When we were at Citi-Mortage my husband had an income reduction so we thought we should try to take advantage of the modifications that were available. (mind you, we were never late on a payment) That is where our problems started. We made the phone call; they approved us and gave us our new payment. We started paying the new amount. They explained the process we would have to go three months on time and then they would modify us. We went several months and then we received a letter from Cit-Mortgage requesting the paperwork we had already turned in. We were asked to resubmit the paperwork again. So we did and during this time Selene Finance bought our loan.
Shortly afterwards..we received a letter from Selene Finance saying we owed 17,000.00 and to call. I called and started speaking with Kevin Wardlow, who was very friendly and helpful at this time. Come to find out Citi-Mortgage was holding our modification payments and when they sold our loan they did not transfer the money to Selene Finance. We were discussing that our house had been on the market and we hoped to sell it soon. Kevin Wardlow asked if we would be interested in doing a short sale. Not knowing what a short sale was Kevin explained they had a company Green Rivers that would market my house. We did a conference call with Greg Cummings. Greg explained they were very aggressive and the house should sale in a couple of months or so. I then asked Kevin do I pay the amount of my modification or do I pay the regular amount of my house note. Kevin said under the short sale program you can’t make any payments. We were uncomfortable with this and made if very clear that we did not want to go into foreclosure. We asked for this in writing and Kevin assured us he would send us something stating we were not allowed to make payments and would not go into foreclosure. We met with Diana Hubert from the reality company to sign an agreement A couple of week passed and we had no hits. I contacted the agent asking about dropping the price. She asked me to allow her to do her job. A couple more weeks go by and I made a call to Kevin and this was making us feel very uncomfortable and we would feel better to make the payments. Kevin told me my account was turned over to JoAnn Bantegui . I contacted JoAnn, we spoke about what I felt was lack of effort on the reality company and again I did not want to go into Foreclosure and wanted to make payments. She told me she understood and I was not in going in Foreclosure. Maybe a month went by the price of the house was dropped once. (Which came after I inquired about it again)? I called JoAnn back again and discussed the same two items. She said she would get with Green Rivers(Reality Company) and follow up. I requested again to make a payment so we would not go into Foreclosure, again she assured me that was not an issue. I also requested the letter Kevin had promised about no accepting our payments and we were not going to be foreclosed on. On March 3rd we received a note on my door to contact Selene Finance. Why they hadn’t called me I am not sure… So I called JoAnn again. She tells me we had a foreclosure date of April 5th. On March 8th we received a letter from the attorney’s office stating we were being forclosed. When I spoke with JoAnn again, I was upset and asked how this could be when Selene was the one that said I couldn’t pay. She asked me if I wanted to keep the house. I said our intention is to sell but if I have to keep it so it won’t foreclose then yes. She said we would have to go through a modification. I agreed, then she came back to say it was a Forebearance and my payment would be $2748.00. That’s $1200.00 more than our original loan. We told them we would like to keep the original loan amount and make up the past payments( We were just setting the monthly payments aside) Kevin told me we were not the ones to demand anything and it was as is. Kevin also came back and stated he never said we could not make payments. JoAnn and everyone else all of a sudden became unavailable. We would have never committed to the short sale if we had known all of this. May 8th they foreclosed on us. We were beside ourselves and worn out from begging them to take our payments, so we just finally accepted what happened to us and tried to move forward. We make well over $250K and to this day this nightmare still haunts us and can’t get decent financing to purchase a new home. I look back on everything now and I wish we would have gotten an attorney at that time.
I can’t believe this company is still allowed to do business.
Jane1025