Consumer complaint received 2015-04-02
Product: Mortgage — Conventional fixed mortgage
Issue: Loan servicing, payments, escrow account — 
Company: JPMORGAN CHASE & CO. (MN)

Greetings. In XX/XX/XXXX, I hired a short sale specialist to list for sale a property I was awarded in my divorce, which had been finalized months earlier. The divorce cost me all of my savings and left me both with huge unpaid debts ( mostly legal fees ) as well as an investment property that had significant negative equity and a tenant who was n't paying her rent. 

The house listed for seven months and received offers but Chase would not process the short sale because I was able to remain current on my payments. In XX/XX/XXXX, Chase advised the office of my listing agent that I would need to skip a payment for the short sale to proceed. In XX/XX/XXXX, I cancelled the auto-payment on the loan for that month only, effectively missing that payment. In XX/XX/XXXX, payments resumed and continued as before. In XX/XX/XXXX, Chase informed my listing agent that they would not agree to the short sale. That same month, in addition to remaining current on the monthly payments, I made a XXXX payment to cover what had been skipped -- again through Chase 's prompting -- in XX/XX/XXXX. 

While this matter did not help my financial picture, which had not significantly improved over this time, it should have squared me with Chase. However, it did not. In spite of advising my listing agent that a missed payment was required in order for them to process the sale of the property, Chase actually raised my monthly payment as a result of the skipped payment. And even though after said skipped payment, my payments continued as before in a timely manner, Chase repeatedly treated these as both past due and insufficient because they had raised dramatically the amount held escrow on my mortgage and implemented late fees as a penalty for the XXXX skipped payment, effectively diminishing the effectiveness of payments. 

The home has since been re-listed again by the same short sale agent, and nothing has changed. In the meantime, even though, my net payments to Chase per terms of my original mortgage should be square, they have continued to report my payments as rolling 30 day late and have escalated the the reporting of late payments and fees associated with the XXXX skipped payment. 

The result has been decimation of my credit and intractable movement on any processing of the short sale. I remain underwater and in debt for the property only now with greatly damaged credit, a higher mortgage payment and undue fees and charges. This is not a creditor working with their borrower. This is a creditor who advised via my listing agent to skip a payment for their own underwriting practices and then used that to attack my credit and further diminish my ability to manage my debt load to them as well as my overall debt burdern, which precipitated the whole issue to begin with. 

Chase should proceed with the short sale of the home. If not, they should give me the option of giving them the deed in lieu of payment or offer to rescind all assigned late fees, acknowledging the effects of their own procedures as well as my own good faith efforts to both follow their lead and to reconcile with them after they originally denied the short sale. They should at minimum expunge the missed payments ( aside from the XXXX ) from my credit report and either work on the short sale or a mortgage modification to deal with this distressed property.