Complaint Review: Westlake Financial Services

First contact with this company was 02/10/2008. My husband bought me a truck for me as a wedding present. We were in the positive by $1900 until 12/02/2008 when my husband and I both lost our long term employment. This is when everything with this company started to suface. I made a call to try to make some kind of arrangment for the payments. I was told that if we couldn't afford the truck then we never should have signed a contract. I calmly tried to explain that being laid off was not something that we had any control over. My husband was at that job for almost 12 years and one day the whole crew was told that Friday was the last day of work. We didn't even have time to make any plans for covering all of our bills and we were only asking for a little understanding and flexibilty. For goodness sakes, we owe over $70,000 on our mortage and they set us up for a six month deferment of payments. We only owe $7000 on the truck and they wouldn't even give us one month. That months payment was not even due yet, I was trying to get it set up before it was delinquit, that should say something for our willingness to pay this loan. We made additional payments of $200 every month so that we paid it off faster. I was hoping that if they allowed the deferment we would lose out on the additional payments that we had made. The employee (Mark) refused and recommended that we just give them the truck so that we could avoid the embarassment of them coming and taking it from us. I tried to remind him that we had a possitive balance and we would just relie on that to get us through. He started yelling this is not what those payments are for, you can't just use us as a savings account that money has already been applied to the loan and you need to send us your payments on time every month. If we haven't received this months payment by 5pm on the 10th I will send out our repoers and then you've lost everything. I ended the call. larocks_1975. I am at yahoo and I don't like to think that I am the only victim who will find justice.
We sent in half of the payment for that month along with a copy of our billing statement that clearly states " DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN PAY AHEAD? MAKE ADDITIONAL PAYMENTS NOW TO GET AHEAD AND BE ABLE TO SKIP A PAYMENT IN THE FURTURE! SAVE FINANCE CHARGES AND FEES! The harrassing calls started three days later when a "man" named Jeremy called asking us just kind of bulls--t were we trying to get away with? We needed to provide him with a credit card number NOW or he was calling in the loan and picking up the truck. I told him he already had over $1900 of our money and that would cover what ever we couldn't pay each month until we were back to work. He screamed "That is unacceptable and I demand the rest of the payment right now." I was a little scared at this point so I hung up the phone. 2 minutes later a woman who refused to tell me her name called and informed me that we were now in default and they were coming for the truck and if it was not here they were pressing charges. I hung up again and called a lawyer. We are currently gathering as much information as possible concerning these bad business pratices and harassment.
What they are doing is illegal and we will take this as far as we have to, to get these guy.

LaRoux
CENTRAL POINT, Oregon
U.S.A.