For the past eight months, I’ve been trying to do a loan modification for my parent’s house through Bank of America under the “Making Home Affordable” program. Although my parents qualify, I have had absolutely no success in making any progress towards a loan modification. I have come to the conclusion that the BAC Home Retention Division is, for a lack of better words, retarded.

Reasons BAC Is Retarded:

1. Ridiculous Hold Time

Apparently, no one works in the Home Retention Division of BAC. Make  yourself a cup of coffee, paint your nails, do the laundry because you will spend an eternity just trying to get out of their looped automated system the first time you call. You will press buttons after buttons, trying to get to the right division and once you do, good luck in figuring out the correct button to speak to a rep.

2. Constant Transfers

Once you do get through to a live person and feel a sense of accomplishment, BAC slaps you in the face by providing you with reps who are completely clueless and useless. They will put you on hold and transfer your call to India, outer space, another planet, or possibly another galaxy far far away.

3. Inaccurate Information

For the lucky few who actually get to speak to a competent rep, you will be provided with their contact information to send in your financial documents.  Sorry to inform you but that fax number and mailing address go straight into what can possibly be the only explanation…the Black Hole.

I come to this realization after their supposed 4-to-6-six week wait period. I called BAC to ask why I haven’t gotten a response after waiting for months. Their explanation: I didn’t fax in the financial documents. Oh really? Well, silly me, I must have sent it to the wrong fax number or maybe it was one of the very, very few pieces of mail that got lost in the mail. Re-faxed it and …again…was told that no financial documents were received. Don’t fret just yet because BAC will kindly offer you a different mailing address and different fax number. Don’t even bother questioning why the new fax number and mailing address are different than what you were provided originally. Save that energy to try to go through their list of fax numbers and mailing addresses to see which ones actually go to them and which ones go to the Black Hole.

4. Reps Suffer from Amnesia

By some miracle of God, you made your way to the last round and got your approval status. The last step is to wait for a package in the mail and sign the paperwork. Piece of cake, right? You made it through the tough rounds and rest should be no big deal, right? Dead wrong! The package will never come. You get on the phone; tell them about your ordeal and how you have waited for months and still have not received your package that they said they FedExed. Their response? They have no idea what you are talking about. They have no idea why you are calling them. They have no tracking log of your millions of phone calls to them. They will try to calm you down and gently coax you in starting the whole process all over again.

Yeah, this is the point where I decided if I had a 747, I would fly my plane into the BAC Headquarters…

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 8th, 2010 at 9:21 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.