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Inquiring Minds Want to Know (Posted May 9, 2016)

As you’ve seen from previous editions of this award-winning weekly newsletter, we have a guy in our office who always has an interesting story to tell – and this one doesn’t disappoint either.  He has a brother who, when he was a wee lad, decided the family cat, Sam, was too dirty for his own good.  The moment this thought entered his head, like the minds of most young children, it dominated every bit of his mental attention – he could do nothing until he had reached this self-appointed goal of having a clean cat.  So, he dropped whatever he was doing – he could have been subdividing a sand castle he was building into affordable condos – and went off in search of Sam the cat. 

Finding Sam, the brother scooped him up and trundled off to the family bathroom to give him a bath.  (I know what you’re thinking: cats and water don’t mix; and you’d be right.  Remember, though, this is a four- or five-year-old boy – those things don’t factor in his head.)  As he neared the bathroom, the brother could hear that someone was already running the water in the bathtub.  I’m sure the brother was thinking, “Great, someone else in this house is on the same wavelength.  It’s about time!”  With his hands full of cat, the brother kicked open the bathroom door to find a good steam building up in the room, and he made a beeline for the bathtub.  This bathtub had a sliding glass-door enclosure, and it was closed.  Shifting Sam as much as he could into one arm, the brother reached over and slid the door open, only to find his dad taking a bath.  Unfazed, the brother – still holding the cat – looked at his dad and chirped a pleasant hello.  His father, a bit puzzled, nodded to his son and said, “What can I do for you, son?”  Without pausing, the brother said, “Sam needs a bath,” chucked the cat into the tub with dad, and closed the sliding-glass door. 

While the brother had good intentions, he committed the same error so many adults commit every day: he failed to ask the next logical question.  Instead, he made up his mind that he had the definitive answer and operated on the assumption that he was 100% right in his thinking.  At Priority Lending, asking the next logical question has been one of the most fundamental factors that continues to set us apart.  Two examples:

•  A gentleman had gone self employed a few months before coming to us for a mortgage.  He had been told by a number of other mortgage companies already that he had not been self employed long enough to qualify for a loan.  We asked him a few questions – the same ones the other companies had asked – and then we asked him the next logical question: the answer to that question enabled us to qualify him for the loan he needed. 
•  A Registered Nurse came to us with a bit of a quandary: while she earned a very good salary, she had no money in savings for a down payment.  We asked her a few questions – yes, one of them was whether she could get the down payment gifted, which she could not – and then we asked her the next logical question: and the answer to that question enabled us to get her qualified for the loan she needed. 


Those are just two of MANY examples of how we’ve been able to make a seemingly impossible transaction have a happy ending.  I’m not going to give away our secrets here – it’s always good to leave a little mystery in the relationship – but I can assure you that whatever weird or one-in-a-million scenarios you have, we’ll keep asking questions until we find a solution.  It’ll be a lot easier, too, than trying to bathe a cat!

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