Citizens Bank Home Equity Loans

Customer service is terrible and using Covid excuse its non-existent. Writing letter to President of the division, Eric Schuppenhauer, falls on a deaf ear. Be careful when you want to get lien release, discharge and suddenly new fees will be levied.

HELOC Application ****257251
Handled by Loan Officer Jordan Addington
If Citizens bank does not believe a preliminary deal will not go through or be beneficial to them, they will drop you and never follow up with you. Tried reaching out to Citizens Bank Heloc applications department because the aboce officer was not responding; on hold for 1.5 hours. Called back in the morning the next day. 1 hour on hold. Sent multiple emails, called several times, left voice mails to the person above...never responded. Reached out to him a month later. Said he would follow up the next day. Did not follow up. Wasted 2 months because of this person and citizens bank practices.
Do not like leaving bad reviews but it is not right for people to be treated that way.
I would AVOID dealing with Citizens bank on any home loan products, especially avoid the above loan person.

Horrible Lending Dept. I'm near 3 months in with a 35% LTV, Perfect Credit & plenty of reserves. Still not closed on equity line.

Service is horrible... no one ever called me.. no calls were ever returned... I received a preapproval letter for 500,000 and eventually was reduced to 268,000. This was fine with me... I could get no one to set closing much less respond to emails or calls...
When I expressed my frustration in an email to the loan originator, Jon Humbert, who has never called, emailed or responded to me,
my loan amount was reduced to 17,500 and the interest rate increased by 2 points without any explanation... still no response

Citizen's Bank works against you. To me, it seems like they have to be doing on purpose in order to get more money out of you. I schedule regular transfers from another bank because they insist on auto-deducting from a Citizen's Checking account. Ok, I transfer money 5 days in advance prior to the auto-deduct, except they delete the scheduled transfer. Even if a credit occurs the same day as a debit, like all banks that suck, they record the debit first so they can charge a fee. Like I said, working against you. Looking out for number one - themselves. Terrible policies.

I STILL can't get this horrible experience with Citizen's Bank out of my mind though it is maybe 3 or 4 years in the past. My wife and I opened a home equity loan to help my son buy a home. From the first monthty payment I made, there was nothing but problems. They lost a payment that I mailed to the address I was given and I was charged a penalty. We got that cleared up but roughly $700 I made in accelerated payments "disappeared",it took months and months and countless letters and me sitting in the branch to get it finally resolved. There is so much more but anyway, after almost a year of terrible service we paid the loan off and moved to a different bank, also in Franklin, MA. Nice people at Citizens, TERRIBLE service. I wrote letters and called Citizens corporate office contacted and filed official complaints to the RI banking commission and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and so on and on...until I finally was fully reimbursed.

So I thought....it turns out there was a $50 annual fee on the Home Equity Loan (never stated in the contract). I was assessed penalties because I was told, "this can only be paid in person", not online or through a transfer from my Citizen's checking account. WHAT $50 annual fee? WHY can't I transfer it from checking? This was NOWHERE in the contract either! I should point out that our monthly payment was somewhere around $400 and we vastly overpaid it each month so we could pay it off quickly. Imagine my DELIGHT when a class action lawsuit was filed against Citizen's Bank recently because of this non-existent annual fee...which many people paid on their Home Equity loans. I signed up to join the lawsuit immediately and ultimately received my reimbursement. This, in my opinion, is verification that something is seriously wrong at Citizens Bank. I can only speculate what is behind the multitude of complaints against them! Do yourself a BIG favor; find a small, local bank or credit union and give Citizen's a WIDE birth. Save yourself a great deal of frustration. Read the numerous reviews in this site and believe them!