My backpack got stolen and it had my checkbook in it. I went into Wells Fargo (I became their customer because they bought my regular bank) to figure out what to do. I was told that I had to close my account (connected to the checkbook) and open a new one. Kinda weird, but I went with it. They sent me a new checkbook and new ATM card. Landlord only took payment with checks so I wrote a check with my new checkbook; it bounced. It was really surprising because I thought I had the funds. I check with my balance with my new ATM card; plenty of money. I call customer service to figure out what was going on. It turns out that they had created two new accounts for me. One was connected to my checkbook and one to my ATM card. The one for my checkbook had a bunch of fines for the bounced check and fines for not paying the fines. The one for my ATM card had plenty. They tried several times to open another account to combine the two accounts together, which would have forced me to indirectly pay the fines that weren't my fault; I objected. In process of all of this they canceled my new ATM card accidentally.
I went into my local branch and withdrew all of my money and canceled all of my accounts (I had somehow ended up with 4). I ended up paying my tuition, rent, etc. with cash which was a huge pain.
It is the worst experience I've had with any bank and it was with many different employees.
Ouch, I have a similar anecdote where they signed me up for a completely incorrect account when I was young. Some 100k minimum trading account when I was a broke 19 years old looking for the simplest type of bank account possible that I could access from hometown and college. Saw $15 monthly charges, went in, found out the problem, took my money and business elsewhere and haven't looked back.
When the opportunity presented itself, I refinanced our mortgage with Chase.
A key goal was to get out from underneath WF.
Every mortgage that I've had has ended up in WF. WF is a mortgage black hole, they buy everything and it's pretty clear that a vast majority of the mortgage industry is to act as service bureaus for WF. I completely understand both business models, I just don't want to play.
When I got the new mortgage, I mentioned to the person handling our application that I was hopeful they would not be selling my paper to WF. Chase is not a mere broker, they're the whole kit. He said he couldn't guarantee they wouldn't sell the paper, and I understood that. But loans are Chases business too, so far they're holding on to it (typically they're sold in the first few months).
So, for the moment I'm out from underneath WF, and have been for several years.
> Example number ten thousand of why the "vote with your dollars and don't do business with them" defense of capitalism fails completely in practice.
Example number ten thousand of how everything bad is blamed on "capitalism." It's a lazy, shallow, knee-jerk reaction that is plaguing this site and ought to be forbidden by the guidelines.
When you apply for a mortgage you are informed in advance that it might be sold. In fact, when I got mine I was told it would be sold. This information is given to every applicant as a legal requirement and people who don't like it don't need to go through with the application.
There are also significant legal requirements for mortgage servicers (such as Wells Fargo) which constrain them to such an extent that they are pretty much interchangeable. This is far from a free market. If you have a beef with this system, you should take it out on Congress and the CFPB, not "capitalism."
>When you apply for a mortgage you are informed in advance that it might be sold.
Ok, and where can I go get the mortgages that won't be sold and have comparable financing terms to the ones that do?
Oh wait, those don't exist (or cost way more)? Hmm. I see.
Here's the thing: free markets can only ever hope to work in a world where people have total freedom of association. If I can't take my business elsewhere, then I'm not dealing with a private corporation anymore. I'm dealing with government with extra steps.
Likewise, capitalism and free markets aren't interchangeable terms. Free markets are a system of resource allocation, and capitalism is just private ownership of an enterprise. There's been plenty of examples of brutally repressive regimes which still had private capital ownership, free markets be damned. Because free markets do not actually maximize profits for capitalist owners.
So I think it's fair to blame capitalism, even if there's some government floating around in there, too. Consider them joint-and-severally liable.
> Ok, and where can I go get the mortgages that won't be sold and have comparable financing terms to the ones that do?
Why should they exist? If they can't be sold, the lender needs to find some other way to make their money on them. What kind of sane economic system would deliver mortgages like that? Should the government subsidize all mortgages?
I'm not a finance expert. But isn't the lender already making money on the mortgage by charging interest? That's the whole reason they can even sell the mortgage, right? Why would anyone buy a mortgage otherwise? They're purchasing a stream of interest payments, like a bond.
I think that's how mortgages were before the 1970s. The bank lent some money and accepted the payments. They didn't sell the mortgage to anyone.
Selling and securitizing mortgages is how 2008 happened. Maybe the old system was better in that way. Again I'm not an expert, so I don't know the side-effects of doing that.
your analysis of the situation as being interchangeable is rendered invalid by the story you're responding to, and claiming "you should have read the fine print" is clearly bad faith in an era where EULAs are a half mile long. Also, to say "don't buy it if you don't like it" ignores a whole ton of a nuanced and complex situation, where there might not be better alternatives.
I would be more than happy to discuss why it is some of us have beef with capitalism, if you're open to a level headed discussion.
The idea that a free market allows the creation of opportunity and choice is powerful, but what I think many of us have seen happen is that a free market doesn't remain free, as wealthier interests will move to cement power through use of funds. The banks are the most prone example of this I can think of.
I never said anything about reading the fine print. I had to sign a short, readable form by hand which was explained to me in person by the lender. They are very, very up front about this (which is also required by law, which means everyone else in the US who got a mortgage in the past decade or two has also signed this form).
> "When you apply for a mortgage you are informed in advance that it might be sold. In fact, when I got mine I was told it would be sold. This information is given to every applicant as a legal requirement and people who don't like it don't need to go through with the application."
Ah yes, the good ol' American practice of victim blaming: "Well, we specifically told you we'd screw you over; look, it's in paragraph 151, subsection 15, article G of the document you signed as we hovered over you impatiently that time you came in when we didn't tell you we were closing 10 mins after that appointment we setup the day before the deadline to sign... so it's really YOUR fault!"
If you agree to something, you are not a victim, you are a participant.
Don’t agree to things you don’t like and claim to be a victim, unless you had a gun to your head. We should have higher expectations than that.
Don’t like the mortgage process? Don’t get a mortgage. Pay cash, or rent. The world doesn’t owe you the exact terms you want. That’s not the fault of capitalism, it’s as bad or worse under any other system.
You also seem confused about how the process works. Nobody hovers over you under time pressure. Escrow takes like 30 days, and during that time the lenders will freak out about any reason to prevent you from getting the mortgage. They are more worried about getting screwed than the applicants are.
> If you agree to something, you are not a victim, you are a participant.
If you cannot give informed or willing consent, you are not a participant, you are a victim. Impenetrable, hard to read terms are not informed consent, particularly when the terms are in a contract of adhesion.
> Don’t like the mortgage process? Don’t get a mortgage. Pay cash, or rent.
Couple of points here. First, I take it you've never read a modern leasing contract. In most jurisdictions, especially where the large corporate landlords have almost entirely conquered the market, they are just as opaque. Landlord associations promulgate so-called "standard leases" that contain myriad difficult to comprehend terms.
> The world doesn’t owe you the exact terms you want. That’s not the fault of capitalism
Perhaps it does not, but yes, it is the fault of capitalism. When all of the participants in a market operate in virtually identical ways because the optimal path, under capitalism, is to legalese first and ask questions later, that is absolutely a failure caused by the capitalistic system. It all stems from the idea that, under capitalism, an individual or group's highest and best course of outcome is to feverishly grab for every single available resource to hoard it against use by others. Along the way, some of those resources are (often temporarily) lent out at an inflated rate to ensure that more resources are grabbed.
This works fine when it comes to a mobile phone device or a book or a toy. Those are optional, often called "luxury", goods that we can leave or take as we desire. Housing, water, food, transportation, energy; we need all of these to live as humans, yet that's where capitalism extracts its most gains because the more desperate someone is for one of these, the more resources they will throw in to fill the need they must fill.
I doubt many people really want to use them, any more than they really want to use any other megabank. A lot of people just use the bank that's closest to their house/work, thinking (and often not wrong from a retail point of view) that banks are fungible.
As a former "customer", in many cases, like ours, it's because they use their capital/position to buy loans from other businesses, and there's nothing the borrower can do about it.
Many wealthy people are inclined because they'll have the lowest mortgage rates caused by a 0.5% interest rate deduction with a temporary asset transfer of $1m. Some people will take the 5% as opposed to 5.5% and save $300/month, because whoever originates your mortgage may just sell it to WF anyway.
Their ATMs are pretty handy. It does not require a physical card - you can just tap your phone on the ATM to withdraw cash. Also there’s lots of ATM locations in north California which is pretty convenient if you happened to need cash.
One thing I do not understand though is that when deposit via their mobile app, they ask you to write something like “Used for Wells Fargo mobile deposit” on the check, which is a pain, not sure how other banks do it.
