World Savings Bank prepayment penalty and escrow ripoff scam Santa Maria California

My husband used World Savings Bank for the mortgage on our first house. He got the 7 year ARM and thought that his interest rate would stay low for the first 7 years, as explained to him. His inexperience along with his loan specialists inability to truthfully explain the loan terms caused us to end up with a loan that had a higher interest rate than the current going rate at the time.

Also, we had sent in a letter requesting that they stop the escrow withdrawls from our payment due to the fact that we had already mistakenly paid the property tax for the year (got the bill and paid it). We confirmed this with a copy of the cashed checks (both payments) and a letter from the Tax Assessors office.

Unfortunately, it took World Savings almost 6 months to give us back the funds in the account that was due to us. I called them numerous times and was consistently told that they would be sending the money.

They waited till we closed out the account (sold the house), paid the prepayment penalty (for only having the loan for 2 years) of about $5000 and then finally paid us the $3500 they owed us from the escrow. This still took a month from the time of our final payment of the prepayment penalty.

They sat on our $3500 for a total of 7 months when we really could have used that money to go towards the down payment on the new house we were in the process of buying.

Anonymous
Santa Maria, California
U.S.A.