Quoted:
A few years back I was a division VP for a large lender that did mortgages, acted as the VMC through the entire process and had its own portfolio management company (separate entity) that then serviced and/or sold mortgages.

Since the golden days of letting people finance homes for more than they could ever pay, charging ridiculous fees (origination fee and title insurance, I'm looking at you) and points things had to get creative if you were dealing with sub prime loans in any way to hedge the losses you will take on defaulting mortgages. It's a sort of corporate socialism; charge the shit out of people that try their hardest to pay their bills on time to make up for those that won't. The sad thing is, you can usually tell 90% of the time who its going to be before you even make it to closing.

On the flip side, banks are getting better at being worse. After the real estate/financial services crash larger organizations like mine cut out practically any service that didn't directly generate revenue and either farmed them out and simply managed the process or dropped them all together. Unfortunately, this brought out the bottom feeder no-names like Green Tree, NationStar, CapStar, etc that will try to charge you for anything and everything as well as simply request more money for you because 75% of people are too dumb/scared/oblivious to do anything about it. It's in their best interests to fuck you, especially if you are a prime rated mortgage because while it's more likely they'll make that little bit of interest off of you over time, they want to generate as much free money from you as they can as its 100% profit.

And when you do catch them after a long drawn out process of proving your innocence, you'll be lucky to get much more than a generic email/letter stating whatever your gripe was is now corrected as a 'one time courtesy' to you or some bullshit that makes it sound like you were the problem.

Be on the lookout for:

- Raising your mortgage on a whim with zero notice other than your bill going up. Chances are if you bill pay, you send the same amount each month as you have for the last few years. This will cause rolling late fees on something trivial that will turn into a decent chunk of change that they will NEVER contact you about and just let it keep snowballing.
- Raising your escrow for absolutely zero reason and raising it a substantial amount to where when asked, they can't stipulate as to why.
- Keeping excess escrow for longer than legally able to. This will depend on your state, but most of the time they should return any excess after a set amount of time or when you ask them to. I guarantee they wait until you ask and that will probably be the runaround from hell.
- Fees for everything and telling you that its required. While some of us know its total bullshit, a lot of people fall for it. Imagine if just 1000 people fall for the 12.95 fee; that's $12,950 a month or  $155k annually in extra 100% pure cash profit to them for doing absolutely nothing.
- Changing due dates/APR dates
- Trying to screw you on your principal/interest application percentages - be very careful with this. Many times a new lender will do this on purpose because most people won't figure it out for year and years and then it becomes an immense legal issue if caught, or free money for them if not caught. They will 150% feign ignorance that it happened.


ETA - OP your attorney is correct. Sit and wait as well as make sure you have all of your payments documented by the check/clear dates. Its extremely uncommon for them to move that quickly with a foreclosure letter or even a demand letter as they LOVE late fees. Something is either very wrong here like their system is fucked up somehow and throws a flag even though you are up to date as this is the first time I've heard of any servicing company doing anything quickly.

Quoted:


Not only the physical mortgage document, but the original promissory note also.  I have seen homeowners win quiet title cases against mortgage holders who couldn't find the original documents.  Something about keeping the 2 docs together was a big deal.  That issue wont come up until discovery and the actual trial though.

Quoted:
At least you didn't get a car repo'd even though you had a title in your hand because of a bank error

Quoted:
One of our past loans was sold to BoA.  I tried contacting them at one point to refi and couldn't get through to a real human being.  Ok, f' you.  Called local credit union, started the refi process, two days later I get a next day air package from BoA with a REFI OFFER.

Again, F' you BoA

Quoted:


I'm surprised to find  that the "five figure check" you are expecting from the insurance company isn't  a 2 party check made out to both you and the lender who is the lien holder.