Midland Mortgage took over my mortgage when it was almost 45 days behind. I was scheduled to catch it up that month, and I sent the payment to the first lender because I thought it was still owed to them, since it was money owed before the other company took over. I called to verify this, and the old mortgage company said it should have gone to the new company, Midland Mortgage, but that I should not worry because they would forward it and Midland would credit it to the day it was received by Irwin Mortgage.
This all happened in June. In December I came home to find a notice stapled to my front door saying the property was in foreclosure and would be publicly auctioned in February.
I called right away to see what was going on, because I had been making my payments all along, although they were just under 30 days late each month. The person I spoke with was snotty and said that was what happened when you did not make a payment for 6 months. Of course I had made payments in the last 6 months, 6 of them to be exact. However, they did not accept them because they said I had gone over 60 days at one point and that is their cutoff time. I asked where all the payments I sent were going, and they said they had sent them back. I never received any paperwork saying I was in trouble, and I never got a check back in the mail, or I would have contacted them sooner.
To make a long story short, I had to pay attorney fees, and all the payments, except one that did come in the mail in January, were put toward paying off all their fees. For the next year my payments were increased to a point that I almost could not handle them, but I did and got through it.
Five months after that, I was in trouble again. The arrangement we made had me make payments on the 25th of the month, and I was paying an extremely higher amount than my original mortgage. I did not pay on the 1st of the next month because there were only 6 days to come up with a full payment, so I "thought" I did not need to pay until the 1st of the month after that.
That made me a little over 30 days late. Also using the grace period, I continued to make the payments a little late and decided to make the extra payment in 4 months when my husband gets his bonus. However, Midland is not happy with this arrangement. Even though they do not do anything unless you are over 60 days late, they decided to hold my payments so that I would go over 60 days, so they can put me into another arrangement that benefits pretty much only them, except that I still own the house.
I think they are shady and unethical in their dealings, and I will try to remortgage somewhere else later this year once this whole episode is behind us. I will request that if the company I go with sells to Midland, I do not want to be sold. Sell it to anyone but them.
I hate Midland, and they are hard to contact. They have an automated system that is not user friendly, and it takes 20 minutes to get someone on the phone who takes a message to have someone else call you back. I like local companies where I can go in to talk face to face. I feel strongly that people are less likely to lie to you in person than over the phone.
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