If you’re looking for a mortgage, think twice before doing business with CitiMortgage. I refinanced my mortgage with them last year. Well, actually this year; it took them nine months. All along the way the process was incompetent and contemptuous of the customer.

I had an existing loan with Citi. They offered to refinance to a lower rate, no cost to me. All very simple: loan-to-value ratio wasn’t a problem, no question about us qualifying. I agreed to refinance in June 2012, gave them all documentation in July, confirmed all documents in place in August. And then nothing happened. For months. All I got was computer-generated letters saying my application had been canceled and empty verbal promises that “we’ll be underwriting soon”. And repeated requests for fresh documents, because the old W-2 copies, the old appraisal, etc, all “expired”.

Underwriting finally looked at the file in January, some six months after I completed my documentation. Then another comedy of incompetence and we finally signed in February. Mortgages usually take 30 days, 60 if it’s low priority. They promised 90 days; it took them 260. From what I’ve heard, that’s been pretty typical for CitiMortgage in the last year.

Maybe it’s all incompetence, but Citi ends up profiting. All told I paid an extra $2800 in interest waiting for them to get around to processing my refinance application. So basically I’m a sucker; I should have gone elsewhere, preferably through a mortgage broker.

Citigroup was one of the main culprits in the mortgage crisis of 2008 that nearly wrecked the US economy. And they were the brokers defrauding their clients in the investment bank scandal of 2003. The incompetence I encountered with my refinance is a different problem. But I really should stick with a policy of not doing business with companies that treat customers with such contempt.