Liberty Bank of Utah Story

I wanted to update everyone that we are still around after 10+ months after refinancing away from Liberty Bank. We have dealt with several different lenders and purchases since last year and we are so happy to be on a great road to financial success.

Leaving Liberty Bank for almost $8000 out of our pocket was one of the best financial decisions we ever made. It hurt us initially but we are now able to focus on more important things than if Liberty Bank is charging us the right amount of interest because it seemed to change each month.

One thing that would really help though with our latest purchase is if we could get Liberty Bank to finally stop reporting that we have an open 2nd mortgage on our credit from them. I think it is amazingly stupid and ridiculous that we might have to call them again after all this time (10+ months) and tell them to update their records. I have a hard time believing that the Credit Reporting Bureaus are completely responsible for updating our records after all the lost paperwork and sensitive information Liberty Bank has lost of ours. I think that most of this problem is still Liberty Bank’s.

Identity Theft note: Hopefully we don’t have to worry about someone stealing our identity because I doubt that everything getting lost over there is getting shredded. For those of you who don’t know what to look for here are some tips on preventing identity theft and what to watch out for with your bank and your personal habits.

Well maybe I’m overreacting. $30,000 of maxed out credit on my credit score has to be good for it. It should help me get some of the best rates and loans for cars, credit cards, houses. It is just hard to completely separate myself from them when they won’t let go of my credit after so long.

I probably just need to call the credit bureaus and make them start the investigation. Then at least they get to deal with Liberty Bank and not me.

Let me know if you have had similar experiences with Liberty Bank or any other bank by commenting on this post or by emailing nightmare@libertybankstory.com.

Liberty Bank - The True Story

Never have I understood the importance of a good mortgage loan servicer until my latest home purchase. I have always heard the stories of mortgage companies that are always selling your note and you never know where to send your check.

I have also heard of people getting stuck with a company that doesn’t have a great way to make payments or know what your payoff balance is. These can be frustrating but I feel like we have one of the best stories around.

We were referred to Liberty Bank of Utah last year by a friend who said we could get a grant for working with them. The grant was legit and we thought five thousand dollars would be a great way to put some equity into our home upfront. Troubles started to arise though when we got to closing. Documents (REPC) were lost multiple times (ten or more) and it seemed they would never get things straightened out.

We went into closing two weeks late after yelling at them to get things worked out and they had the wrong names and property address on everything. So we waited while they fixed them that night for two hours only to have them sent over wrong once again– the loan note terms were wrong.

So we left and the lady at the title company said “Who are these people? Is this their first time doing this?”. Two days later she called us and said things were ready once again but in reality it wasn’t ready because they had misspelled names and had the wrong address on the note again.

This time the lady talked them through putting it in their system so they could get all the names and addresses in correctly. Somehow it worked out that night after another two hour engagement that was only supposed to be 15-30 minutes. We thought we were done but two days later the title lady called me up and said that Liberty Bank did not have a REPC and wondered if we could fax them one.

She also said we needed to come in and sign another document for Liberty Bank. She told me what it was and I said we already had signed it and she agreed but said Liberty Bank must have lost it. So I took my lunch hour and went and signed this again. My wife got the kids ready and met me there to do the same (not an easy thing to do).

A couple days later the title lady called back again and said that Liberty Bank had lost some other crucial document and that in order to fund we need to come back and sign again. She was mad at them and so were we because it took two weeks for funding to switch hands because of lost documentation. Finally this is over we thought.

Should have been our first clue to leave this company while we still had the chance.

Liberty Bank and Kendall Phillips

Few people in my option have anything news worthy to say about them that would make the evening news. I don’t think that Kendall Phillips with Liberty Bank of Utah is any different but he holds the ability to make a person wonder if a personality of his type should be running a bank. I have always thought that customer service was dead but his actions say to me that customer service will not be coming back to life in the near future at Liberty Bank.

Let me give an example. My wife and I had mortgage with Liberty Bank of Utah from 2006-2007. It was a very long time to hold a mortgage with them. We wanted to refinance the first month we were with them because they had messed up so many numbers and addresses and key terms (Fix interest rate, balance of loan — Nothing really big as you can see) of our loan. We had gone to closing so many times that we were almost going to have to start keeping the mileage and submit a bill to them for their stupidity in losing documents with our personal sensitive banking information so they would ask us to come in and sign again. The title company was very annoyed with them as well at this time. They would say to us “Who are these guys”. That should have be a big clue to get out while you can.

