Fighting Wamu
Lesson of the day: Don't mess with Miel.
People who know me would likely say that I can deal with just about anything without getting too upset about things. After all, I do live in Afghanistan and deal with frequent travel and other stressful situations.
Getting screwed by WaMu is where I draw the line.
As regular readers know, our current finance goal is paying off our second mortgage with WaMu. This has to do with putting money on our highest debt, but it is also because we are tired of dealing with WaMu's crap.
The main issue that we are dealing with now is that WaMu has repeatedly applied the funds sent in for our second mortgage to our first mortgage instead. In each case the canceled check clearly shows that the payment was intended for the second mortgage. To learn about other reasons why WaMu sucks, check out past postings.
The first time this happened was back in July, and I only called about a dozen times and in the end they still didn't reverse the payment and apply it to the correct account. I've been disputing two payments where the same happened back in December, and it happened again this week.
I did two things about this. First, I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau, as it is not appropriate for them to apply the payment to the wrong mortgage. Second, I gave them another friendly call and now have their word that they will apply all four payments retro to the date the payment was initially intended to be made.
They tried to pull the whole, "I'm sorry, but one leg can't actually talk to the other leg" game. I was having nothing to do with that story. I nicely made it clear that I wasn't dealing with their games and managed to get someone who actually made an effort.
Now I'm happy to say that it looks like we'll have our second mortgage with WaMu taken care of sooner that we had thought.
With the four payments, totaling $2,750, and the $9,000 payment we are making from the interest free credit card that we just got, we will only have $3,177 to pay off before we don't have to deal with the darn thing again. Sure we'll still have to pay off the $9k on the credit card, but I'm so much happier doing that than giving WaMu another dime in interest.
Cheers,
Miel
Stumble It!
6 comments:
I agree that WaMu likes to scam it's customers. We deposited DH's bonus check and all but $100 of it was put on "hold"...well, if it was a $5000 check we'd have gotten access to all of it immediately. Why did I have to wait a week to get to $5000 that I had access to??? One week down and they are still sitting on a very sizeable chunk of money. Congrats on winning your battle!
Good for you Miel!
I don't blame you for wanting to get rid of that debt. My husband and I have finally paid off all our cars and credit cards, so the only debt we have now are student loans. We feel like we have so much more money now. We are free(er)! I told my husband we will never ever ever take on any more debt unless it's for a house. I don't want to feel like I'm just working to pay the banks and creditors ever again. (All thanks to Dave Ramsey of course) Keep working at being debt free, yall will get there!
I've had a bad time with WaMu (first mortgage), too. WaMu mails me propaganda once a month about their mortgage accelerator program, which allows you to pay down your mortgage more rapidly through payments every 2 weeks instead of monthly. Sounds great, but WaMu charges an initial fee to start the plan plus a monthly or per payment fee, all of which add up and dilute the benefit of the program. WaMu's monthly mailing says something like, "sure, you could do this on your own, but you'd probably get tired of posting the bi-weekly payments and it is much easier if we do the paperwork." WaMu should have said, "sure, you could do this on your own, but you'd probably get tired of spending over an hour per month on the phone with customer service disputing the late payment charges and worrying about your credit rating, even though technically you made more than your monthly payment each month, you just didn't use our fee-laden program to do it."
Good luck getting out from under your second mortgage with WaMu!
Roxiticus Desperate Housewives
When my student loan lender did the same thing, I got results with a letter to the CEO.
Desperate Housewive - Yes, we've actually dealt with the issue of accelerated payments with WaMu before as well. Like you said, they are nice enough to want to have you sign up for a fee-laden program, but otherwise they won't actually accept two payments a month. It is totally bogus and I too got tired of the bi-monthly calls and crap that it took to attempt two payments a month. Ridiculous if you ask me!
Thanks for all of your great comments! Not glad you've all dealt with something like this before, but it does feel good that we are fighting back!
Cheers,
Miel
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