Complaint Review: ASC - Des Moines Iowa

Okay, I got curious and decided to look up my former employer to see what was out there. I worked in the Collections dept. for ASC for a year. I'm reading a lot of the same things I would hear all day in my 8+ hour shifts there. So I decided to answer some complaints etc...you guys have. 1st...a lot of customers complain about getting phone calls so early in the month, or calls period. Believe me, we complained non stop to the managers about calling you so early too. However, the fact is that all the loans ASC services are Non/Sub prime loans. Non-prime loans are reserved for people who don't quite fit the good credit and nice downpayment mold. If there are any open or recent collection accounts in your credit profile or have just emerged from a Chapter 13 or Chapter 7 bankruptcy, in most cases your loan choices will come from a non-prime list of loans. That being said, if you loan is with ASC, it's Non-prime, your credit isn't that great, so they think you need some "baby-sitting", or as they put it, a friendly reminder to pay your mortgage. Oh, and by they way, when you get a message from Bob, or Suzy, or anyone saying theyre at extension 1, its an automated dialer/message, it's collections wanting you to call back. 2..My loan is new, payment hasen't posted, etc...You're protected through RESPA, during the RESPA period no negative credit reporting will take place within the 1st 60 days of your loan being transfered. If you still have not paid after that 60 days, you will be reported. You should recv a "Welcome Packet" from ASC telling you they will be taking over your loan. A lot of people call and say they have not recv it. There is the possibility it got lost in the mail, or you thought it was junk mail, prob thinking refi junk and threw it out. Ever thought of that? 3..Phone Pay fee...It is really pointless to argue over that fee. If its the last day of the month and you're calling to pay over the phone to get your payment in last minute...why should we waive it? You had ALL month to mail it in to get in there by the end of the month. Theres also bill pay you can sign up for that with customer service, and I',m sure you get letters about it in the mail. If you're behind on your payments you can't sign up for it though. 4...I'm behind and they won't help me. You can only do so much for people. If you can't afford you house, well, you can't afford it. If you only make 1200/month and your mortgage payment is close to that or more, you can't afford it, try to refi, if you can, or sell it, downsize. Loss mitigations can only so much. Really, it all comes down if you can afford it. If you're living outside your means, you can't. If you can't afford it theres no reason for them to spend time on it, just to have you try to do it again 4 months later. 5...Can I defer a payment? Plain and simple NO. No mortgage company does this. There is something similar called a LOan Modification. That puts payments onto the end of the loan, but it's going to change your interest rate, and possibly other things with your loan. Keep in mind if your interest rate changes, your payments going to be higher. Could you afford that? 6...mortgageaccountonline.com That's ASCs webiste. 7...Missing payments issues...If its a check, just fax over a copy of the cashed check front and back. Money order..call the money order company..and good luck, money orders are hard to track. Research takes time, don't call everyday asking, you'll be notified, and if your not, wait 30 days to call. 8...All the reps are rude...We try to be nice...but you try sitting in a cubicle all day attached to a headset with screaming, whiny customers telling you nothing but negative things all day and tell me how you are. Not to mention your stats have to be perfect, oh, and if you get up to use the bathroom for 2 minutes you get asked 500 questions. Oh, and god forbid you go over you break 5 seconds. 9...Foreclosure threats etc...Plain and simple, you don't pay, you can't stay. You'll get plenty of notices once you start falling behind. Every state has diff laws. Generally you can't get kicked out until you 90 days behind. 10...Sending partial payments don't do anything. They're pointless to send. 11...I'm past due and they wont take any money. Possibly because an attorney is handling your account, call them. OR...your so past due 1 payment isnt going to help you. If your past due 2 payments, they CAN take one, past due 3 payments, they can take 2. Its goes like that. 12...No1 there knows whats going on or what theyre doing...some people dont, some people are stupid, call centers have huge turn over, so people are in and out all the time. theres constantly training classes going on, very few people stay longer then a year, if even that. Mainly because, well, its a crap job, you get paid ok money, nothing to great, you have no freedom, get treated like crap most of the time, unless they want you to do overtime, and its just a stressfull, annoying, very repetitive job. after the training class, call centers are lucky if half the class stays, if even that. my training class had 20 people in it, only 5 stayed once actually started working. out of that 5 i was the only one left, not even after a year. Hope this helps some of you. Good Luck! Oh, and don't work there! hehe

And ARM Mortgage is a RIP OFF # 1. I have never heard of anything so stupid in my life, and I would never attempt to get one just to move into a house. I would like to have a house but I don't feel I should have to pay that kind of money for a house, I like blowing money on myself and don't plan to be house poor. If more people would hold out and not buy these overpriced houses then home prices would have to drop. The MAXIMUM I will ever pay for a house is 60,000.

