The Mortgage Man

THIS IS A SPONSORED POST

Everyone wants to know more about mortgages. I was a Mortgage Broker before becoming a Hot Dog Man, so I know a little bit about the subject!

It is a wacky business with a great many "shady operators." Many of the loose lending practices of the previous five years or so are creating ugly situations for many homeowners who cannot afford the payments on their mortgages. There were a great many companies who offered and wrote mortgages to people who merely needed to prove they had a pulse to get a loan. The result is a lot of bad loans, foreclosures and heightened regulations for the lending industry.

When I started in the business home values were increasing and interest rates were falling and they eventually hit all-time lows. Many people were looking to remortgage their home to take advantage of lower rates and to pull cash out of their homes. I was making money just by sitting around the office. Walk-ins were common and just about anyone who owned a home refinanced their home.

While this boom in refinancing was going on, I managed to carve out a comfortable niche in the "Jumbo Loan" market- mortgages for people who needed to borrow over $300,000 (the limit kept rising with rising home prices). I dealt primarily with refinancing existing mortgages and providing mortgages to people buying million dollar homes (a market which is very thin right now.

Some of my collegues devoted their energies to bad credit risk customers who needed secured loans to get out of mounting credit card and other consumer debt. That was never a market that interested me personally, but many of the lenders payed good commissions and were fast and loose with their underwriting policies. There were even wholesale reps from lenders who "encouraged" fraud to get deals approved! Like I said before, it was a shady business.

Compared to being a mortgage broker, being a Hot Dog Man is much more fun and a lot less shady!