Greedy jerks (or profile of a mortgage company)

Last weekend I was playing around on Mint, which was depressing enough in its own right because our net worth is hugely negative, especially with the mortgage added in. In doing this, I was looking over our Wells-Fargo mortgage statements and I noticed that our bimonthly payments weren't behaving as expected. It turns out that Wells-Fargo only allows a full payment on the mortgage so when we paid half a payment on the 15th of the month, they held that money and DID NOT APPLY IT to our debt with them until the second payment was received on the 1st of the month. So, essentially I was giving them a FREE LOAN for two weeks every month. After further annoying conversations with the customer service person, it turns out that they pay themselves first for the escrow account and the interested owed and they will only do this in a complete payment. Since most of our mortgage payment is for taxes, insurance and interest, this doesn't happen until we make the second payment. This information was not told to me. It was only after I was on the phone for the second annoying time that I teased out this information. We are allowed to make any additional payment to the principle that we want, after the full monthly payment has been received.

Can you tell I'm still annoyed? Clearly my intent of given them the money was so that they would pay down what I owed them. They insist that other customers don't care about this and are just happy to have Wells-Fargo hold their money for them so they don't accidentally spend their mortgage payment over the course of the two weeks between when they get paid and when the payment is due. Since I'm not brain dead, I would rather earn interest on the money for myself and not let Wells-Fargo make even more money off of me. Jerks.

Click here to return to Gnomicon home page