I appreciate your interest and input, however there are many more factors to our situation than just what's posted here. Again, all I am looking for is some information from others who have dealt with ASC and if anyone has any helpful hints / advice for working with them, since I am a little concerned after reading the posts on here. (The "rumors" I have heard could be just as easily true or false as anything written here.) Nikki, I appreciate your suggestion, unfortunately we have been late on other things due to being so strapped and wanting to make sure the mortgage was the 1st thing paid. Our house has lost so much value since we bought it that there's no way we can refi right now, and we already have and 1st and a 2nd on it. I by no means meant to get into any kind of back and forth regarding what I should or should not do personally, or whether or not my house is important to me or not.

Back in January, I contacted my present mortgage company, Chase, to ask if I could refinance because I had an ARM that was going to re-adjust in May. They took my info, then told me they cannot help me. I went to 5 different mortgage brokers who also told me they could not help me. Then, someone from a Chase office in PA called me and I explained to him that Chase said they cannot help me. He asked me if he could try and I let him. Anyway, I was able to refinance with Chase. However, rather than going directly through them (corporate), I went through one of their satellite offices. Here's the other catch, though. I have not been late in any payments on anything in 4 years. Not mortgage, not car, not credit cards, nothing. I was told that if I would have been late just one payment, I would not have gotten the loan. No one is loaning to anyone showing any late payments in the last few years (new rules due to everything that's going on). In addition, they split my loan into 2 loans, a first and a second (because, supposedly, it is easier to go over loan to value for a 2nd). My payments are higher then they were, but not as high as they would have been had my loan adjusted. Try calling mortgage bankers rather than mortgage brokers. In other words, don't call AAA loans (example. I don't know if that's a real company), call a Chase office, or an office with the name of the individual mortgage company. Also, try as many as you like. I was told not to shop around, but as long as you do it within 2 weeks (some allow 45 days), it is not supposed to harm you (It didn't harm me because all 5 brokers I went to within a 1 month period pulled the same credit score). You're right, it really stinks that mortgage companies don't want to help their good customers. We people with ARM loans were basically promised that as long as we make ontime payments, we could refinance when the 2 years were up. I, like you, made sure every payment was ontime or early. We did what we were supposed to do. There should be new legislation that the ARM loan payments that were made ontime must be refinanced, no matter what is owed. I don't know how much this helps since I refinanced in May and a lot more has been going on since then.

then by all means, you should work with ASC on trying to liquidate the property. If your expenses exceed your monthly income, the do offer short sales. If you're upside down in the loan, and don't see yourself being able to make the adjusted payments, this is the way to go. Just as you are binded by law to the note you signed, so is ASC. They do not have the ability to change the terms of that note. It may sound harsh, but you definitely want to cut back the lifestyle or speak with a realtor, and it will be better for you and your family in the long run. Too many people wait too long to make these decisions, don't be one of them.

It is the most significant investment you'll make. Do NOT for any reason sell or otherwise lose that house at this point, especially if you have negative or no equity. Until the situation with the housing market reverses, you need to tough it out and figure out how to keep it going. Should the broker have given you that loan? Don't know. I would say no based on the better question. could you have afforded a fixed loan? I think the answer to that question is a definite NO from the information you've provided. It would seem to me that you were not in a position to buy a home and now you are in a heck of a mess. I was thinking about the rumor you heard and I was talking to a broker over the weekend about the state of his industry and he said you couldn't do a refi even if you had equity - I mean no one is. The industry needs money and how they plan on getting that money right now is really hard to say. I doubt seriously any rumor like the one you heard, but if the only way to keep people in their homes and keep payments coming to the mortgage company - that is the only thing that makes a little bit of sense. Until then, you need to hang tough, figure out how to make it through this, and not depend on rumors.

