Consumer complaint received 2022-07-02
Company: Shellpoint Partners, LLC
State: GA
Product: Mortgage
Sub-product: Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Trouble during payment process

Complaint:
I have a loan that is serviced by NewRez Loan Servicing and unintentionally missed a payment due XX/XX/XXXX. I believe I was never adequately notified of the missed payment which resulted in a 30-day late payment hit on my and my wife 's credit reports and the damaging of our credit scores. In fact, the only reason I became aware of the overdue balance was because my third party credit monitoring alerted me to the change in my credit report. 

Timeline of payments : XX/XX/XXXX unintentionally missed normal payment XX/XX/XXXX made normal payment of {$1600.00} XX/XX/XXXX after receiving alert from credit monitoring, made payments totaling {$3300.00} to become current Supporting information to my complaint : - Even though I have opted-in to paperless communications and statements from the company, the only notice that was ever sent to me about the status of my account was by mail according to the phone representative I spoke to on XX/XX/XXXX. One letter was mailed on XX/XX/XXXX and a second one on XX/XX/XXXX according to the phone rep. As I am writing this issue on XX/XX/XXXX, it is obvious that I never had an opportunity to receive the second letter. After speaking to the phone rep, I examined our junk mail pile and was able to find the initial letter. I was surprised to see that the letter had no outside indication of whom the letter was from and frankly the letter is indistinguishable from ordinary junk mail. Again, this is the single time the company attempted to communicate the late status to me. I have attached a photo of the outside of the letter to show how nondescript it is as well as the inside to prove it is the same letter. 

- Along with the letter having no outside identifying information, even the return address shown would not alert me to the fact it is from Newrez. The return address on the letter is XXXX, Michigan. The contact us page on my Newrez dashboard gives an address in XXXX, South Carolina. The billing statement pdf gives an address in XXXX. The general Newrez site gives an address in Pennsylvania. So again, there is no way for me to distinguish this letter from ordinary junk mail. 

- There is nowhere on the Newrez online account dashboard that shows a total balance outstanding. Even though the total amount outstanding on my account was actually {$3300.00}, the online dashboard only presented a single payment due of {$1600.00}. I unfortunately do not have screenshots of the dashboard before I made my catch up payment but I have attached current screenshots for reference.

- Nowhere on the landing page, account dashboard, or payment screen does the Newrez system ever indicate there is an overdue balance on my account. No red alert box, orange exclamation point, or any sort of overlay message to draw attention to an overdue balance. 

- When I logged in to make my payment for XXXX, the options to add the additional missed payment and pay off the late charges were unchecked by default on the payment screen with no alert messages or anything to catch my attention. This is incredibly easy to miss and the only reason I caught it was because I already knew I needed to pay an additional payment to catch up. 

- I do acknowledge that if I had checked my pdf statement online, I could have been alerted to the overdue balance. But I would question how many of Newrezs customers do that promptly every month and why is that the only place on Newrezs website that communicates the overdue balance to me? The online dashboard is flashy and colorful with numbers and graphs that I feel a reasonable person would expect to communicate all important information without looking at a pdf statement.

For the reasons described above, I believe Newrez did not make adequate attempts to notify me of my past due balance resulting in damage to my and my wife 's credit histories.

Company public response: Company believes it acted appropriately as authorized by contract or law
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation