How could a home be repossessed when it's no longer in the homeowner's possession? One family in Utah asked itself the same question.
Shantell Curtis and her family were threatened with foreclosure months after they had sold their Vernal, Utah house. What's more, the problem revolved around a single dollar, Connect2Utah.com reports (h/t The Consumerist). Months after the Curtises sold and moved out of the home in August of last year, their lender, Bank of America, reportedly sent them a foreclosure notice.
Bank of America claimed the family owed months of missed mortgage payments, before realizing a $1 coding error had held up the Curtises' title transfer. While BofA has taken months to resolving the issue, the Curtises' credit report has taken a beating since then.
The episode is far from the first foreclosure mishap BofA has dealt with in recent months, and not even the smallest dollar amount related to foreclosure threats. In June, BofA tried to foreclose on a man living in Massachusetts over a missed mortgage payment totaling $0.00.
More recently, a Texas man was threatened with foreclosure over a home that was destroyed years earlier by Hurricane Ike, even though he had continued to make what he thought to be the requisite monthly payments.
BofA's numerous struggles this year aren't limited to foreclosures though. The bank, which recently lost its status as the largest in the country, experienced a heavy backlash after announcing in September plans to charge customers five dollars to use debit cards. Indeed, a poll found a third of Americans would leave their banks should a debit fee be put into effect.
Other banks made sure to note they themselves would not be imposing debit fees, and BofA eventually abandoned the idea this week, less than a month after CEO Brian Moynihan said his bank had "a right to make a profit."
Recent events would seem to have taken their toll on the bank's popularity. A recent poll found 9 percent of BofA customers said they are "not at all likely" to stay with the bank. That's compared with 6 percent of Wells Fargo customers and 3 percent of JPMorgan Chase customers. Likewise, 15 percent of BofA customers said they don't feel valued.
Bank of America has been the worst performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average for the last two quarters.