This is a tale about Mr. Cooper, a mortgage company, and State Farm ("SF"), an insurance company, and my investment property in CO that I have held since the 1980s. It is an unbelievable story off corporate hubris, ridiculousness and overweening you-ain't-nothing corporate attitude because you, Mr. Property owner, are a little individual piece of nothingness and here, kiss my ring.
The house, which provides me with my retirement supplement beyond my tiny social security stipend, is worth maybe $300K. My mortgage on it is about $28K. There are no other liens on the property. The roof suffered hail damage last month, which is causing it to leak, and needs a new roof which is covered by my insurance policy from State Farm, which has been my insurer since the eighties.
The current loan was acquired by me from Capital One about six years ago. Last year, it sold the loan to Mr. Cooper, a transaction I had no say about whatsoever. If I could fire Mr. Cooper, a terrible mortgage company, I would. I might change my insurer because they are complicit in this be.
After filing a claim for the hail damage with SF, they inspected the property, issued an assessment report and sent me a check for $6103.97 so I could hire a contractor to get the property repaired. I deposited the check in my checking account at Capital One at its ATM, as I do with all checks I receive. It issued me a deposit slip and then, apparently, a minute later debited the same amount back out of my account. I discovered this 2 days later when I examined my account statement online.
The bank threw up its hands, told me my endorsed check was invalid because as issued, there was a co-endorsee on the check, Mr. Cooper. I would have to get the check re-issued by SF in CO, sent to me in VA, send it to OH to get it endorsed by Mr. Cooper, an effing corporate entity with a minuscule "vested interest" in my property ($28K vested interest concerning a $6K claim on property worth $300K), have it returned to me by them after this ridiculous and useless gratuitous act, and then I could deposit it and gain access to my insurance money so I could pay a contractor in CO to get the leaking roof repaired.
SF confirmed this ridiculous rigamarole on the phone, which will take at least a week if not a month to complete by mail, as did Mr. Cooper after I spent a long time on their phone menu listening to canned music and recorded statements about how they were engaged in debt collection and any information I tendered to them could be used against me for this purpose unless I was in bankruptcy in which case, never mind. They had the temerity to state that this byzantine procedure was necessary because of "fraud."
I have no idea how Mr. Cooper thinks this is the process I should use to get my insurance money from a claim I filed with SF, or why SF should issue such a useless, time-consuming check unless this is a giant check-kiting scheme so SF can can collect interest on the $6,103.97 for an extra three or four weeks and maybe, I imagine, kick some of that "profit" back to Mr. Cooper, while I jump through these hoops. Multiply my month-long delay in getting my money by 100,000 or a million claims and you're talking some serious money. Mr. Cooper and SF can go to blazes.
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