Consumer complaint received 2017-10-25
Company: WELLS FARGO & COMPANY
State: CA
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process

Complaint:
I refinanced my primary home loan on XX/XX/XXXX with Wells Fargo and started making payments covering {$2800.00} of {$2800.00} monthly mortgage payment. I paid an additional payment each month of {$1600.00} that was supposed to be applied to principal. Every once in a while the bank would apply the funds towards principal, but in XX/XX/XXXX the bank suspended all additional payments because they said I had paid the full amount of the years mortgage payments by then. I asked several times over the years for my additional mortgage payments to be added to principal, and always received the reply that they were. I asked again a few months ago and they responded that they were applying additional funds to principal. I called again a couple of weeks ago because the principal was n't going down and after 40 minutes on the phone, learned that they had n't been applying the payments towards principal but accelerated the payments ( applied the payments to future monthly mortgage payments due ). Clearly paying off the whole year in the first half of the year is in the bank 's interest as is not allowing me to pay down the principal and it allows them to receive funds in advance of their due date. When I asked the manager to reverse the payments from my Wells Fargo account to my Wells Fargo mortgage, she said she could n't because they had already paid the mortgage vendor. I realized during the call that Wells Fargo was able to cancel my payments from both XXXX XXXX XXXX and Wells Fargo to the mortgage. Wells Fargo never informed me, which the Wells Fargo manager apologized for. She stated that it should have happened according to their policies. I never would have expected that my auto payments were n't active and paying my mortgage on time. She offered to set up the monthly payments from both accounts we had been using to pay down the mortgage, but said if I wanted to pay against principal I would need to log into my Wells bank account each time and manually transfer the money to the Wells mortgage in order to stipulate that the payment go towards principle. That requirement makes it a lot harder to pay down principal. It also creates a couple of questions. Why, in a couple of cases, did the extra monies get applied to the principal without needing to go online to utilize this special transfer mechanism? What if someone did n't have a Wells Fargo account to transfer to their Well 's mortgage? Why is a mortgage company allowed to halt automatic payments that a person has set up, especially regarding an account for a mortgage which is central to a person 's financial solvency? 

Summary : 1 ) WF mortgage is directing WF checking and XXXX checking to cancel payments that the user directed WF and XXXX to make, without notification to the borrower/account holder. 2 ) WF  mortgage is consciously attempting to prevent customers from paying down principal, by canceling payments that the user has directed their bank to make, and by requiring procedures that are inconvenient and onerous in order to deter this activity. 3 ) WF mortgage is applying current payments to future interest payments without authorization, which results in advance payment of interest which is in the Bank 's financial interest against the will and instructions of the customer.

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 explanation