Aww, look! Another happy Countrywide customer, so pleased with their experience that they wrote them a thank you letter.
Note to furriners: Countrywide is pretty much the evilest villain in the American financial crisis. It has the twirliest moustache, the creepiest hunch, the darkest eyebrows. Booo! Hiss!
Found by: SC
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They pretty much screwed us and left, too. I was REALLY tempted to do this, but the loan had been sold by then and they offered to pay us NOT to. Somehow I majored in Real Estate and they still pulled illegal crap behind the scenes…I’m still shaking my head on that one.
When we were going through hard times, we kept getting letters from Countrywide “Call this 800 number and ask us about how we can help you!”
SO we called, naively, and asked how they could help us, while we were behind on payments due to being unemployed/under-employed (working any odd jobs available, but not getting paid enough to pay all the bills and eat too).
Guess what they said?
“We can’t help you.”
Guess what the letter we got the next month said?
“Call this 800 number, and let us help you!”
>.<
Hate them. Hate them so very much.
Since it was brought up:
No, we weren’t “house poor” it was a tiny 3-BR starter house that had been in the family for over 20 years, and we did end up selling just in time. The payments were well within our means, but it’s pretty dang impossible to keep up with everything while being out of a steady job for over 18 months, going to the department of labor looking for work, submitting dozens of resumes every day, while working odd jobs and anything you could get.
For what it’s worth, Countrywide ALSO messed up the loan of the people who bought the house from us. Last I had heard they were planning to refinance with another lender ASAP.
Yes, there were many who made foolish choices, and shouldn’t have borrowed. There were also honest, hardworking families who did nothing wrong, but ended up bad off anyhow.
These folks harassed us constantly to refi our nice fixed loan.
They are evil incarnate.
They harassed us as well. We have a fixed at 4.75. Our house is almost paid off (four more years)- so please tell me why I need to refi???? They are so so so…what is beyond all evil? that’s what they are.
The blame is not only with the lenders. It also lies with the people who took out loans that they could barely afford during good times and could never afford during bad times. Many people failed to plan for the eventual downturn in the economy and were caught with their pants down. Did these lenders make bad loans and thus place their investor’s money at undue risk? Yes, but they are not solely responsible for the problem. anyone with half a brain could tell 6 years ago that this was a bubble like the dot coms before it, but most people chose not to think logically and instead thought emotionally because they wanted a house NOW!
I knew the fall was coming, but sadly my house was in poor shape and I could not sell it at the time. I wanted to sell it, put the money in the bak and wait for it to all go to hell so I could take advantage of the situation as it unfolded. Sadly, it took too long to clean it up and get it fixed and now I am lucky to still have 20% equity left for a refi.
Yup. Why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to buy a house that they couldn’t afford to at least put 20% down on is beyond me. We were offered plenty of those sketchy sounding ARM, no percent down mortgages when we bought our house a decade ago, but I guess I’d always listened when my mother said “just because everyone else is jumping off a bridge, doesn’t make it a good idea.” We’re stretched now given the effects of the inevitable crash and subsequent depression, but at least we have the equity we put down in the house in the first place.
Well now, I didn’t have money to put down when I bought my place, but I made good and sure to get a fixed rate mortgage with monthly payments I knew I could afford. I refinanced last year when the interest rates bottomed out. And yes, my mortgage had been bought by Countrywide and then Bank of America… the hand-off happened in the midst of my refinance and made things even more complicated. BoA has picked right up where Countrywide left off, asking me to refinance AGAIN. LOL no thank you very much, I got the best deal I’m going to get and I’m not terribly eager to spend another $6000 in fees (which were supposed to be $3000 until I was actually signing the papers….).
Well, that’s the thing right there. ARM loans are a bad idea unless you KNOW you are moving before the adjustment period. Plus, a lot of people saw their homes as a secondary form of income due to the ever-increasing equity and refinanced to the max several times. This left them screwed when it all fell apart.
However, there were other things leading to the crisis which are not as widely understood. Things like the role of the Clinton White House and their forcing banks to make loans in previously unmortgageable low income neighborhoods, or Barney Franks’ desire to flood the market with cheap housing so anyone could afford one-whether they could or not. This lead the banks to try and find a way to deal with this risky debt so they could stay in business, so they used derivatives to repackage the loans as bonds with an A rating. The derivatives worked mathematically 99% of the time, but the 1% situation happened and ruined the world’s financial markets. It is important to look at the whole picture and you will find far more villans and fools than just the banks and borrowers.
It is also interesting to note that the banking crisis helped to take down GM. Why? Well, Homecomings financial, one of the biggest mortgage lenders in the US at the time, was a wholly owned subsidiary of GMAC financial. At the time, GM was oft described as a “financial services company that happens to also build cars”. Indeed, all of their profit came from GMAC and they lost money on their automobile production business.
Jim-Bob you have done your homework! We did ours as well and put half down on a smaller home (Empty Nest!!!!). No pool, no frills, good hood, though. Well worth it. Almost paid off. Bigger is not better sometimes.
NOW it all makes sense why people refer to Countrywide employees by the first syllable of the company name. I thought it was something different altogether.
Why do people call then “cun”? hehehe, sorry I know where you were going, but couldn’t help myself.
