Consumer complaint received 2021-03-25
Company: BANK OF AMERICA, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION
State: CA
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process

Complaint:
I've been a BofA home mortgage customer since XXXX without missing payments. I have automatic payments set up to pay three weeks in advance to avoid any possibility of late fees. 

In XXXX of XXXX, right when Covid hit, Bank of America routed my monthly payment to principal only and didn't apply the funds to the monthly payment. As a result, the XXXX payment wasn't considered paid, and they applied a late fee. By the time I found out, it was XXXX or XXXX of XXXX. I called BofA at that time, and their customer service said they would fix the issue and reverse the late fees. 

In XXXX of XXXX, with the issue still unresolved, and now late fees continuing to compound, I called back to check the status of my original case. After an hour on the phone explaining the situation for the third time, I was again assured it would be resolved. 

That's when the BofA debt collector calls started. After answering the first one, and spending 90 minutes explaining the situation to new people, and being routed to other agents, I was yet again assured the issue would be resolved. 

In XXXX of XXXX, after being fed up and spending countless hours on the phone with BofA debt collectors, customer service, and supervisors I was finally told that I would need to skip my XXXX payment because I was actually overpaid due to the reversal of all the late fees and the application of my XXXX payment to cover that month. They also said skipping that payment was imperative because if I made the payment it would 'screw up ' the reconciliation process. I was also told they couldn't stop the debt collectors from calling me because that was a different system. This supervisor told me to either ignore or answer those calls, he couldn't advise me either way. It takes roughly 90 minutes to answer those calls and explain the situation, so I chose to ignore. 

In XXXX, I noticed my FICO score declining. In XXXX of XXXX it was XXXX, and has since dropped to XXXX. Please note I make over $ XXXXyear and don't carry debt besides this mortgage, an equity account, and two car loans. My credit cards are paid each month. 

When I checked the account in early XXXX, I again saw large late fees. So I called back to check on the status of the reconciliation. I finally reached an agent who seemed to be truly interested in helping, but she has limited power. She has been communicating with me over email, but has told me there is no record of BofA telling me to skip my XXXX payment and therefore I need to pay that month. So, I sent the payment. Now I'm told that the late fees are in 'dispute ' because there's no record of them telling me to skip the XX/XX/XXXX payment. I told them to check the recorded tapes, they made me approve the recordings each time I spoke with them, so I'm sure there is record of this entire saga. 

My damages : 1 ) Stress - it is unreal that this has been going on so long with no resolution. Each time BofA comes up on my phone it's a debt collector telling me I'm delinquent. They have called me over 50 times over XXXX to XXXX 2 ) Time -- with an average of 90 minutes per phone call, over 8 phone calls, it's been approximately 720 minutes of wasted time. 12 hours of my time at $ XXXXhour is {$1800.00} 3 ) Credit -- my score has dropped almost XXXX points. I don't know how to put a value on that, but I was going to refinance my mortgage with the historic low rates in XXXX, but decided to hold off until this resolved so my credit would go back up and I wouldn't have this issue in place during the refi. Over the course of a 30 year loan, I missed out on about 1 % on $ XXXX. There are other places, I'm sure, where this credit score hit has impacted me.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with non-monetary relief