My family took out a mortgage from CitiMortgage to buy our house and at various times we have been prepaying some of the outstanding balance. A few weeks ago, we decided we wanted to pay off the entire loan. Cenlar is the administrator for the loan and there are several potential legal problems with their platform and business practices:
1.
Their site offers no ready option to pay off a
loan or to generate a payoff statement that tell you how much you would need to
pay or how to pay off the loan.
2.
The site doesn’t allow you to prepay all of your
outstanding balance. You must keep at
least a penny outstanding on your loan.
I paid off this maximum amount.
Do these first two restrictions violate CFPB’s prohibition
on prepayment penalties?
3.
The site now reports that our outstanding balance
is one cent, but that our monthly payment of thousands of dollars is past due
-- still with no indication of how we can pay off the loan and lift the mark on
our home’s title.
4.
Yesterday, I received in the mail a Payoff
Statement with an effective date of Feb. 10, 2021. In the statement, it says
in addition to our present principal balance of one cent that we also owe a
recording fee of $60. It also says that Cenlar will not accept personal
checks or online payments as methods of remittance, but that we must make this
final payment of $60.01 via bank wire, certified check, cashier’s check or
attorney’s trust check. It also says if
we fail to pay by 3-26-21 “a late charge of $351.33” will be charged.
In the absence of a prior mortgagor promise, does a
mortgagee has a duty to remove its claim on property when a loan is paid off? Also in the absence of agreement, are there
limits on a loan administrator’s ability to restrict the means by which mortgagor’s
pay off their loans? And finally, can a lender charge a late fee of $351.33 on
an outstanding loan balance of $0.01 (or on their claimed payoff amount of $60.01)?