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Household Finance Corporation ripoff HFC's balance never goes down only increases Bowie, Maryland
This is the letter we sent our AG:
We are writing you because we need your help. In June 2001, we took out a loan through Household Finance (HFC) to consolidate our bills during a difficult time. The loan was supposed to be for $30,000 and our loan officer told us the loan was for 5 years. We have been paying $600 for over two years and the balance never seems to go down. We have called and meet with HFC several times to no avail. To lure us to get the loan, we were told several lies by the loan officer AJ at HFC.
Lie number 1) When we first got the loan we noticed that it said we owed $32,000 instead of $30,000. We contacted HFC immediately about this and they stated that the extra $2,000 was because they added our closing fees on top of the loan money. We told them that we wish they had explained that to us before we signed off on the loan because we would have preferred that they did not do that.
Lie number 2) At the closing, we explained to our loan officer several times that we did not want their insurance but when we got our bill we noticed that we were being charged for their insurance. We called HFC and after much haggling and a couple of billing cycles they took off the insurance charges.
Then after paying them for several months and noticing no change in our balance (in fact sometimes it would increase) they told us that we had to pay the bill on time every month because just one day interest adds up to a lot of money. When we called several other times after that they kept trying to get us to refinance our mortgage into the loan. We explained to them that we were having a lot of problems out of them and that we didn't want to put our house mortgage with them also especially at 10%.
Lie number 3) When we tried to refinance our mortgage we found out that the HFC loan was actually secured by our house as a home equity loan. We did not know this.
This summer we had enough of HFC we had paid them over $11,000 in two years and our balance still remained over $32,000. We did our research and saw that several people had sued HFC for the same reasons. We wanted to be fair to them so we went to try to talk to them one last time. We went to the office and spoke to the manager.
Lie number 4) We shared our dismay with him and told him that we don't see how this loan will be paid off in 5 years. He told us that this was not a five year loan and that it was a line of credit so there was not payoff date. We were very upset to learn this and we shared with him all the lies that the loan officer told us to close this loan and how we felt that we were taken advantage of. He stated that we should have read our loan papers we explained to him that no one understands all of those documents that's why we rely on the loan officer.
We have since tried to refinance this loan with other banks and are denied because the amount due on this loan is more that the amount we were given.
We have tried every avenue with them and now we turn to you for help. We have now paid over $13,000 to HFC and our balance is still over $30,000. Please let us know what options are available to us. Thank you for helping us with this catastrophe. Have a great day!!