And I have the Google to prove it. Doing a Google search on “u.s. bank sucks”” turns up four entries. The third one down is this blog (ahem). The first one is Jake’s reference to this blog.
Huzzah.
Meanwhile, no new news on that front. Nobody has called us back (of course). We pay everything off this month, including the $250 (which actually gets rolled up into the new loan). Which probably spells the end of it, since once the damned thing has vanished from their records, and we finish closing all our accounts with them, it’s even more doubtful we’ll see that money back.
But it’s been … well, not fun, but an interesting new use of this blog to bitch and wail and moan and gnash my teeth about it.
And I still think I’ll put together a page that groups all these posts on it, with a little tag on this cover page. Lest we forget …
(Oh, and Margie is still wonderful. No ever forgetting that.)
[For more in this thread, visit here.]
Ahem.
Google will pick it up sometime soon.
I’ve seen it on at least one other blog, too, so the meme is spreading.
Oops, it ate my link:
http://www.whiterose.org/ginger/arch/week_2002_06_02.html#000896
Thankee, ma’am.
Ginger, you comment in your blog (which doesn’t have comments, so I’ll comment back here) that rather than going with a Big, Faceless Corporate Monolith of a bank next time you’re in the market for a mortgage that you’ll go with the local entity, where you know the people involved. A couple of thoughts:
1. Our actual *mortgage* stuff has been handled pretty well. Few banks actually carry their own mortgages any more, after the original sale is made, but instead sell them to other companies. Our current first has gone through three hands since we bought the house seven years ago. Not to say that Fleet or WaMu couldn’t make the same sort of bureaucratic errors, but before you assume that you’ll “know” the folks carrying your mortgage, find out what their rate of selling mortgages off is. (It’s on a disclosure form that lenders have to give you.)
2. Knowing the local banker doesn’t render you immune from problems. Caught a story on NPR the other day about the local banker, piller of the community, seeming related to or a friend of half the town … who was busted in February after embezzling $40MM of bank funds, rendering the bank insolvent.
Still, *if* you have a problem is with a small, local bank, you can at least go in there and pound your shoe on someone’s table, and raise your voice where other patrons can hear, and cause local word of mouth to turn sour. That is a big advantage.
I agree completely that US BANK sucks. We had problems with them about the home equity loan on our old house. Tax time rolled around this year and we didn’t get an interest statement from them. So, Rick (the hubby) calls them and he gets the “they’ve been mailed out you should see them soon” answer. So…we wait a few weeks…. Wanting this info so we can file and get our refund. We receive no mail from them, which is no surprise. So, I call again and they tell me they don’t have to send us an interest statement because it was a non-collateral loan, not a home equity loan. I told them that if they loaned me $20,000 with no collateral they were insane, and that they sent me an interest statement the year before…why not this year. They say, “we’ll have to investigate and call you back. I wait a few days and no one calls me back. I call them back and tell them that the IRS requires that they get me this information and they better get with the program or I’ll be contacting them. I get put on hold for about 10 minutes. Finally someone comes back on and lets me know what the interest amount is and that they will be sending me something ASAP. I got the actual form 3 weeks after I filed.
On a side note, my parents have been baking with US Bank since I was knee high to a grasshopper and they have never had any problems. Maybe it is just their loan division that is incompetent.
Amanda
I suppose that’s possible. Part of the problem seems to be that, when a problem occurs, nobody steps up to the bat to take care of it. With the zillions of transactions that U.S. Bank manages daily, it’s not shocking that a few go awry. But that needs to be accounted for when you build your backup system, your customer service group. That’s the place that U.S. Bank seems to truly suck at.
I think it’s the lack of accountability that gets to me, too. Our current mortgage has been sold twice since we got it (September 2000) and I’d have no flaming clue where to go if there was some problem with our loan.
I think the thing that appeals to me about the small town banker is both the shoe-bang factor and that I think we won’t be sold. I also trust the banker (or rather I trust my father-in-law’s and husband’s judgement of him), but they and I could be wrong, per the NPR story.
But there are no guarantees with any bank. I just like my odds of fixing any problems I run into better with a small bank that I know.
Aside: The only problems we’ve had so far are with the escrow calculations, but that’s not surprising given property values in our neighborhood. The mortgage company can’t seem to figure out that our property value is going to increase to the cap every year. You’d think that since we live in one of the biggest metro areas in the country (Houston), it wouldn’t be too hard to learn how the tax scheme works. But you’d be wrong …