Cenlar FSB: Mortgage account not supporting transaction downloads

Besteffort9

We shouldnt need to refinance our mortgage to get basic account info out of Cenlar....

I am also in disbelief that Cenlar - which bought my morgtage from another bank that DOES enable account info access - doesnt enable its basic account information to be shared with accounting software. At first I thought problem might be with Quicken and/ connection, but no... they confirmed it. I had sent a letter (the kind you put in an envelope and mail) to the Cenlar COO Rob Lux in Dec and got a reply back from an assistant that said: "Thank you for contacting our executive team...regrettably our online system does not support third party applications. We regret any inconvenience..." in 2021, they are going backwards and making it harder to manage our mortgage payments, arguably the biggest bill we all have. And what choice do we have? We are locked in unless we refinance? So I suggest others also write a letter as 1) they read them, 2) they seem to think they dont need to offer what they used which is basic access to our account information. Cenlar FSB, COO Rob Lux, 780 Township Line, Road, Morrisville, PA 19067

jacobs

@Besteffort9 I wanted to reply to your post last week, but it was marked closed for a few days; a moderator has re-opened it.

What I wanted to say is that downloading from a mortgage company is not something Quicken users necessarily need — some Quicken users say to avoid it even if it's available — and I certainly wouldn't consider refinancing over this.

If you are armed with the data of your mortgage from the company's website, you should be able to set up a loan account in Quicken to mimic what's happening in the real world. You might have to make a small adjustment every now and then if Quicken's and the mortgage company's interest/amortization calculations differ slightly. If you need help setting up the loan and payment transactions in Quicken, post back with what your questions are and I'm sure folks here would be happy to help. 

Besteffort9

Thanks for that. I ended up doing that (creating an offline account and having to carefully estimate everything to ensure it was set up right), but this was after hours of trying to determine WHY Cenlar - unlike so many financial institutions - would provide basic account information to an established third party platform used by millions of customers. They used to. But they stopped. And it is probably the single biggest cost that most people need to manage in their lives. This just makes that way more of a hassle.

jacobs

I understand your frustration with Cenlar. I was just saying that it doesn't need to be, and really shouldn't be "way more of a hassle". Once you have the loan and recurring transaction set up in Quicken, the most you should ever have to do is a minor adjustment to interest/principal split to keep Quicken matching what Cenlar is showing. If you do this once a month, it should take a minute... and since any variance is likely to be very small, you really don't even need to do it every month.