Bank of America offers a variety of standard mortgage products and a few creative options too, as well as a heavily advertised teaser mortgage called “No Fee Mortgage Plus”, which is said to come with no application fee, no closing fee, no private mortgage insurance, and a close-on-time guarantee: http://www.bankofamerica.com/loansandhomes/index.cfm?template=lc_mortgage

The BOA Mortgage website offers lots of calculators and interactive tools, as well as a smiling brunette Bank of America lady wearing red lipstick and dressed in a dark blue suit. Her streaming video image keeps popping up unexpectedly to wink at you or attempt to explain something you didn’t really care about, or otherwise annoy and distract you from whatever information you are seeking, and then not-so-gently guide you into providing information about yourself, or, better yet, into applying for a mortgage. Easy preapproval! Quick! Now! Really!

You can talk to a Bank of America Mortgage specialist online or by email or by phone, at any time during your visit, the sooner the better. Seriously, they really, really want to talk to you.  What they don’t appear to want to do is disclose a whole lot of nitty-gritty information over the internet, no matter how badly you’d like to look at it without a BOA salesperson peering over your shoulder. If you are the kind of person who is annoyed by that approach, Bank of America Mortgage might not be the mortgage company for you.

That word of warning aside, Bank of America Mortgage does offer a decent, standard line of home mortgage products, refinancing options, and home equity loans and lines of credit. Fixed rate mortgages are available for terms of 15, 30 or 40 years. ARMs are offered with low initial fixed rate periods of 1, 3, 5, 7, or ten years, followed by adjustable rates for the rest of the mortgage term.

A 10/20 interest-only mortgage is offered that resets to a 20 year fixed rate after an initial ten year interest-only period. Another interest-only option gives the buyer five years of paying only interest at the beginning of the mortgage, followed by a 25 year ARM.

If you are curious about the No Fee Mortgage Plus that comes with no application fee and no closing fee, it is worth poking around the site a bit to get more detailed information. On the Frequently Asked Questions page, we learn that third party fees (as separate from an application fee and a closing fee) are “…fees charged for services rendered by parties other than the borrower or the lender. Such fees may include appraisal, credit report, title and flood certifications.”

In other words, even without an application and/or a closing fee, plenty of fees are still left that must be and will be charged at closing on any and every mortgage. Not all borrowers realize this, and Bank of America Mortgage does not make a big deal out of making sure visitors to the website understand it either.

As to guaranteed on-time closing, that depends on what exactly you mean by “on time.” Again, the FAQs page informs us that “…the 60-day estimate is calculated to cover tasks you need to do, tasks we need to do, and tasks that third parties need to do. Examples of the latter include property valuation and title search. During times of high application volume, such as when rates are low, these tasks can take more time.”

Those rascally third parties! …Always making it hard on consumers and the nice people at Bank of America.

Despite all these complaints and irritations, it’s worth remembering that Bank of America Mortgage is big, really, really big, so big that Bank of America was recently able to swallow battered, ailing giant Countrywide Home Loans whole without so much as a burp in BOA profits. BOA will be there tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after that too. Sometimes that can be a good thing.