No Way Out

Owning your own home is a wonderful thing. It is an accomplishment which is seen very much to be part of achieving the elusive American Dream. There is something about knowing that this space is yours that is empowering and freeing all at once. It is wonderful.

Of course the reality of owning your own home is that until you pay off your mortgage you don't own jack shit. All you own is an incredibly large debt that you have absolutely 0 control over when it comes to who handles that debt on the debtors end of things. None whatsoever.

When we bought our first house we were told that our loans would be sold within a month. The company we had worked so hard to get a mortgage through were not going to actually end up being our lenders. In fact the people they sold our loans to would not be our lenders for the entire term of our mortgage. Over the next several years our loans would go bouncing around from lender to lender without any rhyme or reason, and certainly without any input from us.

We have absolutely no control over any of it. If our loan is sold to a company that has bad customer service, are unscrupulous, or have a tendency to cheat their customers, there isn't squat we can do about it. We have to continue to pay our monthly payments and just hope that our mortgage is sold soon to someone who is more tolerable to work with. I have no idea how that is supposed to be right, but that is how it is.

Now we could always refinance our mortgage. We could go to a bank and go through the incredibly arduous task of getting them to do the refi and having them be our lender. That is we can do that if we happen to have the money available to refinance a loan, because you can't just do that sort of thing for free. So if I happen to have the time and money and qualify I can refinance the mortgage and get away from my awful lender to an awful lender that at least I chose.

Until that lender sell my mortgage again, most likely right back to the amoral willfully negligent company I just escaped from.

This is the most fucked up system that is obviously completely built around making the banks money without any regard to the customers that they are supposed to be serving.I as a consumer have little to no recourse against these companies and banks. Anywhere else if I get shitty service I can easily fire that company and move to another provider.

Phone company supplies poor coverage or charges you too much for your data plan? Jump ship and head over to the competition where now days the competition will pay your switching fees. Cable company have abysmal customer service and constant outages? There are a plethora of other TV viewing options available to you from satellite providers to a Netflix Hulu subscription package.

Your mortgage company is forcing you to pay for things they shouldn't and has customer service reps that actively lie to you and are unwilling to help you?
Sucks to be you.

Suddenly owning a home sounds so much less appealing than it once did.