Better Mortgage

There were things like they told me that I was a claims processor for 22.50 for this company and that they needed the W2. I kept saying to them, “That's not me. And I don't care if it came up in my background search, that is not me. Here's my employer. I obviously can't work two places full-time.” My HR director was going to get involved to say, “She's here 40 hours a week.” I had to convince them over and over and I wrote a letter, too. That was one pain point. They were asking me for things. I was saying, “I don't have this. I can't give you that.” I kept telling them we had an escrow account. I would send them all of the information from the escrow account, and they would reject it and say it was insufficient even though it was coming directly from my PennyMac portal.

Everything was coming from my PennyMac portal. They were saying, “This is insufficient. We can’t accept it. We need a different escrow. We need different evidence.” I was like, “There's no other evidence. This is it.” Then they wouldn't build us an escrow account. They did everything outside. They did the taxes and the homeowners insurance outside of the loan. I was like, “Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I told you this was going to be rolled into an escrow account.” “Well, you need to show us you have an escrow account now.” I kept showing them. So, getting them to accept the documents was another difficult thing. I explained to them my husband was a consultant with Cigna. Then Cigna bought his contract and hired him fulltime, which was why there were two different W2s. I had to keep saying it's the same company, same job, same everything. They were asking for the same information over and over despite my explanations.

While I was happy with the overall outcome, because I've done this before, I do get annoyed with the idea that nobody wants to give me a loan when I'm laid off, even though I can prove that I have an average annual salary that well exceeds what they would need to prove that I was not a high-risk mortgage. I had great experiences with everyone that I spoke to at Better Mortgage. I was quite pleased with it. They were quite responsive and did as much as they could under the issues of being a union employee. Otherwise, my loan probably would have been a few weeks faster but that was not Better Mortgage's fault.

I just had a few issues with the platform itself. We had a couple of points locked up along the way, but Taylor, the gentleman I dealt with, was very responsive with attempting to remedy those. I was happy with the way they dealt with it, but I think in the future, that's something that Better Mortgage needs to take care of. I don't know if it was because I did most of my application on a mobile device, but I would suspect that if that was the problem, they should be prepared for that because that’s what a lot of people are doing nowadays.

We shopped around and contacted every mortgage provider for New York City and it was a lot easier to handle and speak to other people. It was a lot more personal and there was a lot more in terms of communication and connection. I had a guy at KeyBank who was handling my mortgage and he gave me a cell number. There was another guy who Zoomed with me and went through the whole process of the mortgage. So, I got a whole lot more information from other people. I'm a first-time homebuyer and they were a lot more ready and willing to be like, “Oh, let me just hold your hand while we do this,” or I ask questions, or I wanna shop around for a formula to figure out the interest rates. Whereas, with Better Mortgage, I have to figure it out for myself.

But the interest rates weren't the same. And a 30-year mortgage with even a 0.01 of difference is enough for me to deal with. So, I went through the assembly line. I'd recommend Better Mortgage but shop around. If Better Mortgage is the place with the cheaper interest rate, then go for that. The loan officer was as helpful as she could be. But there's still limitations to everything that she knew or where we were in the assembly line. The issue was getting to her, whether it was email or trying to call her. ‘Cause sometimes they just don't wanna deal with the email. I would never recommend this to my mother because she'd be lost. She'd have to be more internet-savvy and more used to the emailing. I definitely don't think Better Mortgage is for the older generation but it's better for younger folks. Also, it's not so great for first-time homebuyers. Fortunately, got to have all of my questions answered by other mortgage companies, so I have less reliance on Better.

Better Mortgage assumed that I owned that company. They asked for a ledger on a company that was basic for consulting that I did for a company, and it was very short period. The underwriter was asking for way too much info that did not apply so that made it more complicated. I'm in the tech world so I know how to get around computers, capture files, upload them, and put all this stuff on to the cloud or encrypted data. There are a lot of individuals that could benefit off of the refi through Better Mortgage, but the issue is they don't have the same capabilities. They're not tech-savvy or they don't have the proper equipment for either scanning or converting to PDFs so it's difficult for them on their end.

Better Mortgage could develop a phone app where one could take a picture of documents that they want that would automatically upload it to the specific task that they're looking for. That would make it easier for a lot of people because then they could just get their phone, take a screenshot of the front, maybe of each page of the document, and it upload it to their system that's encrypted.

The rate and terms were one of the best. In some cases, if they could turn around and be a little bit less lenient when somebody wants to consolidate debt, then that would help out also. A lot of times, they look at debt to ratio. But if you pay off the debt, hypothetically, the debt to ratio is going to be a lot better. If they have control over it on their end and say that, "Okay, we're not going to let the client pay off the debt, we're going to pay off the debt," because then they can automatically see that once the debt is paid, the debt to ratio is pretty much within the borrowing limit.

Their process was a superfast one. It was about 25 days from the very start to actual funding. There was one time where it was the only time that they outsourced any portion of the refinance process. But I had to use a third party over the phone verification process where I got on the call with them via a code that was sent to me. Then they called my, at the time, current lender to verify all of the data and the numbers from my current lender. I don't know why they had to do that, but that was the most frustrating process. I was speaking to the same person the whole time. Having to deal with an outsourced third party didn't go too well.

Better Mortgage tries and steers you towards appointments on the website. Pretty much anytime you have an issue, there's a button on the screen you're looking at that says, “Do you have an issue?” When you click it, they try and get you to set up an appointment with somebody. I never did that. I personally use the chat feature on the specific problem I had, and they responded so quickly. Then, if I felt like it was something to worry, then I would just give my individual person. She was great from top to bottom. She responded to my calls within super reasonable amount of time. It was 20 minutes mostly which I think is awesome for an industry with such a high workload.

The rep was super on the phone. He was very responsive. He apparently had team members who he would delegate some things to or who would contact me on his behalf. There seemed to be communication amongst his team. If he wasn't readily available, somebody else was to get back to me. It's a well-oiled machine. I don't know how they did it, but they are a great systems process thinker and I appreciated it. It made the end user have a great experience. The rate was higher than what we were paying before, but we did a cashout so we still have a great rate considering how rates have been over the last 30 years. We're happy with the rate that we have. We were very happy to get a cashout too.