After closing was finally over we decided to go into talk to Kendall Phillips, the bank president at the time because of all the problems Liberty Bank had with closing. We were expecting him to be understanding of our troubles. We wanted an apology for having to go through all this ridiculousness but we got was very very different. To this day we don’t really know what Kendall Phillips was really saying but you can be the judge if we overreacted.

…Continued soon with Part 2

How to Win Enemies and Drive Away Customers (Customer Service)

This top ten list is dedicated to all the people at Liberty Bank of Utah that we worked with for the last two years. Without your lack of customer service towards us this list would never have been possible. All items in this list are inspired by actual events that took place while working with Liberty Bank. If you have had trouble with Liberty Bank or any other bank please feel free to comment on this post or email us at nightmare@libertybankstory.com.

1. Tell your customers that all further requests to fix your mistakes have to be submitted in writing. (We were not allowed to call Liberty Bank after they got our payments, statements, and accounts wrong month after month after month. They must have gotten tired of us pointing out how incompetent they were.)
2. Promise reply mail to those requests in writing within 30 days and never actually respond.
3. Tell your customers that you don’t care if they leave. (I think that after dealing with Liberty Bank as a mortgage company that they must never have serviced a loan before mine. They told us countless times that they didn’t care if we left. They offered to pay closing costs if we refinanced with them so they could sell our note to someone else. We would have loved to refinance with anyone but Liberty Bank.)
4. Tell your customers that you are having a party now that they have left. (We called to get a copy of our last few months statements so we could double check their work and they refused to send them to us. Not only is this possibly against the law, I think they are trying to hide something. They also told me that they didn’t care and that they were having a party now that we were gone.)
5. Tell your customers two weeks after the bill due date that they owe money to Allstate for home owners insurance, demand payment immediately, and then wonder why this is a problem.
6. After demanding payment for the home owners insurance bill, tell your customers that you found out that they have plenty of money in escrow and offer to reduce monthly payments for the rest of the year to make up for it. (I think they did their books or something and found our money after sending us these nasty letters demanding payment.)
7. At closing, instead of sending a check for the money your customer paid into the escrow account as stated in the closing documents, apply the escrow amount to the principle of the loan and then refuse to document this action. (When we called to ask what was happening with our escrow account after our refinance we were told “Well, I’m pretty new and I’m not familiar with payoffs, but the way I did it was to apply your escrow amount to the principal of your first mortgage. I don’t see how sending you a check for the escrow account is any different than that.” Well, for one, applying it to principal just gives the money to our new lender, sending us a check puts the money that is ours for paying taxes and insurance back in our savings account earning interest.)
8. Hang up on your customer when they call up and say “Hi, this is (your customer). I have a quick question for you”.
9. Send your customers to closing 4 times after: getting the property address wrong (meaning a completely different house in a different city), misspelling their names, losing sensitive documents, allocating funds wrong, etc.
10. During your customer’s application process and the weeks leading up to the loan closing date, don’t return phone calls to answer questions or give progress reports. (We should have gotten a hint during the weeks leading up to the closing on our loan that this was how the rest of our professional relationship with Liberty Bank was going to be. Too bad we have so much faith in people. We would have turned around and run if we thought Liberty Bank was going to service our loan for the next two years. Our favorite comment came just after closing when we met with the bank president to straighten out one missing loan document. He said “We are going out on a limb to buy this house for you.” Well, excuse me, but we are not a limb with A+ credit for both of us and plenty of cash reserves, and it’s not your house, our names are on the title. We own the house and we will always own this house as long as we pay our bills on time.)

What else can Liberty Bank of Utah get Wrong?

A week after closing we got a letter from Countrywide Bank saying they were happy to service our new loan. This was not a surprise as it said in our closing documents that Liberty Bank had every intention of selling our loan to them. We almost wrote out the check and sent in an early payment to get our payments to fall better in line with our paychecks.

For some reason we didn’t and it is a good thing because two days later Liberty Bank writes and said we need you to sign some extra documents. Weren’t we happy because it seemed like they were trying to change the terms of our loan through the mail. They had a problem with margins of our loan and wanted us to sign some documents to fix it for them. After seeing how much they got wrong with our closing we were not about to sign anything without a lawyer.