Jim-Bob makes some excellent points about personal responsibility. Certainly a lot of people behaved like utter fools as the housing bubble expanded. But plenty of people were suckered in and taken advantage of, too, plus most of us didn’t forsee just how bad the economy would get. The brutal dismissiveness of the banks and companies like Countrywide is chilling.
Personally I’m amazed at the restraint of the evicted former owners. (That is, assuming their little thank you note was ALL they left behind.)
I agree about the restraint. Note that the spraypaint is on the wallpaper, not on the unpainted trim or built-in furniture.
One of the pictures has a swastika on the wall. Maybe the previous owners were using it in accordance with its original beliefs?
http://www.answers.com/topic/swastika
Boy, I think I’d have written something other than “Thank you.”
This subject irritates the heck out of me.
I truly feel for those who lost their jobs and as a result lost their homes, unable to afford their mortgages.
But I fail to see how the banks are responsible for THAT. It’s sad for you, and I have great compassion for you. But the bank has no responsibility to say, “Oh, you lost your job? Ok. Stay there and don’t pay us until you get back on your feet.”
Do people bear no responsibility at all for taking out mortgages they could not afford? Did you never hear that your housing expenses should never be more than 25% of your income? Weren’t people just as greedy for a house and a beemer as the banks were greedy for money? Didn’t people take the equity out of their homes and take vacations and get new cars and buy all kids of other toys?
Yes, it’s the banks’ fault.
It’s absolutely the banks’ faults for extending loans to high risk customers. Banks accepted the risk of people defaulting, and look what happened — people defaulted, and the banks couldn’t cover all the money they loaned, so the government (read you and me) had to bail them out.
Not only did banks extend loans to high-risk customers, they created products specifically for “sub-prime” borrowers. Zero down, adjustable ARM that’s nothing for the first months or years.
And then they aggressively marketed these products to high-risk borrowers.
So yes, people shouldn’t borrow more than they can afford. But the banks are at fault for loaning more money than they had to loan. To people who couldn’t pay the bills!
Furthermore, the fact that banks so over-extended themselves with subprime loans is exactly how our economy got into this mess in the first place! It’s why “hardworking, honest people” started losing their jobs and couldn’t keep up with their mortgages in the first place.
Sub-prime lending in the U.S.A. was at the heart of this global recession. And it will take many, many years to recover. Let’s hope we remember this in the future and don’t allow banks to act like Guidos, breaking knee caps of suckers who took the easy money. [Suckers who, BTW -- were also "hardworking, honest people"]
Grrr, Countrywide !
We went through a local bank who turned around and sold our mortgage to Countrywide. That first month an amount appeared on our balance that was our monthly payment, fine. Then another amount that was in the same ballpark but not quite the same. I called them up and they said — this is a direct quote — “That must be someone else’s payment. We’ll find out whose when they call in.” It never was straightened out. So, we weren’t screwed but someone else was.
Second story: I set up auto-payment by giving Countrywide our bank account info. Everything was fine for about a year and then they just stopped doing it. No explanation, no notification. Just didn’t take the payment, but all late fees apply. When I called they said, “You have to send in your bank numbers again. No, I can’t transfer you. You have to call this number. And, oh, they don’t open until 9:00 Pacific.”
It’s not just a matter of approving loans that shouldn’t be approved. It’s also about servicing the loans. If they don’t credit accounts accurately — you know, bookkeeping 101 — homeowners can get screwed in ways they never saw coming.
We had the exact same thing happen. They also told us our HOA was being paid from the impound, only to get notice several months later that we were well behind on HOA fees. Then we gave them extra money each month for the impound to cover HOA fees, only to have them sit on it and not pay the fees.
Our loan wasn’t subprime. In fact – they approved us for $500,000 and we took a house at half that price. We knew what we could afford. We got royally screwed when the builders sold the remaining units for half the asking price, so the bank wouldn’t even talk to us about a refi.
It seems most mortgage servicers and bankers really stink. I had a mortgage serviced by a company called Ocwen. They suck really bad. How bad? They got an “F” from the Better Business Bureau. Do not let anyone sell your mortgage to these schmucks.
This is why you get your loan directly from the source–a bank that will never sell your loan.
Part of the problem is that the secondary mortgage market (those who buy the loans from the people that set them up) buy bundles of loans. These bundles had good traditional loans and bad risky loans all mixed up together, and when the bad loans went bad, they took good loans with them.
When we got a loan on a house last year, we made sure it was directly from the bank that would service the loan. That bank also never engaged in the risky sub-prime lending that went on. They suffered a little through that phase, but they are making up for it now because they have had fewer defaults. Yay Wells Fargo!
We now have Wells Fargo, too. As an added bonus, I get to sing that song from The Music Man every month as I pay bills.
The strange thing is where I live, Countrywide is a very nice furniture store.
So Countrywide in the US: A place homeowners never, ever want to deal with.
Countrywide in Western Canada: A place where homeowners want to go, in order to get a classy couch.
At least it looks like all they did was spray paint. Doesn’t look like they stole the plumbing pipe or cabinetry like I’ve seen in some foreclosed homes. Probably the new buyers would want to paint anyway. This is a darling house – I bet the owners were devastated to lose it.
In the picture with the “thank you” message, I did notice that the glass on the built in cabinetry seems to be both broken and twisted. My guess is someone decided to throw something heavy in that direction.