Your Mortgage or Your Life? A Perspective.

I was mostly out of the office the last couple days.  Nothing happened, so you didn’t miss anything.

Actually, something did happen.  After the previous post about John who was having hard time getting over the screwups that happened on his deal, I got an email from another client who was a little miffed (well, a lot miffed, actually) over the Shameless Plug in the most recent newsletter.  See the comment, though, for a view from a happy client.  Didn’t want you to think there was an epidemic or anything.

An aside: we are, as you see, very techno-savvy here at the CJG.  Oh yes, we love technology, but not as much as you you see. (reference)  But we are also devotees of snail mail.  I am an avid book reader (currently reading: Lost Country Life, John Adams, and Holly Hanberg’s debut novel On the Table, about which more later) and there’s something about having paper in your hand that satisfies in a way e-print does not.  We do send out a blizzards of email, and we blog, and we do other e-things, but we send out more mail – all solicited – than US Bank does in this state.  If you want on the newsletter mailing list, and you so do, hit me here.

The Plug says that we did three impossibly complex loans in two different states with three different Realtors and three different title companies in less than a month.  The client objected to the less than part, and emailed us to say that according to her timeline, it was way more than a month.  Like, 45 days.  She got a little heated about it, actually.

We (Ray and I) immediately reconstructed the timeline for her.  Turns out the following are true:

• The client signed the first purchase contract on July 22


• That contract was first transmitted to us on August 2


• The loan was logged on August 8 (when Ray gets it, then it’s a real loan)


• That loan was closed on August 21 – 13 days later, and 29 days from the inking of the contract


• The last loan was closed on September 6, 28 days after Ray logged the receipt of the original purchase contract


• All three loans were closed in 34 days from the date we first received the first contract


• Each individual loan was closed in 27 days or less

Now, you’ll pardon us if we looked at this complaint and were a little bit bewildered that we would be called on the carpet for being “deceitful”.  We had a nice conversation, lasting 41 minutes and 29 seconds (phone logs available upon request), and during the conversation the client and I both made a similar observation.

To wit: loans are stressful.  There’s a lot of money flying around here.  This stress causes people to lose perspective, and we include ourselves in the people part.  Under stress – and even in everyday situations – the tendency is to magnify the things that are going wrong and to ignore the things that aren’t.  Some people call this “realism”, but those people are just as delusional as the rest of us.  How are things going?  Well, I’m not in Kandahar being shot at.  I don’t live in a cave.  I have food.  My city has not been destroyed by a hurricane.  My wife is still speaking to me despite being in the first trimester of her seventh pregnancy.  I have three for-sure friends that I can think of.  How are things going?  Pretty well.  Pretty freakin’ well.  Oh, yeah, there’s this bill I need to pay, and we don’t have the appraisal back yet on the Hawthorne property, and nobody has yet made my client an offer he can’t refuse on his house in Payson.  So I’m likely to answer that things are crappy.  Precisely the opposite is true.  Don’t you do this?  I do.

It became evident that in the middle of a really crappy morning the client decided to take some frustrations out on us, and we ended up by her saying “you know, the thing I hate about this business the most (she’s a Realtor) is the clients that I kill myself doing great things for, who then turn around and complain about the tiniest things.  And then I just did that to you guys.”  So all is forgiven, we hope.

I’m taking it as a lesson for me that I need to be just a little more grateful, have a better perspective on what’s really happening.

The sun is shining.  It’s a perfect day.  I ran 2.5 miles this morning and did not require emergency medical care.  My children slept well, they’re all healthy, and we prayed and sang together this morning before they went out the door.  Yeah, things are pretty good.

Hope the same is true for you.