In February last year, my husband and I refinanced our home with Ameriquest Mortgage. At that time things were OK with us since we were paying off all of our bills and getting a sizable amount of money out of it. I had a full time job with Aventis Pharmaceuticals in NJ and my husband was working part time with a local Ambulance Company.
Everything was fine until March of last year when I had to quit my job due to a family situation which required me to be home with my children. When I left my job things were OK for about 5-6 months following since I had received a severance from the company. During that time, my husband went to work full time while I stayed home to be there for the kids after school. My husband did not make as much money as I did, but it was the only choice I had at the time.
As I stated before, things were OK for about 5-6 months afterwards, but then things started going bad when the money started running out and the holidays approached. We decided that we needed to refinance again to get a lower monthly payment and interest rate, at that time our interest rate was 10.35%, now it is 8.5%, we dropped it a whole 2%. we only dropped our payments by $25 per month, but we thought that was better than nothing.
We had been getting offers from many mortgage companies, but what we were most concerned with was the pre-payment penalty that we would have to pay so we went back to Ameriquest Mortgage and asked if we refinance with them if they could waive the prepayment penalty and the person we spoke with at the time said that they could probably do that so we decided to go with Ameriquest.
At the time of the signing we had to meet with the Notary who was handling the paperwork in a Diner in town at 7:00 pm. We had to take our three children with us, one who is physically handicapped, into this diner so we could sign the paperwork. Everything seemed to be in order so we signed everything without reading it over very well since the kids were with us and we wanted to get going.
After we returned home, I started looking over the paperwork, and found that we did infact wind up paying the prepayment penalty and did not get as much back from the company. As soon as I saw this, I contacted my broker at Ameriquest and asked him about this and he told me that he would have to look into it and get back to me. He never did get back to me, I even called him a number of times and left him messages. He eventually told me that he would need to check with the underwriters to find out and when he got back to me he told me that because of the type of loan that we received, it was necessary to pay the prepayment penalty. When I asked him why he didn't tell us that in the first place, he denied telling my husband that we would not have to pay the prepayment penalty.
Another thing that was weird about this refinancing was the appraisal. Before we went with Ameriquest, we had been working with another company who had sent someone out to appraise my home. They could not appraise it at what we would have needed to refinance with this company. Then when I told Ameriquest this, they said that they could get it appraised at the amount that we needed, and sure enough they did. Why would one company appraise my home lower that what Ameriquest appraised it at?
From this point forward I will never use Ameriquest Mortgage again, and I will tell all that I run into to never use them either. We still do not know what we can do about our mortgage, but we will do all that we can so we do not loose our home. Things will be tight for a while, but God willing we will be OK.
Yvonne
East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania
U.S.A.