Stay Away from CENLAR
I’m a grown adult but sometimes it is still very hard for me to come to terms with how the system is so rigged and how companies like Cenlar, which we used for our second mortgage, feed on people.
When we bought our house, between the real estate agents and the title company and God knows what other agents were floating around at the time it was just a given that we were going to need to get a second mortgage with CENLAR.
We paid and paid and paid and paid and paid and paid and paid and barely made a debt because of course it’s perfectly legal that they frontload all of the interest so that you are just paying your debt to the company and not touching your actual Principal. That isn’t specific to CENLAR that’s just the American way.
What is specific to CENLAR is terrible customer service. I never received any communication from the company by mail, and came to find out that they were sending it to a completely garbled address— a series of typos clearly created on their side when they set up the loan so that my statements were never going to reach me. Once I figured that out I called to have the address corrected, only to be told by an incredibly rude woman who I believe was half asleep when she spoke to me that you can’t change that address (even though it’s the address of the house they have the Mortgage on) except by writing a physical letter to them to ask them to change that address.
I did that and they ignored that too.
I called back and was hung up on while being transferred. So I looked into how to change the situation from a variable interest loan that fluctuated wildly every month between something like $700 and well over $1000. I got a personal loan through another company for a fixed interest amount with a loan that actually lets me pay down my Principal rather than just line the loan companies pockets and transferred the remaining debt, paying off CENLAR in full.
That was in December 2025.
Then in July I was surprised when looking at my bank account to see that CENLAR had pulled out $332. I HAVE ASSUMED THAT SINCE THE LOAN WAS PAID IN FULL AND I WAS DOING BUSINESS WITH ANOTHER COMPANY THAT MY RELATIONSHIP WITH CENLAR WAS OVER.
I called and was told that just because you pay off your loan it doesn’t mean that your account is closed. And how do you close your account? Well, you have to FAX a specific form requesting to close your account to CENLAR.
Fax? It’s 2026. There is no other acceptable way to close a CENLAR loan. You can’t write a letter. You can’t email. You can’t call. You can’t send a carrier pigeon—you have to go find a fax machine. The rep told me that you could fax from Staples. Since I live in a small town, I took part of the day off so I could go to a neighboring town to the Staples and stand in line to Fax CENLAR what I learned was the third page of a series of pages of paperwork that had been sent to either me or my new lender back in November. Meanwhile CENLAR was going to keep charging me for my zeroed-out account.
The ironic part of this is that CENLAR doesn’t hold the loan they ONLY exist to manage it—to do the administrative work that they’re, in my experience, incompetent at executing.
What all the people helping you buy your home when you need a second Mortgage don’t tell you is: you can and should refinance that second mortgage after a fairly short (often six months) waiting period.
Of course it’s no doubt buried in the reams of legal language, but while they are taking your money month after month after month after month after month after month and your original Principal isn’t going down or is going down in minuscule units you can get out from under that by refinancing with a company that allows you to pay against the Principal while you’re also paying interest.
I was just letting that second Mortgage ride paying thousands and thousands of my hard-earned dollars a year into somebody’s pocket without it putting much of a dent in my Principal. I have changed that situationk and I hope that somebody can benefit from my experience.