Our mortgage is owned by Chase. Originally, it was with Wachovia, but of course they sold it a month after we closed on the loan.
Anyways, like everyone else, Chase has online access to accounts. One login gets me to a credit card account and the mortgage account (there used to be four Chase credit card accounts, the result of their buying spree; I closed all but the oldest account).
You can pay the credit cards online and the payment is credited the next day, which at this point, all of the credit-card issuers let you do.
You can also pay the mortgage online. However, instead of electronically debiting the checking account and crediting the mortgage account, you have to sign up with their bill-pay service. And get this: rather than doing what's done with the credit card accounts, the bill-pay service debits your checking account, writes a fucking paper check and mails it to Chase Home Loans, a process which can take up to six business days. Yep, that's right: they mail a check to themselves. All that spewing to government regulators about how the big banks needed to combine all of their operations for the consumer's benefit turns out to be complete HORSESHIT.
You know, if I wanted to mail a check, I'd just write out a check and drop it in the mailbox at the post office (which is what I do). And it's worth noting that Wachovia's online payment system works as you'd expect: you schedule the date on which the payment will be made, and it's done and you don't have to worry about it.
A second issue with Chase's online mortgage-payment system is that there's no way to indicate that you want to pay any extra towards your loan principal. In fact, the system is too stupid to know your regular payment amount! So, you just fill in whatever amount you want to pay and they send a check to themselves and if you include an extra amount, you have no idea whether it'll be applied towards the principal or to the escrow or to the interest.
Since Chase tends to fuck up simple things like "please apply the extra payment amount to the loan PRINCIPAL instead of the escrow," I've had to call them and deal with their customer service. And every time I do so, I say, "oh, by the way, when will it be possible to do instant online payments like you do with credit cards?" and the answer is always, "I'll forward your request ..."
It turns out that there's a Real Good (from Chase's point-of-view, anyways) reason why they don't handle online mortgage payments like they handle credit-card payments: they offer their "Fast Pay" process, where you have to call them on the phone and authorize an overnight payment, a "benefit" for which they charge $12.
One imagines that there's a lot of people who have to do an overnight payment, and if you were Chase, you probably wouldn't butcher a cash cow, either.
But as a(n unwilling) customer, fuck that.
And fuck that black hole known as the Chase Mortgage Research Department. If your issue is referred to them, you're hosed. They want YOUR money immediately, if not sooner, but G-d forbid you close the loan and need to get an escrow refund.
Posted by Andy at September 8, 2006 04:53 PM