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So when I bought my home we were told the property was in a flood zone and we needed flood insurance at a massive cost (we were told we were basically in the "serious flood every ten years" type zone). We thought this was odd since we are 60 feet away from and 40 feet ABOVE the nearest waterway, and it's a creek. If our house floods, people better be building arks! But we were in a time crunch for the closing so we sucked it up and just pressed on.
Well, due to State Farm screwing up our flood insurance account (an epic fratching event), Wells Fargo forced lender-placed insurance on us. Still, I wasn't paying much attention because all of it is direct deposit and we were doing okay for money. Well, money got tight and I started looking into ways to trim expenses and I finally thought to challenge the flood zone ruling. I gathered my plot maps and FEMA's flood zone maps and found out that my house was NOT in a flood zone! Woo-hoo! That's $250 a month I could cut from the expenses!
So I call Wells Fargo. It takes some time to get to the right department, but the lady there takes one look at my account, calls up the FEMA maps, and verifies that my home is not in danger of a flood pretty much ever. No problem to cancel the insurance, but she asks me to hold for a few minutes while she checks on something. Uh oh, I'm thinking. What now? She comes back on the line a few times to ask me to keep holding while she gets a supervisor involved. I'm starting to really worry.
Finally she comes back on to explain that the problem was that the FEMA maps had taken my house out of the flood zone back in 2007. Since the bank had forced me to maintain flood insurance all that time, she felt I deserved a refund not just of the last month that I'd been working to get the insurance cancelled, but of all the insurance I had paid since 2007, and her supervisor agreed!!!
Wells Fargo made a mistake and is going to be eating the costs to the tune of almost $6,000.
It isn't often that you find a company that admits they made a mistake when the customer doesn't even know they made one, and then makes it right like this. I know for a fact that another bank I deal with would not have said a word about any culpability and would have let me go on my happy way content that I got a month's refund.
This money is going to come in handy right now, as hubby's graduate school bill will be due in March. Thank you, Wells Fargo employees, for doing what's right for the customer instead of protecting the company's bottom line.
Well, due to State Farm screwing up our flood insurance account (an epic fratching event), Wells Fargo forced lender-placed insurance on us. Still, I wasn't paying much attention because all of it is direct deposit and we were doing okay for money. Well, money got tight and I started looking into ways to trim expenses and I finally thought to challenge the flood zone ruling. I gathered my plot maps and FEMA's flood zone maps and found out that my house was NOT in a flood zone! Woo-hoo! That's $250 a month I could cut from the expenses!
So I call Wells Fargo. It takes some time to get to the right department, but the lady there takes one look at my account, calls up the FEMA maps, and verifies that my home is not in danger of a flood pretty much ever. No problem to cancel the insurance, but she asks me to hold for a few minutes while she checks on something. Uh oh, I'm thinking. What now? She comes back on the line a few times to ask me to keep holding while she gets a supervisor involved. I'm starting to really worry.
Finally she comes back on to explain that the problem was that the FEMA maps had taken my house out of the flood zone back in 2007. Since the bank had forced me to maintain flood insurance all that time, she felt I deserved a refund not just of the last month that I'd been working to get the insurance cancelled, but of all the insurance I had paid since 2007, and her supervisor agreed!!!
Wells Fargo made a mistake and is going to be eating the costs to the tune of almost $6,000.
It isn't often that you find a company that admits they made a mistake when the customer doesn't even know they made one, and then makes it right like this. I know for a fact that another bank I deal with would not have said a word about any culpability and would have let me go on my happy way content that I got a month's refund.
This money is going to come in handy right now, as hubby's graduate school bill will be due in March. Thank you, Wells Fargo employees, for doing what's right for the customer instead of protecting the company's bottom line.
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