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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