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I want to recap what I covered in “My Journey to Financial Freedom Part 4” where I told you about how we had trouble with the bank where we had our home equity line of credit (heloc) from the very beginning.

To reiterate when we signed for the heloc loan all of the paperwork was accurate, but when the heloc was funded, and we received a copy of the loan papers with my husband’s name on them and a stranger’s name. My name was not even on our loan.  We didn’t have a clue who this woman was nor did the bank and to make matters worse it took a long time before we could get her name taken off our heloc account. Because of this error we had never made an advance from our heloc account until we became clients of United First Financial and started using the Money Merge Account.

In spite of the problems with our bank, our experiences with the Money Merge Account system were well beyond expectations.  Over a period of six months from August 2008 until February 2009 our average interest payment on our heloc loan $39.00 a month.

Each month when we receive our income we would deposit it into our Read the rest of this entry

Watch how the Money Merge Account is helping one man invest in his children

In August 2007 my husband and I applied for a home equity line of credit (heloc) because we were looking to invest in more rental properties.  We decided to use one of our current rental properties as collateral for the heloc.  At that time the property was estimated at $450,000 with a mortgage of $149,000.  The loan officer recommended that we request the maximum line of credit amount of $195,000.  We had only planned to use around $80,000 max in our investment quest but based on his suggestion we went for the larger loan amount which proved to be a mistake later on.

The bank where our heloc was established was a problem from the beginning.  When we signed all of the paperwork for the loan everything was in order.  All of our information was accurate including my husband’s and my name.  We signed the notarized papers and the loan amount was authorized.  When the money was funded, a copy of the loan documents were sent to us and instead of my husband’s and my name on the loan there was an unknown woman’s name in place of mine on our loan.  Not only had we never heard of this woman’s name, but the bank seemed baffled as to how her information got on our loan documents.  We went around and around with the bank for a number of months before we were successful in having her name removed from our account.  Due to the mess we had experienced with this heloc, we allowed it to sit for a year without use.

Because we had a heloc with a zero balance Read the rest of this entry