Come on it’s, a loan application not rocket science

I may have to start a series based on this style of complaint. Having worked with financial software for the last 2 years I know that it is generally designed to be as fool proof as possible. This means that end users are only given a few specific fields at a time to fill in, as many options as possible use drop down boxes, radial buttons, checks, and pre-populated lists. All of this is to take a formerly complex task and simplify it so you no longer need specialist to do this. This cuts training and employee cost for financial institutions. The mortgage industry is a leader in this area. With the housing bubble over the last ¾ decade they needed more people on board as fast as possible to process all of the loan applications; the same applications that led to the avalanche of defaults beginning mid last year. So it was a surprise for me when a company I do a lot of business with couldn’t get it right.

To begin though I need to step back and mention that the city sent me an ever so friendly letter this winter with a list of home improvements I had to have done by summer. I don’t mind the target a different neighborhood every year. The tactic was first used in St. Paul and it worked so well that Minneapolis copied. However for me this means that I need to push some things to the top of the list. One of these is the big job of having the house resided. This is one job like roofing I don’t want to do myself. Therefore I decided to get a home equity loan to cover the costs. Also if I don’t make these fixes by mid-summer I get fined and eventually the city may send contractors to do it for me then add it to my tax bill. This certainly isn’t something you want to happen as city contractors normally aren’t the cheapest people to have do work.

A few months ago while I was online with my insurance agent they mentioned – due to the fact they also run a bank – that I was pre-approved for a home equity loan or line of credit at a certain rate. I remembered this a month ago when I started applying for loans and checked their rates against all the banks I do business with. They were the cheapest. So the application is actually completed via a website, and I have to admit I started the comedy of errors that was to follow. I put my gross bi-weekly pay in for where I should have put my monthly gross. So I called them up and had this corrected. A few days later I was contacted to complete the process. A nice loan officer asked me some questions, I answered and she overnighted me the papers. Even with overnight I am only able to get them on weekends though because of traveling. Well when they came instead of adding my wife’s name to the paper work they put my dad’s name on the mortgage. This baffled me, but they are not open on weekends so I had to wait to call and find out what was going on.

Well after traveling, checking in with my managers, and doing some work the following Monday I phoned up my loan officer. Got a voicemail “where she says leave a detailed message and I will back to you by the end of business”, so I did. But she didn’t. Two days later she got a hold of me apologized and sent more paper’s out. Well, when they hadn’t arrived by Thursday I called again, she told me she had forgotten to hit print. Can we say strike one and two. That Saturday when I did get the papers again they had the wrong name on them. The loan officer had butchered my wife’s name so bad that it wasn’t even close. So again I had to wait until Monday to call. Strike three.

Monday I called and asked to talk to a supervisor. Really I thought most of this was funny but I didn’t want someone who couldn’t get the correct name on a document working on my account. Well no supervisor was available but I was put through to their voicemail. Strike four. Again the message said they would get back to me by the end of the day. I left a message, they didn’t make the end of the day. Again two day’s later I received a call back but it was over the dinner hour and I didn’t see the call so they left a VM. Strike five. So the next day I left them a pretty harsh message and decided to check out the number 2 choice of loan providers my credit union.

So on Wednesday I drove to the credit union, turned out they could beat the rate at the first company and we did the application right there. The next day the paper work was ready. By now the first company had called and made corrections and sent new papers that would arrive in a couple days. I was no longer interested. I ended up getting a better loan at a better price; a nice happy ending in my opinion. What is funny though is that it took getting the paper work printed several times at the credit union as well. But since I was onsite they could correct it while I waited and we signed right there.

If the first company was just able to put the correct name on the correct line of 2 documents they would have had a decent size piece of my business. Instead I think I am going to avoid most their banking services, even if the credit card and insurance I have with them have been the best customer service that I get. Well hopefully dealing with contractors will be a better story.