XX/XX/XXXX I was leaving the Army and looking to buy a house with my then fianc and our teenaged children. As first time home buyers we were qualified for a XXXX loan. We found a home in our price range and I carefully chose XXXX Bank because they were least likely to sell our mortgage. One year later, they sold our mortgage XXXX, which was taken over XXXX XX/XX/XXXX. 
This was the worst possible outcome. After carefully avoiding XXXX during the mortgage buying process, here we were. The first thing they did was raise our mortgage from {$1700.00} per month to {$2500.00} per month citing a deficiency in the escrow account. We struggled to keep up, sold family heirlooms, cashed out our annuities, anything to keep from losing the house. Four months later, they lowered the payments to {$2100.00} per month, but we were getting fewer hours due to the weather and it was still too much for us to pay. We were able to keep it up for a year, but XX/XX/XXXX we were laid-off. My husband and I are both XXXX. The financial crisis may have taken a bit longer to get to us than the rest of the workforce, but it hit us with a vengeance. Our friends were getting help with their loans from the government, and they recommended we try to do the same. 
We tried for a year to get a loan mod, but were told that we did not qualify because we were still making payments and in order to qualify we would have to be behind on payments by three months. What they did n't tell us is that penalties would continue to accrue. 
We stopped making payments and applied for the loan mod again. XXXX asked us to fax over XXXX pages costing us XXXX dollars, but at least we would have our application in and we would finally get help. A month passed, and XXXX contacted us to send the exact same paperwork again, they had allowed the paperwork to expire and if we wanted to mod we had no choice but to resend everything. This was to be a monthly theme where we would spend over XXXX dollars to send them paperwork and they would ignore it until it was expired. All we could do was continue to send the same paperwork to XXXX every month and hope that one day they would actually review it. 
Finally XX/XX/XXXX XXXX let us know that our mortgage would be reduced by only XXXX dollars a month. It turned out that all of the payments that we missed plus all of the interest and penalties, fees and so forth was added to the mortgage. They did n't even lower the interest rate. Six months later XXXX cashed out our P & I insurance and the loan went back XXXX who then sold it to Rushmore Loan Management XX/XX/XXXX. Once again I began negotiating to keep the house. Rushmore told us that we would have to come up with a down payment of at least {$8000.00} in order to get a loan modification. We started the paperwork all over again and this time we were successful. They gave us a six month trial payment of {$2100.00} per month. 
When the new paperwork came in, we were not able to hire a lawyer to look it over carefully, but we read it the best we could. It was n't until we had already signed it and sent it back that we realized that not only had they not reduced our loan payments, but they had tacked another ten years onto the mortgage. Our {$210000.00} home would end up costing us almost XXXX XXXX dollars by the time it was paid off, and we would never be able to pay it off during our lifetime, since we are almost XXXX. Then Rushmore raised our mortgage to {$2200.00} per month, citing a deficiency in the escrow account. They are likely to push us into foreclosure so they can also cash out on our P & I insurance.