My husband and I were steered toward HomeTrust Bank by a franchisor that we purchased a franchise from. We were finally able to get our funding in place but the journey has been months long and with very little communication from our banker.
After working with this bank for about two months to get our SBA loan going, we were advised to move forward with the sale of our house, to quit our jobs and make the drive out to Florida from California. Our new business is located in South Florida. We were assured of a mid-June-ish take over date. Certainly no later than July 1st.
So we sold our house, quit our jobs and made the drive out to our new home where we then proceeded to spend three and a half months running through our life's savings that was originally intended to serve as working capital because our banker had shelved our loan application and completely neglected to work on it or communicate with us. After several weeks during which no phone calls or emails were acknowledged or returned I finally began sending e-mails in which I would end with "Mr. Diggs, PLEASE let us know the status of our loan application. We have quit our jobs, sold our house and moved 3,000 miles and we are watching our savings disappear."
Nope. Still no response.
After several months we finally had to get our franchisor involved who got in touch with our banker's supervisor who then got the banker to start moving on our loan application.
Once he was FINALLY communicating with us, our banker - Joe Diggs - admitted to shelving our loan application for over three months and completely neglecting it while simultaneously neglecting to offer anything that resembled an apology or acknowledgement of the grave financial harm that neglect caused to my family, much less any kind of offer to make us whole. He was unbelievably blasé about it, he might as well been advising us we were out of cat food. He could care less that we lost $60K in wages my husband and I would have had had we simply waited in California until he was ready to process our loan not to mention the lost opportunity in the business and the tens of thousands of dollars that should have served as working capital but instead went to bills. Nope, he clearly did not care.
Joe Diggs turned a scheduled June 15th take over into a September 14th takeover. It was like the worst, most stressful four-month vacation ever.
At this point I have made appointments with attorneys because this bank continues to take a hard pass at our requests to make this right. At this point our only recourse is to take them to court.
I would absolutely warn anyone off this bank unless they have some strange kink involving the enjoyment of being thoroughly screwed and experiencing the stress of vehicle repossession and possible foreclosure. (We *used* to have an 800 credit score!) read more