Consumer complaint received 2016-09-18
Product: Mortgage — Conventional fixed mortgage
Issue: Loan servicing, payments, escrow account — 
Company: WELLS FARGO & COMPANY (NJ)

We have been married 50 years, XXXX of which my husband worked as a XXXX XXXX XXXX. We are both college educated, hard-working individuals. We never missed a single mortgage payment in 48 years of home ownership until beginning the loan modification process. We are lodging a complaint against Wells Fargo for mishandling this process and their ultimate resolution. In XXXX we had a 7 % mortgage interest rate with Wachovia, and with the declining economy, the interest rates dropped to 5 %. I, XXXX, was working full time. My employer was determined to keep staff employed, but to do so, had to cut our working hours in half. While making a regular monthly mortgage payment, my husband went to the local branch of Wachovia to personally ask a bank representative about refinancing the interest rate of our loan. The loan officer told us about the new " Mortgage Modification Program ''. We were assured by Wachovia that the modification was the " best '' way to lower our interest rate and that in order to qualify for the " modification '' program, we needed to stop paying our mortgage payment in order to show that we were " in need '' of a loan modification. We did what was requested. We never would have stopped making the mortgage payments if not instructed to do so by the officers at the bank. We first attempted to complete the modification process by ourselves by submitting Application Forms, XXXX forms, bank statements, Profit & Loss Statements, paystubs, Hardship Letters, explanations of income and expenses, tax returns, checklists, utility bills, social security award letters, pension award letters, and more. We re-submitted these repeatedly. Every time we submitted a complete set of documents, Wachovia would let our file languish for weeks and then instruct us to send additional redundant documents, always assuring us that our file was in " Active Modification Review. '' After a frustrating year of this process and being turned down, we hired a law firm in XXXX. After complying with redundant requests for information over a period of almost two years, the XXXX Law firm was unsuccessful. We can not comprehend why were turned down for a LOWER monthly payment, when we had been successfully making HIGHER payments over the many previous years. We then hired a XXXX law firm. During the course of their efforts to get our loan modified ( again with many repeated submittals of requested information ) ; Wachovia was taken over by Wells Fargo who did not honor any of the process that we had gone through with Wachovia. We began another process of re-submitting the same information. In XXXX XXXX, Wells Fargo finally approved a loan modification -- almost 4 years after the start of the process -- at a monthly payment that is almost {$1700.00} per month more than our original mortgage payment. We have struggled to make these payments using up almost all of our reserves and also accruing credit card debt. During this 4 year time period, banks would not take any payments from us until the loan modification was complete. The final modification includes all of the principal plus interest that was unpaid during their lengthy modification process, stacked atop our original principal balance. We are being charged interest on the interest and principal that was not paid during the modification process even though we were complying with the bank 's instructions not to make any payments during this process. The outcome of our efforts is that even with a slightly lower interest rate applied to this new capitalized principal, our monthly mortgage payment is approximately $ XXXX/month higher than it was when we began our long struggle to achieve a loan modification. There is NO REASON AT ALL, in today 's technologically advanced world that the modification process should have taken four years!