Skip to main content

Unlimited Data Can Be Confusing (Posted January 2, 2017)

If I were to walk up to you and ask you to explain your cell phone plan to me, that would be relatively easy, right?  You have three phones, two of which are smart phones so you pay an upcharge of $XX, and you get 4GB of data each month (you usually use just over 2 GB except for those months when you have to take your car into the shop, and they don’t have free WiFi so you end up using a boatload of data playing Candy Crush and watching videos on YouTube): all of this costs you $XXX/month.  Easy enough. 

However, if I asked you to explain how you arrived at that particular plan, there’s a 95% chance you’ll just shrug your shoulders and say, “I honestly can’t remember.  It’s all a blur now.”  Why is that?  There are two parts to that answer.

The first part is relatively simple to explain: it’s something you see every month and doesn’t change – you’ve become used to seeing it arrive in your mailbox or inbox, and unless there’s a drastic change in the monthly price you’re accustomed to paying, you don’t give it another look.  Am I right?  Now for the second part of the reason.

When you originally walked into the store (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc.) to get your phones and their accompanying plan, you’re immediately “greeted” by a plethora of shiny gadgets (phones that can slice, dice, julienne, AND solve quadratic equations) and a man or woman wearing an ill-fitting polo shirt who stares directly into your eyes so intently you’d swear they can see your soul, and they won’t look away.  You’re on sensory overload, and you’re not sure where to look: all this beautiful technology all around you but this sales person with the tractor-beam eyes.  Help!  While you start salivating over a particular phone (which Mr./Ms. Bad Polo IMMEDIATELY picks up on like a shark sensing blood in the water), the sales person is showing you algorithms and flow charts that only rocket scientists at JPL could have produced to demonstrate each monthly phone plan.  Before your head explodes, you ask, “Just tell me: how much?”, and Polo has you!  Like a WWII fighter pilot who paints a small version of the enemy’s flag on the fuselage of his plane for each “kill”, these sales people, while they’re retrieving your phones from the back, lift up their shirts and tattoo another stick figure on their backs to represent another “sucker sold”.  I wouldn’t be surprised if they used their own blood as the ink for the tattoo – these folks are ruthless!

With that said, though, if you’ve ever had a real estate/mortgage experience similar to the cell phone plan experience, I apologize on behalf of all the good people in the industry.  Yes, we’re in this to make money and feed our families, without a doubt.  However, our job, first and foremost, is to educate and explain (without using complicated algorithms and flow charts) so the client can make an informed decision – the client should never feel pressured into a transaction, no matter how much they want that shiny house.  If we’ve done our job correctly, the client can easily explain the reason they chose our plan over someone else’s – and it’s an added bonus if they can remember whether the shirt we were wearing fit properly. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Naked Truth About Home Buying

It’s highly likely I’ve already written about this, but I’ll try to make it entertaining at least.   There’s a guy who works in ou r office who suffers from kidney stones – and from what he’s described, “suffers” might even be a little too tame a word for it.   As an aside, though, when you ask him how painful the experience is, he gets an odd smile and says, “It’s the most intense pain I’ve ever experienced, but it’s hard to describe.   I’ve heard a lot of people compare it to the pain a woman experiences while giving birth.   To that, I must say, those people are big, fat liars!   I’ve been in the presence of a woman giving birth, twice, and her pain has to be 100 times worse.   They’re passing the equivalent of a Buick.   I’m passing a pumpkin seed.”   He’s always been a colorful fellow. He’s had this wonderful condition for over a decade now, and the stones make their appearance about every 18 months or so.   Up until recently, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Time for a New York-Style Housing Fix

Previously, I’ve written about a man who works in our office who lived in New York City back in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s – let me assure you that while that does seem like a very long time ago, it’s not nearly as far bac k as when the wheel was invented and humankind learned to harness the power of fire. If you’ve been to New York City recently and blissfully walked around Harlem to get chicken and waffles at Sylvia’s on Malcolm X Boulevard between 126 th and 127 th Streets or stopped in at Keybar on 13 th Street between First Avenue and Avenue A to wedge yourself into a cozy corner next to their notable fireplace, you wouldn’t get a sense that these areas were once . . . not as welcoming and glitzy as you now see them. Our office mate has told some fairly interesting stories of living in those and other areas of New York City that give a much different sense.   In the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, no matter how many great things you heard about Sylvia’s food, 127 th Str...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Indelible Lesson

This is a reprint from about nine months ago, but I thought the timing is right to revisit this subject.   Recently, I saw this gentleman at the gym whose upper body was almost entirely covered in tattoos.   I struck up a conversation with him and learned that it took well over 100 hours, and it cost $85/hour.   As we continued to chat, I was doing the math in my head: $85 X 100 hours = $8,500 !   Being the mortgage geek that I am, my next thought was, “I’m staring at a walking, talking down payment on a house!”   There’s a huge misconception floating out there that 20% is required as a down payment.   There are those products that do require such an amount, but there are so many others that don’t.   A very popular loan option only requires 3.5%.   In the case of my new gym acquaintance, $8,500 represents a 3.5% down payment on a $242,000 mortgage – that’s not a palace, but that amount of money could buy a modest home in a nice neighborho...
Post a Comment
Read more