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I first started working with these clients back in 2018 when I was working with another mortgage company, and they were a young couple buying their first home. The couple were super hard working and they had saved enough to buy their first home. He was a construction worker building houses and she was a hair stylist. They were a pleasure to work with and were just so happy to buy their first home.

I heard from them again during the refinance boom and we were able to get them into a lower interest rate, saving them money each month for their growing family. Things really went well for this young family. The husband started his own contracting business, and his wife was able to stay home and raise their three children. They would check in from time to time when they were thinking about buying a bigger home or possibly buying a home to fix up and flip. None of those opportunities were the right situation for them.

Then, about four years ago, they came up with the idea of buying the wife’s grandmother’s house in the next town over, which was substantially larger and has great schools. They didn’t want to just buy the house; they wanted to buy it and then renovate it into a mother (grandmother)-daughter set up so Grandma could still live with them but have her own space.

As a self-employed contractor, there is always special care that needs to be taken when qualifying for a mortgage loan, so we worked backwards from how much loan he needed to purchase the home to how much income he needed to show on his tax returns over a two-year period. During this time, we worked on improving his credit scores and strategizing on the timing of their current home, which had appreciated substantially since they originally purchased it.

As it turns out, the wife’s mother had moved from California recently and was looking to buy a new home for herself in the area to be close to her grandchildren and decided to buy her daughter’s house! So now we had all the pieces in place, we just needed to make sure the timing was right. We needed to have the architect’s drawings completed and accepted by the town. We needed to have all the building permits in place and ready to go. We also needed to have the most recent year’s tax return filed and tax due paid. Once everything was lined up and ready to go, I went to work.

The first step was finalizing Mom from California’s purchase of the couple’s home. She decided to add her other daughter to the purchase, which was a piece of cake, and we got that taken care of without a hitch. With Step One completed, we moved on to Step Two! This is where all the years of preparation for this moment paid off. We had everything we needed in advance and everyone was pulling in the same direction so when we got a curve ball thrown our way during the process, we were easily able to handle it and move on to closing. Four plus years of strategizing, planning and working paid off for this couple!

The words I’ve written here can’t convey the sense of satisfaction I felt in helping to make this all come together. The real payoff came when I received a phone call from the wife a few days after closing. She was so emotional, she had trouble speaking the words she wanted to tell me. I too had a giant lump in my throat and I’m not ashamed to say that I had more than a few tears running down my cheeks during that call. The joy and gratitude that she expressed was truly humbling. I’ve been working so long with this family that they felt like my family. While my job often consists of just helping people get the right financing to purchase or refinance their homes, sometimes it involves helping a great family put together a plan that stretches across generations and provided for everyone’s needs. It’s not often I get to be involved in so many aspects of a transaction for so long a time and not only have all parties happy but genuinely ecstatic. This is one I will never forget!

Sometimes the randomness with which a client finds you feels like the hand of God. I received a phone call from a client, who must be one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked with. He found me online from a simple Google search and he was pretty desperate. As it would happen, he was currently working at a really good job but had been out of work for a while and had run up a good bit of debt on his high-interest credit cards. In addition, he had taken out a home equity loan at a pretty high interest rate. On top of this he just found out his wife was expecting, and the family was expanding. He needed to find a way to get all this debt under control and reduce the amount of cash he was paying each month, especially because those high monthly payments on his credit cards were killing him!

The first thing we did was take a thorough look at all his finances. We then worked through what it would look like to refinance all that debt into one monthly payment with a low interest rate. Fortunately, the value of his home had risen dramatically since he bought it and there was a good amount of equity we could work with. We were ultimately able to consolidate all those high interest, high monthly payment credit cards as well as his home equity loan into a cash out refinance that eliminated all those steep monthly payments as well as provided him with some extra cash to use for the inevitable expense that comes with a new baby.

Throughout the process he was always concerned that something would go wrong or fall through, and he wouldn’t be able to make it all work. He kept saying that it seemed almost too good to be true. We were able to get him closed in a few weeks without so much as a hiccup during the process. Everything fell into place, and he was thrilled. We were able to help him consolidate all his debt into one monthly payment, reduce his monthly spending by several hundred dollars and put some extra money in the bank for his growing family. I really feel like God placed me in the right place at the right time to help someone who was in need.

There are times as a loan officer where you need to go well beyond the normal aspects of helping people buy their new homes. This particular client had just gone under contract to purchase a new home for his family when the Covid pandemic hit. The whole world was going crazy and uncertainty was everywhere. Interest rates were all over the place and closings were delayed and some were cancelled outright. The timeline for closing was extended significantly and to top it off, the client and his wife were pretty nervous and high-strung people.

As we were working through all the issues related to the pandemic as well as the issues that were involved with securing their financing, we came across a pretty unique situation. We discovered that the wife was still on the deed and mortgage of a house she had purchased with her then boyfriend, many years prior. This presented an issue because that old mortgage payment was showing up on her credit report and was negatively impacting their Debt-to-Income ratio even though he hadn’t lived there in over ten years! The good news for her was that in this situation, we can exclude an old mortgage payment like this one, if we can show that the monthly mortgage payments were made by someone else for at least the previous twelve months. It seemed like a pretty simple solution . . . at first.

It turns out that the relationship with the ex-boyfriend didn’t end well and suffice it to say things got pretty ugly when they split up. The wife had hoped to never have to deal with her ex ever again. Now, here we are ten years later and we need to get proof from the ex-boyfriend that he made the mortgage payments for the past twelve months. The wife is sick over the situation. She has all sorts of worries about how the ex will react and what he may do. It was not a good situation to say the least.

Normally, the client, in this case the wife, would obtain the proof we need but clearly this was not a normal situation. I offered to reach out to the ex to get what we need. At first, my calls went unanswered, and my voicemails ignored. With some persistence and charm, the ex finally answered one of my calls and sent me over what I needed to get these clients closed.

This situation illustrated one of the core tenets of how I approach my clients; no two clients are ever the same and every situation is different and has different challenges. The key is to listen when the client speaks and try to offer solutions whenever obstacles or challenges arise.