My brother and I applied for a home mortgage as first time buyers wit BOA this year. We intended to put 20 % down for a home costing {$150000.00}. Our combined salaries are $ XXXX. We were declined based on my bother not having enough trade accounts and because my debt to credit ratio was too high. Here is where the incompetence becomes egregious. BOA did not include any of the credit accounts my brother indeed possessed on the loan application, so it appears as he had no credit history and the credit card omitted was a BOA card ( and the other was a cell phone bill, both having more than the year of required payment histories )! For me, I told both the mortgage officer and his immediate supervisor that all of my credit cards were paid done to reflect 25 % of the total credit for each which cost me about {$9000.00}. I paid the cards on Monday. Yet, BOA then went ahead and pulled my credit report again on Tuesday, then declined the loan on Wednesday and said there was no change in my credit debt ratios and that my report only showed a {$24.00} reduction in balances. Even a security guard at BOA knows that credit reports are not updated so quickly as to reflect payments made on accounts in a day. I was also charged the {$450.00} for the home appraisal to be done. When I asked the mortgage officer about this he told me that there was no way I could have been charged when the appraisal had not taken place. I sent him a copy of the charge and got no response from him until he sent the e-mail informing us of the loan denial. I was also able to log into the BOA mortgage section and noticed that many of the documents that we submitted had not been uploaded into the system as if they had no record of our submissions just before the denial It seems to me that if BOA was interested in financing the loan they would have advised us to push back the closing date and allow time for the payments on my credit cards to be updated on my credit report and actually included my brother 's trade accounts on the application. The e-mail informing is we were declined came almost 2 weeks after repeatedly contacting our officer to ask for a status update and two weeks before the closing date. The whole experience has made us reevaluate our relationships with the bank and made us grateful that we did not enter into a 30-year relationship with a bank that has shown an extraordinary lack of competent business practices and professionalism. 
