My story

My name is Matt and I bought a home in Omaha, Nebraska almost 13 years ago.  Since the loan was sold to PHH Mortgage by US Bank I have had nothing but problems and headaches.

I will detail some of the problems I have had with PHH in subsequent blogs, I will provide supporting information, and I will show that I am not the only customer PHH is mistreating, pulling stories from the news, consumer advocate sites, etc..

The short version is very straight forward. When you take out a mortgage, you have monthly payments that you make that the mortgage servicer puts toward your mortgage as you pay it off. Over time, your interest payments become less as you begin reducing your principle amount. What's happening here is that I have been making my scheduled payments as agreed upon with the President of PHH, but the payments I've been making are not being applied to the account. The payments stopped being applied around July 2011, though I was not notified of this until November of 2011 when I received a notice that my account was 90 days delinquent. (Shock to me since I'd been making the payments and the money was disappearing from my account, so SOMEONE was taking the money) While I will outline some of the abuses I've encountered with PHH trying to resolve the matter a little later, the end result is that they give me the run around, have refused to produce evidence that they even hold my mortgage paperwork (I've repeatedly requested to have them send me the original loan documentation and/or give me the name of the title company that now supposedly holds the title - and they repeatedly refuse to disclose this information, a clear and simple violation of RESPA), ask me to call numbers that they then block me from calling, have lied, forged documents, have made multiple accounting errors and send out conflicting information on what is even owed. Furthermore, the original loan was for $95,000 made with US Bank in 1999. 13 years later, PHH is claiming the principle amount due is $110,000, meaning not only have my 13 years worth of payments not reduced my principle and interest, but in fact has gone up $15,000!

On February 2, 2012, we received a foreclosure notification from PHH's lawyer.

I have contacted the State Attorney General, who turned it over to the office of the comptroller who turned it over to the Nebraska Dept of Banking and Finance, whose response will be posted below, essentially stating they have no authority to make a financial institution adhere to federal laws. In the state of Nebraska, we cannot sue them for punitive damages nor recoup court/lawyer fees if we were to take them to court. Nebraska is a non-judicial foreclosure state, so the only way to get it in front of a judge to review is to fork over large sums of money to take them to court. In essence - without deep pockets to take on the mortgage industry, there's nothing we, as citizens of the state of Nebraska, can do to stop them from just stealing our house. I can't refinance because the delinquency reports have destroyed my credit, and the alteration of the original loan amount has caused the loan-to-value ratio to be such that it's impossible to refinance with another institution.

The sad part is - this is the third time they've done this to me, and the third time I've had to fight off a fraudulent foreclosure from them. Previously, because I was living in the house raising a daughter by myself and did not want to be homeless, I simply paid them what they wanted - in the amount of over $27,000 in additional fees, charges, and additional payments (over and above what my normal payments should have been). Call it extortion, racketeering, fraud... whatever - basically if I wanted to stay in my house, I had to do whatever they told me to do and pay whatever they told me to pay. Because I got married and am now living in my wife's house in Kearney, we have the luxury of trying to fight them off. If we lose the house - we won't be totally homeless. Not everyone that PHH is doing this to is that lucky, however. And we aren't the first - but we're working on hopefully being the last.

My purpose in broadcasting this is not about me.  I would like to get the issues permanently resolved, and would like to help others who are being burdened by this corrupt company.  As you will see in the supporting articles, PHH recently lost a $21M settlement that did nothing to change their behavior.  My goal is to see a reaction that causes PHH's share price to fall, for their investors to demand change, for states to suspend their ability to conduct business within their borders, for awareness to be raised and permanent action be taken.

What you can do:  share this site to people you know.  Get it attention.  Call your congressmen, and elected officials, call PHH's offices.  Email their board chairman and their CEO.  Help me shine a spot light on this abusive company.  Be angry, outraged, and appalled along with me.

I am not asking for financial assistance from anyone.  I am asking people to donate something more valuable than money, your time.  Please call, forward, retweet, share, blog, network and do whatever else you can to help get the word out and stop this company once and for all.

Thank you in advance for your help and support.

**Please note, the dates for the blog posts are not accurate dates. In order to put things in order, we had to make the dates for the posts earlier than the first one since there's no way in blogger to put them in whatever order you want. So this post has to be the most recent posting if we want it to be viewed first.