We called them up and they swore up and down the changes had to be made and that they didn’t know if they were going to be servicing our loan or if Countrywide would be. They said that was beside the fact and that we need to sign the new documents and send them back so they could finish our loan. We asked what was different and all they would say is that there were just minor changes. They couldn’t point them out so we felt good enough to sign these new loan documents without some legal advice.

Calling them again about the documents after talking with a relative in the mortgage business they were even more rude to us. Their account manager was very unhelpful. He said there was nothing he could do we would just have to sign it and accept the changes they needed to make on our loan. We didn’t know what that meant but it didn’t help us want to sign it.

I said I wanted to talk to his boss and get this straightened out. He said I needed to come in to talk with Kendal Phillips, the President of Liberty Bank of Utah, and we would need an appointment. I said that would be great. I would love to talk to him and tell him how much trouble we had at closing too. Maybe a little feedback from a customer would be a good thing for helping the next person’s experience go smoother. An appointment was set but we didn’t have a clue what we were going to find out was going on at Liberty Bank.

If you have had trouble like this with Liberty Bank or any other bank leave us a comment or send me an email about it at nightmare@libertybankstory.com.

Somehow we made it through closing and got into our house. We should have thrown in the towel long ago and gone with someone else but we kept at it. Our forgiving nature and patience should never let them get so far, but most of all we would have to give up that grant money if we went with someone else. So we just kept saying to ourselves that it was worth it.

We joked that that is what the grant money was for. To put up with Liberty Bank of Utah long enough to get through the process. It is not much of a joke for us anymore. Our title company said that in all the years they have worked with Liberty Bank they don’t think they have ever had a repeat customer. I wonder now if the grant money is the only way they close loans now or if people really ever come back.

(This first time home buyers grant money is why I have the image of the money in the mouse trap in the header of our site. It was too perfect of an image for what happened to us as we tried to get $5000 to help with the down payment on our first home.)

Either way I know from my own knowledge that Liberty Bank is hard to work with. I will tell more of our story with future posts about how they drove us away within a year and a half to spend $6,000 to refinance our house with a different company.

If you are a Liberty Bank of Utah repeat customer please comment on this post or email me at nightmare@libertybankstory.com and tell me your story.

Liberty Bank - The Closing Story

Never have I understood the importance of a good mortgage loan servicer until my latest home purchase. I have always heard the stories of mortgage companies that are always selling your note and you never know where to send your check. I have also heard of people getting stuck with a company that doesn’t have a great way to make payments or know what your payoff balance is. These can be frustrating but I feel like we have one of the best stories around.

We were referred to Liberty Bank of Utah last year by a friend who said we could get a grant for working with them. The grant was legit and we thought five thousand dollars would be a great way to put some equity into our home upfront. Most of the troubles started to arise though when we got to closing. Documents (REPC) were lost multiple times (ten or more) and it seemed they would never get things straightened out.

We went into closing two weeks late after yelling at them to get things worked out and they had the wrong names and property address on everything. So we waited while they fixed them that night for two hours only to have them sent over wrong once again– the loan note terms were wrong. So we left and the lady at the title company said “Who are these people? Is this their first time doing this?”.

Two days later she called us and said things were ready once again but in reality it wasn’t ready because they had misspelled names and had the wrong address on the note again. This time the lady talked them through putting it in their system so they could get all the names and addresses in correctly. Somehow it worked out that night after another two hour engagement that was only supposed to be 15-30 minutes.

We thought we were done but two days later the title lady called me up and said that Liberty Bank did not have a REPC and wondered if we could fax them one. She also said we needed to come in and sign another document for Liberty Bank. She told me what it was and I said we already had signed it and she agreed but said Liberty Bank must have lost it. So I took another lunch hour and went and signed this again. My wife got the kids ready and met me there to do the same (not an easy thing to do). A couple days later the title lady called back again and said that Liberty Bank had lost some other crucial document and that in order to fund we need to come back and sign again. She was mad at them and so were we because it took two weeks for funding to switch hands because of lost documentation. Finally this is over we thought.

This trouble should have been our first clue to leave this company while we still had the chance but we thought it was just normal closing troubles. It turns out it was much more that that. It was the way the company has been running for years and we were just its next victim.

If you feel the same way about Liberty Bank of Utah or any other bank like this. Please let me know with a email nightmare@libertybankstory.com or comment to this post.