My mortgage company is threatening foreclosure even though I never missed a payment

I was standing in my kitchen, still in my scrubs, staring at the letter from the mortgage company. It said we had fourteen days to pay $4,218.63 or they’d start foreclosure proceedings. I read it three times because my brain just wouldn’t accept it. We’d never missed a payment. Not once in nine years.

My husband, Dan, was at the table doing a crossword. I slid the letter in front of him. He looked at it, then at me, then back at it. “That’s a mistake,” he said. “Has to be.”

I’m a nurse at a county hospital in Topeka. Dan drives a delivery truck for a bakery. We’re not rich, but we’re careful. We bought our little ranch house in 2014, refinanced once when rates dropped. Our payment was $1,142 a month, auto-drafted from our joint checking. We never thought about it. That was the problem.

The next morning I called the mortgage company. I got a woman named Shauna who talked in that flat customer-service voice, like she’d said the same words ten thousand times. She told me our payments had been going to a different account since March. “What account?” I asked. She said she couldn’t tell me for privacy reasons.

I said, “It’s my money. It’s my mortgage.”

She said, “I understand your frustration, ma’am, but the account number on the auto-draft authorization doesn’t match your loan number.”

I asked her to read me the number on the authorization. She did. It was one digit off from our loan number. A 7 instead of a 1. I told her that. She said, “We can’t verify that over the phone.”

Dan came home that afternoon and I was still on hold. I’d been transferred four times. One guy hung up on me. Another told me to fax a written dispute. A fax. In 2023.

I went to the bank the next day. The teller pulled up our statements and showed me the withdrawals. Same amount, same day, every month. Going to the mortgage company. But the loan number on the transfer didn’t match our loan. Somebody, somewhere, had typed one wrong digit. Maybe us, maybe them. Didn’t matter. The money was leaving our account and landing in somebody else’s loan.

The bank said they couldn’t reverse it without the mortgage company’s cooperation. The mortgage company said they couldn’t do anything without proof from the bank. I spent my days off on the phone, sitting at the kitchen table with a notepad, writing down names and reference numbers. I started recording the calls on my phone, just audio, after one supervisor told me, “Ma’am, you’re not listening,” and then denied saying it.

Dan wanted to just pay the $4,218.63 and be done with it. “We can pull it from the emergency fund,” he said. “It’ll hurt, but we’ll survive.”

I said, “That’s not the point. We already paid it. It’s sitting in some stranger’s mortgage account.”

He said, “I know, but we’re running out of time.”

That was the worst part. The clock. Every day I spent fighting, the deadline got closer. I started having trouble sleeping. I’d lie awake doing math in my head. Four thousand dollars. That was two months of groceries, a semester of community college for our daughter, a new water heater. We didn’t have that kind of money to just throw away.

Then I remembered my cousin’s wife, Renee, worked at a title company. I called her. She listened to the whole story and said, “You need to file a complaint with the state banking commissioner. And send a certified letter to the mortgage company’s legal department. Not customer service. Legal.”

I did both. The certified letter was three pages, single-spaced, with dates, times, names, and reference numbers. I attached copies of our bank statements with the withdrawals highlighted. I attached the letter from the mortgage company. I attached a timeline. I made Dan read it before I sent it. He said, “You should’ve been a lawyer.”

I said, “I just want my money back.”

Two weeks later, I got a call from a woman named Patricia in the mortgage company’s executive office. She said they’d reviewed the case and found the error was on their end. A data entry mistake during a system migration. Our payments had been credited to a loan with a similar number. She said they were reversing the payments, crediting our account, and waiving all late fees. She said, “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Inconvenience. I almost laughed. I’d spent forty hours on the phone. I’d cried in the parking lot of the bank. I’d snapped at my daughter for leaving her shoes in the hallway. But I just said, “Thank you.”

The money showed up in our account three days later. The foreclosure letter was rescinded. Our credit report still shows a thirty-day late mark from that mess, and I’m still fighting to get it removed. That’s a whole other battle.

But the mortgage is current. The emergency fund is intact. And I’ve got a folder in my filing cabinet labeled “Mortgage Nightmare” with every scrap of paper from those six weeks. I don’t know why I keep it. Maybe just to remind myself that I was right.