Household Finance Corporation HOW HELP TURNED INTO A HIGHER INTEREST RATE Green Acres Florida

In the summer of 2002, we decided to go ahead and remortgage our home with one of the newer low interest rates that was available, and wanted to end paying on two separate mortgages as we had been doing and combine it all into one. We contacted a local company, not HFC, and were getting our mortgage underway with only one glitch...HFC would not give the company the "pay off" figure for a loan we had with them.

I decided to contact the local HFC office myself only to be asked why I hadn't considered letting HFC redo our mortgage, and then explained that I really wasn't aware that they did mortgages and thought they only did personal and home equity loans.

After a brief phone conversation, I was promised that HFC could do much better than the company I was now in the process of trying to do my mortgage with and also told if I did do it with the other company, it would mean I would be paying off the loan I had with HFC too early and would be responsible for a pretty hefty penalty fee as well, so I asked them to show me what they could do and I would make up my mind between using them or the company I was already working with to do my mortgage!

Time dragged on and in the end, HFC convinced me they could pay off all my bills, ignore the early payment on my previous loan, and all we had to do was wait for the final paperwork and a date would be set for our closing. At this point I cancelled the other loan with the other company thinking I had made a much better deal.

As it turned out, right before we were to close, I was told that HFC didn't agree with the appraisal we had done and paid for on our own and that while they could still give us the same amount of money, we would be back to having two loans, but we went along with it not realizing what it really all meant.

The day of the closing, September 9, 2002, we sat in the Greenacres office and found out just how creatively HFC was able to put our mortgage together. First...they gave us a mortgage at 8.41% for 15 years, to be paid directly out of our checking account every other week, thus shortening the pay off time on the loan.

Then the surprise! The other loan was for 21.41% for the same 15 years, to be paid once a month. So there we were again...two loans, and for some reason they were willing to give us an unsecured loan of $10,000 instead of adding into our mortgage as originally promised, and making themselves a whole lot more money, which I think was a very deceptive way to handle it!

Dori
Boynton Beach, Florida
U.S.A.