STORIES FROM THE BANK VICTIMS
Hi Denise, my partner and I are about to lose our house with Bankwest. We are a young family who started with our modest first home of $200,000 we had another child and years later we attended a Creating Wealth Seminar. We now realise this was funded by the Banks. The financial advisers taught us to use the equity to buy another home and have a rental and provide stability for our kids. Bankwest was only too happy to grab our equity and exchange it for hell on earth. The stress and inability to seek answers of why this strategy was so flawed resulted in me being separated from my husband. We were happy until the day we signed up with Bankwest. Our total debt became $600k plus.
The Bank has been making massive fees from this advice and for our family, it's gone from bad to worse. The bank gave us buffer monies to pay for the payments on the debt but after 5 years of battling and ill heath we are about to lose our home. The investment property has been sold but was overpriced and now our original home equity of $80,000 and in 5 years went from 380,000 to now 430,000 debt with the bank in repossession mode.
We were told by the spruiker Bankwest reps, that within ten years we would own a second home and provide for retirement. To the unwary like us, its a bank scam. In desperation we hung on and that made things worse.
I cant tell you what it's done to my once happy family even after I worked 2 jobs and my husband 16 hr days nothing ever made any difference. I am angry and I want answers to which we have not had any help whatsoever, and are about to lose everything. We have no chance to ever own a home again. Our faith in the bank has been shattered. How can they do this to families?
We were told: "do not leave dead equity in our home. Make your money and equity work for you." its all nonsense!
How can banks be allowed to do this? They know it would fail but for them they end up with our house and interest and default fees on a $600k loan. We have been slaves to the bank.
We don't even understand how we worked hard to build equity to have a loan that exceeds the value of a home leaving us bankrupt. Please can you help us we don't know what else to do. There is no counselling on how to deal with this. We are hanging on by nothing more then a thread and it's cost us our marriage our children's mental health and our own selves compromised from not having assistance other then more debt from Bankwest. The Creating Wealth is crap. It only created wealth for the bank and now they are stealing our home. I had no idea so many others are suffering to.
I've been in to speak with bank staff numerous times and simply get the runaround. They will not give us the LAF. FOS just threw us out. I have every form we ever got but no matter how much we look we can't unscramble the mess. Nothing makes sense and I've run out of hope. I saw your site last week. You are my last stop. I am fighting but it feels helpless and hopeless. Any day now the bank will repossess. I wish we had known you were there three years ago. Its been a nightmare.