You know how when you’re in the early stages of a relationship it’s generally considered good form to tell your partner that you’re already married?  Or that you have 5 illegitimate children?  Or that you’re a serial killer?  It isn’t just good form, don’t we all generally  believe this kind of information to be vital in our evaluation of whether or not we want to pursue a relationship?  I know I do.  On a slightly less monumental scale, I also think it’s important to mention any predilection for pain with your sex, venereal diseases you’ve passed around, and any serious fetishes that would impede a political career if they got found out.

I expect the same from my bank.  We’ve been applying for the HAMP loan for exactly one year now.  We stopped paying our mortgage* and every month Philip has been reapplying for the loan, filling out all the paper work and faxing it all in.  For an entire year we’ve been stressing out over not knowing whether we’ll get to keep our house or not.  Stressing over the fact that the bank hasn’t bothered to talk to us.  Or respond in any way.  Stressing over the fact that every time Philip has called them for an update he gets zero useful information.

In a parallel universe we have also been dealing with our other property (the one that caused our bankruptcy in the first place) and our neverendingly unclosed bankruptcy.  The other house has been pending foreclosure for two years.  TWO YEARS.  People call us all the time asking if we want to sell it and telling us that the bank claims we still own it.  We still own it because the bank hasn’t finished foreclosure proceedings.  In the meantime they don’t even recognize our property on their list of properties they own.  Someone at the bank is into some serious opiates.  All this harassment by prospective buyers (this is meaningless for us because we couldn’t sell it for enough to pay off our loan and we’ve already been excused of that loan through our bankruptcy so there is nothing for us to gain by trying to short sale it) has resulted in calls to our bankruptcy lawyer to find out why this is dragging on and on.  As it turns out our bankruptcy file has failed to close in two years.  The trustees were, apparently, still trying to figure out a way to take Philip’s share of his family’s homestead in Louisiana (which we already knew was impossible) and have finally given up the useless fight.  Our file finally closed officially.

Imagine our surprise when the bank of our current loan (for the house we’re living in and want to keep) sends us paperwork suggesting that we apply for a HAMP loan to keep our property from being foreclosed on.  Yeah, dipshits, why do you imagine we’ve been sending you the HAMP applications every month for a year?!!  Suddenly Philip is talking to people who actually know shit.  Suddenly we’re getting the paperwork from them to apply and a timeline and real names and a bank underwriter is now actually involved.  All of a sudden it seems we may get an answer, one way or the other, within a month’s time.

The vital thing they didn’t bother to tell us a year ago was that as long as our bankruptcy file was still open, there’s nothing they can do.  They can’t process applications for HAMP with an open bankruptcy file.  This piece of choice information would have saved us an entire YEAR of stress and worry and endless paperwork for Philip (which seriously stresses him out on its own account).  This is like finding out that the person you married, who knows that the thing you want most in the world is children, got a vasectomy years ago but didn’t tell you until you’d tied the knot, blended your assets, and made a life together.

Thank you, Wells Fargo.  If you were a boyfriend I’d kick your ass to the curb and call your mama.

As it is, I really want to keep my house so I guess I’ll play nice and just be damn thankful that you are now going to take us seriously.

But if there’s anything else you need to tell us, now’s the time.

 

*So we could pay our taxes and also because we couldn’t afford our mortgage and we told the bank that we couldn’t and we weren’t willing to keep giving the bank money if they weren’t willing to refinance.  I’m only explaining this in case you think we’re cavalier about paying our mortgage.  We’re not.  Until the bankruptcy we had A+ credit scores because we always pay our loans and always pay our shot and we always paid ON TIME.