Veterans United Home Loans review: Misleading during closing

We just had the worst experience with Veterans United. This has been extremely stressful and has disrupted our entire family. We have been working with Veterans United on purchasing a home. We found a home and placed a contract. We spoke to our loan officer several times and he assured us everything would be transparent. We were 21 days from closing on our dream home. Our closing costs were around $7,000. On our "to do" list, we were required to create a "Statement to Verify Funds for Closing" for the $7,000 and were never told this amount would increase. The loan officer told us he was going to be transparent about everything and we believed him. Monday 4/1/24 we paid our appraisal fee and 30 minutes later we received a new loan estimate that increased our closing costs by almost $5,000. I immediately sent an email to our loan officer and loan coordinator for clarification on the increase. I also called them both, left a voicemail requesting a call back. This was at 3pm Monday 4/1/24. We did not receive a call or email from either. As a courtesy, our bank's loan officer looked at the loan estimate from 3/20/24 and 4/1/24. This person said we should have been told up front about the inevitable increase and from what they could see, there would be another increase in the closing costs before we closed on 4/23/24. By this time, it is 10:30am on 4/2/24 and still no call or email from either Veterans United staff. We were absolutely heartbroken. There was no way we could come up with the new closing cost amount of a little over $12,000 before 4/23/24. We were angry to say the least. We sent an email to both Veterans United staff informing them that we needed to cancel everything. The loan officer acted like he didn't understand what the problem was. All I could reply was "we want our appraisal money back immediately." I don't understand how someone can be so out of touch with the general public. Who has an extra $5,000 laying around? I let our realtor know what happened and he informed me that Veterans United has the ability to offer lender credits. So, I went into our Veterans United account, around 11:15am 4/2/24, to see if we could request a credit BUT our account had been wiped clean of the nearly 40 pages of documents I had painstakingly gathered and uploaded. The loan officer didn't have time to call or email us back, but he didn't waste any time deleting our entire account. I can't even describe the devastation. Our dream home just slipped away in a matter of hours. Adding to the devastation, we terminated our lease at our current home last week.