My point is not that I feel I deserve a better loan or anything like that, but simply that I'm trying to be proactive by contacting the lender since I know the loan IS going to adjust and that anything higher than our current payment will be unmanageable. I truly feel like we were placed into a loan by a broker when we shouldn't have been, but up until now we've managed to make it work. We have other things that are much more important to us than hanging onto to a silly house. I do not want to even consider foreclosure, or bankruptcy, but I will not let a bad loan with a lender who's not willing to help keep me from affording to buy food and clothes for my family. I have heard, through the real estate grapevine, of other lenders simply maintaining whatever the current terms are, rather than adjusting them or refinancing. Something like that is what I was hoping for, but alas, there are no ethics or helpful solutions when it comes to dealing with a company who is so obviously willing to let their customers get into a foreclosure situation. Basically now my hopes are to find other people, of whom there are plenty on this site alone, and try to communicate w/ them and see how things ended up and if they might have any advice from experience w/ this company.

He is saying that he cannot pay anymore than he is paying now. Since the loan was in 2005, I am certain that the payments were quite low. Even if the OP got a fixed rate loan, the interest rate is going to be several points higher than what he has now, which will raise his payment by at least a couple of hundred a month. This is unfortunate. So many people got trapped into the nasty ARMs. Most people knew that the payment would go up, but never budgeted for that, they just figured that it would probably be 50 bucks or so, not hundreds. Now they are paying the price, which is almost always foreclosure. To the OP. Your house is the most important investment of your life. Car payments, credit card bills, and other loans are not nearly as critical as your house. If you know you cannot make your house payment if it increases 2-300 dollars, then you need to act now. If this were me, I would file bankruptcy, and get rid of, or at least decrease, the rest of my bills. If I had a large car payment, I would let it go back to the bank/finance company. Ya, it would hurt my credit, but your credit's probably messed up anyway. And if you won't be able to pay for your house, you will have bad credit regardless, as well as losing your house. Get yourself a used car for a few hundred bucks with the money you are saving by not paying your credit cards and other loans. Meanwhile, you can still make your house payment. Later, when your situation improves, you can refinance and get your rate back to normal. REMEMBER - Nothing else is as important as your house! NOTHING. If you let it go into foreclosure, you will regret it for the rest of your life.

Bob, Thanks for your posting, however, we've already looked into other solutions, ie refinancing, and since our home is worth a significant amount LESS than what we bought it for, we can't refi at this time. Our credit is not good due to the fact that we've been living paycheck to paycheck due to some personal difficulties over the past year. We had bought the house w/ the intention of refinancing before the 2 years was up on our ARM loan, but since the market has not really improved that hasn't panned out. As I stated we have made every single payment on time for the past two years through all of this, but apparently that doesn't mean anything to anyone in regards to our situation. Again, I am not surprised that they won't initially offer us any help, but when they are a subsidiary of such a large company, a company who likes to declare their willingness to "help" their customers stay in their homes and stay current on their loans, etc. (Wells Fargo has an entire page titled "Responsible Lending"), it's quite contradictory and disappointing when a responsible customer is told, basically, tough luck. All I'm looking for is some honest assistance with our loan so that we can stay current and continue to be responsible customers, rather than feeling like we can't do it and walking away or not communicating that we need help.

But your battle is not with ASC. ASC simply holds the note THAT YOU SIGNED. In that note, it should state that your introductory interest rate will be the LOWEST rate of interest you'll ever pay on the loan. I would imagine that nowhere in your note does it state that the note holder will lock you in at a fixed rate or refinance your existing loan. Your interest rate is based off of the risk of giving you the loan. The risk is mainly based off of your credit score, debt to income ratio, and how much money you can put down. I don't know what your current rate is, but I'm sure its a lot lower than you could get at a fixed rate, IF you could even get a fixed rate. This is not a slight to you in any way, its just reality. BUT if what you say is correct about making all of your monthly payments on time for the better part of 2 years, you could possibly refinance and get the fixed rate that you would like. What they mean by not being able to help you until you fall behind is that they can't offer you a repayment plan or loan modification until the payments are past due. HOWEVER, this does not mean that they will lower your payments. This means should you encounter a TEMPORARY hardship, they will help you to catch up your payments. The best way to be proactive about this situation is to budget your expenses, pick up overtime if available, possible part time jobs, etc...or barring any negative equity and poor credit, try to refinance into a lower fixed rate.