A Letter from our Mortgage Company
We got a Very Important Looking mail from our mortgage holder recently and I just love it:
Your Account Has Been Reviewed And We Would Like To Speak With You.
A recent review of your account indicated that your home may be carrying up to $large_number in equity. This amount is very important because it is the number that can help determine how much cash you may be able to access by refinancing, blah blah, blah blah blah, etc.
It goes on in this vein for the rest of the page, implying that they’re going to do us a favor by letting us take out our equity, and reset our mortage at an interest rate over 2 points higher than what we currently have.
As the movie SuperTroopers once noted, desperation is a stinky cologne. It couldn’t be that we have such a large equity amount because we’ve been aggressively trying to pay down our mortgage for the last 3 years, could it? It couldn’t be that with the recent and upcoming spates of ARM adjustments that our mortgage company — who has been on the forefront of exotic and risky mortgages and refis — really wishes that we would stop squeezing their profits on our own mortgage, which is one of their least likely to default, and get back on their cash cow wagon?
They Would Like To Speak With Us, Indeed.
[updated 3/21: formatting changes - agw]
Dave said,
March 20, 2006 @ 4:45 pm
If they do manage to get you on the phone, try to be nice.
And be aware that you’re handling them quite well. That smug look that will undoutedly appear on your face during and after the call should be fed some wine. Kudos on the equity!
Marilyn said,
March 23, 2006 @ 7:28 pm
This is my first time on your site and I really like it. I was led here by several links starting with Money’s magazine’s mention of financial websites such as all things financial. That said, I got the VERY same letter from my lender, so I guess we have the same one. I really do like them; their website is easy to use and I never have any problems getting payments and extra principal credited properly. However, I don’t plan to refinance with them or anyone else. I laugh at the lenders who call me to say that they can get me a better mortgage than my 15 year (12 years, 4 months left), 5.375% fixed interest rate loan. No, actually they can’t!
sam said,
April 1, 2006 @ 3:39 pm
We are paying down our mortage also, and so we are always getting letters and phone calls about home equity lines of credit, refinancing offers, etc. They are desperate to find a way to get us to borrow more from them.