Being three months behind on your mortgage is a different experience than being one or two months behind. That woman filing her nails, playing Solitaire, cackling with the woman in the next cubicle and getting a foot massage turns nasty.
No more polite questions such as, "Is there a reason?" "When can you send payment?" Now it's threats.
Sure, just let me click my heels together and poof! the money will appear. Better yet, give me 10 minutes to slip downstairs to my laboratory and print up some $1,000 bills. They bear the portrait of the president born in the town I grew up in. Oh wait, the treasury doesn't make 'em any more. Will you take hundreds of hundreds?
Nasty notes start to appear on our front door, with a phone number to call to "confirm" that we are still living here.
And no longer will the mortgage company (First Horizon Home Loans, in case you've forgotten) take a single payment. Nope, they return the check we send.
"You must bring the account up to date," sneers the woman. "We will not accept partial payment."
"How is our request for a loan modification going?" I ask.
"It's in the system. It will take at least 30 days." I know what that means.
Our monthly payment is somewhat north of $3,000. That includes our property tax and mortgage insurance, which First Horizon Home Loans forced on us. We have two weeks before we will go four months delinquent. We borrow some money from my partner's mother. Now that is embarrassing. But at least we bring the loan current.
And for now, the phone calls stop. The nasty notes left on our door stop.
We breathe.
You breathe, I breathe.
ReplyDelete