Your heart has to go out to people in this situation. We know qualifying for a mortgage is hard, even harder for a mortgage at age 84. But when you get approved and then your spouse dies, it should not be this difficult to get the payout.
The day after George Baumann’s wife died, the loan officer at a branch of the Hanover Community Bank refuse payout of a loan that closed 5 days earlier. First of all, the lack of empathy is amazing but the bank has dealt with that and that loan officer is “no longer with the bank”. But the timing of it is even worse.
Here is a man who knows money is tight, has lost the love of his life of over 50 years, and now has to worry about a bank paying out an already approved loan?
As they say on Long Island, “You got to be kidding me?”
Hanover Community Bank had inexplicably refused to refinance the Baldwin, L.I., home where George Baumann and his wife, Florence, lived for almost 50 years.
The couple closed on the $271,000 mortgage five days before Florence, 82, died of a heart attack on May 12. The bank told him a day later he could no longer have the cash.
Baumann needs the money to consolidate heavy debts that leave him virtually penniless at the end of every month.
“The bank is going to honor its previous commitment,” said state Sen. Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn), who contacted Hanover after reading Baumann’s story.
“We will be contacting Mr. Baumann as soon as possible,” vowed Sangeeta Kishore, Hanover’s acting president and CEO, who blamed the snafu on a loan officer who no longer works there.
But Baumann, 84, isn’t celebrating yet.
“I am gonna believe it when I get the check and it clears,” he said. via The NY Daily News
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Here is a bank that knows neither good customer service nor how to get good press.
I would pull every last dime of mine out of that bank and take my business elsewhere. If we continue to let banks, businesses or anyone take advantage of us and our peers, it is just like turning a blind eye to the school yard bully.
Wow it seems there is no compassion in the money world at all. We have all become a number or a statistic either it fits in the box or doesn’t, that is no way to measure a true worth of any human being. Very sad.