And I am sure that if my bookkeeping skills followed Generally Accepted Accounting Principles rather than my current approach, Write Debit Charges on Scraps of Paper and Stick Them in a Pocket Spanish-English Dictionary, which I've carried in my hip pocket in self-defense for a year now, this ordeal would have been caught before Wells Fargo went trigger-happy.
Two points, though:
I asked one of the people I talked to with Wells Fargo if there was a way to note the nature of the mistake, that we tried in good faith to make the payment and it just didn't “take,” and she mumbled something that included “it's all a numbers game.” That means “a racket,” although I'm sure she meant that nothing — NOTHING — matters but the numbers.
No wonder so many people are just walking away from their houses and house payments.
And, at one point, the other person with Wells Fargo said, emphatically, “Your loan isn't actually in default.” Well, right here on this Wells Fargo letterhead, in big, all-capitalized letters, it emphatically says: “YOUR MORTGAGE LOAN IS IN DEFAULT.”
So either the person or the letter was dishonest. That is no way to treat any customer, especially a good one. And it makes me doubt even more any statistics from anywhere that claim to assess the mortgage, default and foreclosure situation in this country.
Read more: http://newsok.com/oklahoma-mortgage-bill-comes-with-chest-pain-courtesy-of-wells-fargo/article/3624484#ixzz1eAsowe00
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