Our Mortgage was Sold

Written by nickel - 8 Comments

About a week ago we returned home to an urgent sounding phone message from our mortgage lender, Provident Funding Associates, saying that we needed to call them. Having been through this before, I knew exactly what they were going to say — they sold our mortgage.

Of course, I Googled the phone number that they left before calling them back just to be sure that it wasn’t a phishing scheme of some sort. When the number popped up on one of Provident’s contact pages, I gave them a call. Sure enough, they had sold our mortgage — or at least the servicing rights — to Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. This happens all the time, and it’s not a big deal. The terms of your loan remain the same, so you basically just need to start sending the money to someone else.

Here’s a tip for you… If you ever receive notice from a new loan servicer that your mortgage has been transferred to them, call the old servicer to verify that this is true — and don’t rely on contact information provided by the new servicer when doing this. If you naively start redirecting your payments to the new servicer, or try to call the old servicer using a number provided by the new servicer to verify the transfer, you could end up in a world of hurt. It’s possible that a scammer is trying to intercept your mortgage payments, and you might not figure it out until after the original servicer comes after you for non-payment.

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Published on July 25th, 2006 - 8 Comments
Filed under: Mortgages, Moving
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Comments (scroll down to add your own):

My boyfriend’s father’s mortgage was sold, and he thought it was some kind of scam, because who in their right name would name a mortgage bank Fifth Third?
Comment by Kira — Jul 25th 2006 @ 11:18 am
GREAT advice! Thanks for posting it.
Comment by mapgirl — Jul 25th 2006 @ 11:36 am
This is a good advice. I have never thought about this … That’s for sharing.
Comment by nick — Jul 25th 2006 @ 4:22 pm
My last mortgage was sold right away - I hadn’t realized it was a common practice.
I love this website - you keep it so fresh and interesting. Thanks, Nickel!
Comment by Kim — Jul 25th 2006 @ 11:25 pm
Interesting… when I had a mortgage about 10 years ago, it was sold but nobody ever called to tell us about it. I think we just got a letter and a new little payment coupon book with the new bank name on it, and it was seamless. I suppose the little coupon books aren’t really in use anymore? That would be a fairly complicated thing for a phisher to produce!
Comment by Madame X — Jul 26th 2006 @ 9:15 am
Good stuff, Nickel. Wells Fargo has just bought about $140 billion worth of loans from Washington Mutual so a lot more folks will be getting similar calls.

The business of collecting mortgage payments is called “mortgage servicing” and the profits lie in scale, as in Economies of Scale. Wells Fargo pays to service loans, but for each loan it services, the cost per loan to Wells Fargo is reduced.
Comment by Dan Green — Jul 31st 2006 @ 12:51 pm