In 2003 my wife and I wanted to refinance our home to obtain a lower APR and lower effective interest rate, and consolidate credit bills into the loan.
We obtained the services of Heartland Home Finance, Inc., from a web search. The agent came to our home and we talked, and completed some preliminary papers after we felt comfortable (ha ha) with him and the company he represented.
We in the course of time got all (we thought) loan papers for review, and we went over each document one by one to make sure it was what we wanted. At closing we again went over the documents one by one.
The APR was right, and we did not see any prepayment penality or any other red flag. We signed the papers. It was only after the three day waiting period that we noticed that we had signed a settlement that had a 7.98% APR, and the documents included a $5000.00 three year prepayment penalty.
We thought we were savy because we had refinanced twice before and had no problem. The loan was sold to Homeq Servicing and subsiduary of Wachovia.
I don't know how we could have prevented what had happened, we thought we were being careful, but somehow, unless both of us were blind, our signatures wound up on documents that gave us no benefit.
I have read and heard of other people who have experienced similar things from other companies, and we were just as dumb founded as they.
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