Consumer complaint received 2026-01-30 00:00:00
Product: Mortgage — Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Struggling to pay mortgage — An existing modification, forbearance plan, short sale, or other loss mitigation relief
Company: DISCOVER BANK
State: NC

Complaint narrative:
I applied for forbearance on a second mortgage we have on our home with Discover. We have had the loan for a little over two years with no late payments. My husband lost his job in XXXX and the current job market seems to be very tough ( as well as all of the scams that are out there ). By the end of XXXX, we knew money would be really tight, so we applied for forbearance on our primary and secondary mortgages at the beginning of XXXX. XXXX XXXX  was great! They took only 10 days to process the forbearance, sent us a copy of the final approval and covered the month in which the forbearance process was started and a few months forward. No issues ... no delays in paperwork... no requesting I resubmit everything in writing multiple times... just a clean application and approval process. 

Discover, on the other hand, since being bought out by XXXX XXXX has been a real pain to deal with. They sent me to a different website portal to submit all of my documentation ( XXXX ), and seemed to indicate this was a third party collecting the information on their behalf. Turns out Discover mortgages are sub-serviced by XXXX XXXX  ( who apparently operates the site ), and every time I submitted documents on their site, they rejected many and told me to resend with this or that, and change this to that. The process was excruciatingly long and frustrating. I requested any financial hardship assistance they could provide on XX/XX/XXXX. After directing me to the website ( with me only knowing about the website when they mailed the Loss Mitigation Paperwork to me a few days later ). 

So the paperwork submission took 42 days to complete ( because they kept denying my submissions and asking me to resubmit things I already submitted ). So by XXXX they finally said they received the paperwork and starting the process of approval. They finally approved the forbearance for 3 months on XX/XX/XXXX ( before the XXXX mortgage payment was due ... which the due date was XX/XX/XXXX ). They post-dated the forbearance to cover XXXX, XXXX and XXXX... but not XXXX and XXXX. 

Even though they were probably supposed to cover XXXX and XXXX, according to XXXX : " Mortgage companies are expected to apply forbearance, which pauses payments, starting from the date the hardship began or when the request was made, rather than just from the date of approval. The process generally takes XXXX business days, and lenders must act quickly to approve/deny requests, ensuring the relief covers the intended period. 
Key details regarding forbearance timing : Approval Timeframe : Lenders must approve or deny requests within 10 business days. 
Effective Date : Forbearance is typically applied to include the time taken to process the request, often retroactively to the date of the hardship or request. 
Duration : Initial periods are usually XXXX to XXXX months, with extensions available. 
Reporting : During approved forbearance, lenders are required to report accounts as current, or maintain their previous status, rather than reporting them as delinquent. 
It is essential to contact the servicer immediately to initiate the process and confirm the exact start date of the, as policies can vary. " They did not, so we had to scrounge up the money to pay those two months and a late fee on XXXX. They had already reported XXXX as 30 days late on my credit report as of XXXX ( and I asked for a Goodwill removal of that since we started the forbearance application more than two weeks before that payment was due... and with the grace period 30-days late would have been almost a month from the date we requested forbearance ), which is THE ONLY 30-DAY LATE PAYMENT ON MY ENTIRE CREDIT REPORT! But they said " we don't do that ''. Now I find out that the forbearance doesn't start until the XXXX payment is due ( which is XX/XX/XXXX ) and goes for 3 months. They should have at least covered the XXXX payment due ( XX/XX/XXXX ) since the forbearance was approved on XX/XX/XXXX and finalized in their system that we " were on forbearance '' as of XX/XX/XXXX. Yet somehow I have to pay the XXXX payment die and a late fee ( and they have yet to apply the late fee we paid for XXXX ). So now I have to scrounge up another {$1000.00} to pay the XXXX mortgage payment " while I'm on forbearance ''. It's not yet technically late ( since there is a 15 day grace period ), but this whole thing seems like attempts to somehow put me in default, or ruin my credit to make denials easier for them, or force me to pay money I don't have so it will XXXX up other bills or leave some discrepancy after the forbearance is up ( like maybe a denial for an extension of another 3 months ). I feel like XXXX XXXX, Discover and XXXX are doing some illegal things, but feel as though there is nothing I can do about it. 

And on top of that, we received a notice from Discover that the " servicer '' of our loan was changing to " XXXX XXXX '' but the sub-servicer was staying XXXX. And that this change was to occur XX/XX/XXXX ... yet in that same letter it says they have to notify me at least 15 days before this change occurs, and I received the letter via regular postal mail on XX/XX/XXXX, which is two days before the change in servicer ( yet even though there was no date at the top of the letter, not a postmark on the envelope, the date at the end of the letter was XX/XX/XXXX... which is 16 days before the change in servicer... even though it took the letter 13 days to get to me via regular postal mail ). 

I don't mean to sound like some conspiracy theorist, but this all seems like unscrupulous business practices and attempts to get me to default by XXXX XXXX, Discover and XXXX. I am writing to see if there are any technicalities in what I have described that would allow the XXXX payment to be covered under the forbearance ... I sent an email to Discover to see about this ... and any possibility to get the one 30-Day late notice removed from my credit report under Discover. I feel like I'm getting screwed over by Discover, while XXXX did everything they were supposed to. So I have filed this complaint to see if this can be taken any further and to ask if I should file a complaint with the credit reporting bureaus to dispute the 30-Day late mark on my credit.

Company response to consumer: Closed with non-monetary relief