The only way we survived this long was through prayer, persistence, and the amazing counselor at Auriton.org (got connected with them through
HPF - Foreclosure Prevention Counseling at 888-995-HOPE). The only way to survive this is to have a third party advocating on your behalf.
My husband and I took a week off from work. Every document they requested I faxed it back to them immediately 7 times back-to-back (I have a fax machine at home). Sign the bottom of every page you send them and make sure your loan number is on each page as well.
Once we were connected with a counselor, we did not speak to Wells Fargo without calling her first and she would conference call them. If they said to call back the next day, we called back in two hours until we got the answer we needed. It's imperative to not accept "no" as an answer and when we did get a "no", the counselor consistently asked for someone in a different department because the same person never answered the phone with the same information. We were down to 3 days before the sale date and they kept stringing us along. The counselor let us know that they will ask for a down payment so we started scrambling to get as much money together as we could. Two days before the sale and we were still waiting for the amount of the down payment. We were able to do $2600 immediately or $3700 the next day when my husband got paid, which was also the date of sale. We continued to call back every two hours and let them know each time how much we could do. The night before the sale date, the person we reached was emailing the "decision maker" as we were telling her how much we could do. The girl got the figures wrong and told her we could do $4700. Suddenly, WF decided the magic number was $4700 and they needed it immediately to stop the sale. Our counselor was relentless and refused to give up and explained that it was their employee that got the numbers wrong. WF refused to budge and said it needed to be done as a bank draw from our checking account within the hour because their offices were closing and she wanted to go home for the day. Our counselor ended the call.
Our counselor then told us to get some sleep because we were going to start again at 6am (PST) the day of the sale and that we needed to get together as much cash as we could and have it sitting in our bank account ready to be withdrawn for the next morning. She said she had done this before with other lenders but made no promises. The next morning the counselor called us and we had $3700 sitting in our account. We started calling and within 20 minutes she was able to navigate us through the WF phone system from hell and got us to someone who could make a decision. Just as we were about to hear the verdict, the call dropped! Our counselor started the calling process all over again and she kept at. One person actually told us that the notes had been updated to reflect that they will not be able to accept any payments at that time and to call the attorney handling the sale. It is now 5 hours before the auction! The counselor kept asking for someone else to speak to. She finally reached the person who told us "no" the night before. Once she heard we had $3700 sitting in our account ready to be withdrawn, she changed their tune and stopped the sale. They set up the withdrawal and we ended the call. We scheduled a follow up call with the counselor to begin working on the loan modification process. Once we hung up, there was a voicemail message from the dropped call from WF. The woman actually called us back and said that they would except the $3700. While she was leaving us that message, several others at WF were telling us it was too late.
There's so much more that happened that I can't even get it all down. One WF employee actually LIED and said they did not receive any of my faxes. I jumped in and said, "You must have it. I faxed each document to you 7 times". She then paused and said, "Oh. Was your last document 10 pages long?" On another day during that week, my husband was waiting for the WF employee to read all of her notes, but she failed to put him on hold. In the background he could hear another WF employee telling a person, "I understand that you faxed it but we have no record of receiving any of your faxes." Another WF employee told us, "We post-poned your sale date 4 months in a row. We are NOT allowed to do it again." During those 4 months, we were in bankruptcy. We had no idea they did not stop the sale date but kept rescheduling it! We were not allowed to begin communications with them until we were discharged. By the time we were discharged, we only had two weeks to work something out with WF before the sale date.
My advice to others: try your hardest to carver out a few days to just handle this mess and focus on nothing else. Call 888-
995-HOPE and get connected to a counselor. It's a long process, but if you want to save your home, get ready to fight for it. These not-for-profit organizations have received government money to help us and they actually are doing it.
Yesterday Wells Fargo put us on a three month trial payment plan beginning October 1. After that they said we'll receive the modification. I'm still holding my breath and we realize we need to not miss those three payments.
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