Wells Fargo can rot in hell

I got some news from Wells Fargo Mortgage that's just plain annoying.

In short, the mortgage on Casa de Hawg is going up by about $70 a month. I can afford that, so I shrugged and started to throw the letter from Wells Fargo in the trash.

But then it hit me -- that's around $840 extra a year and I'm not real clear on why I'm shelling out the extra cash to the vipers. I have a feeling that the same kind of "adjustments" have been foisted on other Americans who have lived up to the contracts they agreed to when taking out mortgages.

The money really isn't the point in this instance. But the fact that the bank officials thinks they can simply steal my money because they are arrogant enough to believe can get away with it is aggravating. If they're stealing from me, what are doing to the rest of their customers?

Wells Fargo claims they figured my escrow account wrong in that home insurance and property taxes are higher than they anticipated. That dog won't hunt because my home insurance hasn't increased and we've not reassessed since we bought the house two years ago. Even if there was a reassessment, property values haven't been going through the roof lately, so the idea that my property taxes have gone up by $840 a year doesn't quite cut it. Oh, and we've got the caps on assessed value in Arkansas to consider, but I won't go into that.

In short, Wells Fargo claims that they figured the escrow wrong, but those calculations were made two years ago and the bastards haven't squawked about it until now. The timing seems very suspicious as the "uh, oops!" letter came right after Wells Fargo announced it wrote off $1.5 billion in bad loans in the second quarter. I do believe, then, we're getting the "St. Louis beer man treatment."

Let me explain what that is. A few years ago, I was at Busch Stadium in St. Louis watching the Cardinals whip up on the Cubs. The beer man came by and I bought a beer that was priced at $6. I gave the guy a $20 and he tried to hand me $6 in change.

I pointed out his error and he apologized and gave me my $14 in change. But, you just know he went around doing that all night long and some people were either too drunk or paying too much attention to the game to catch his error.

And that, folks, is what I suspect Wells Fargo is up to right now. They're probably pulling this nonsense on their stable customers and hoping they can get away with it. Hell, the weasels probably feel justified because they're losing their filthy, stinking shirts on a bunch of bad mortgages right now.

That's not my fault. My wife and I, when we bought our house, did everything right in that we put 20 percent down and took out a 30-year, fixed-interest mortgage. We've not missed a payment on our mortgage and haven't paid late, either.

Wells Fargo, then, likely looks at us as people they can exploit at will. The company probably doesn't want to take responsibility for making a bunch of bad loans so they'll hammer their reliable customers to cover their butts with shareholders a bit. It's not my fault that Wells Fargo decided to hand out money like drunken sailors on shore leave when the housing market was booming and I'll be damned if I'll pay for the company's reckless behavior without at least screaming at a couple of the grasping, unscrupulous misers that companies like Wells Fargo attract.

Of course, there's no one in a Wells Fargo office around here that his any authority to make this situation right. The old days when companies were a little bit afraid to reach into our pockets and blatantly steal from us have ended, I'm afraid. There was a time when the banker that controlled your mortgage was local and he always knew he might get a butt kicking or at least some bad PR if he decided to cheat you.

We got our mortgage through a local bank, of course, but that was repackaged and sold to the jerks at Wells Fargo before the ink dried on the contracts. So, some wretched little banker in another state has likely made the decision to steal from Wells Fargo's reliable customers. Visiting that jackal personally and howling at him until he called security on me isn't an option.

I'm taking my letter over to my accountant and I'll ask him whether the vague financial data Wells Fargo is using to steal from me makes sense. I doubt I'll get the thieves at Wells Fargo to budge an inch, but I'll at least annoy the hell out of them and get some satisfaction that way. Screw them all.