There’s a commercial for a mortgage company that plays regularly on a podcast that I like to follow.   In this commercial you hear the question, “Why can’t people get a decision on their mortgage in minutes rather than having to wait weeks?”   Kudos to the copywriter of the ad for keying on our penchant to have things instantly instead of having to wait.   In today’s day and age, we take photos with our phones and see them instantly (and most likely never view them again until we’re looking to free up storage space on our phones).   Conversely, it wasn’t THAT long ago that there was this thing called “film” that went inside a camera (that had no way of making phone calls), and you had to take the film to a place that developed it and printed the photos on PAPER – and we would wait a few DAYS to get those prints back to see that we had our thumb in front of the lens in five of the shots and seven other photos were completely blurry and unrecognizable (and we paid ...

A friend of mine works for a major car manufacturer in his capacity as a mechanic and technician – he’s been with the same company for over 20 years, so it’s safe to say he knows a thing or two about how engines work, right?   Whenever I have a problem with my car that extends beyond needing new tires or an oil change, I always reach out to him to see if he can give me an idea of what’s going on and how much it’s going to cost to fix it.   In the times he’s kindly come over to look at one of my ailing vehicles, I’ve learned a couple of things.   One is you don’t need nearly as many “things” to change your spark plugs as the folks at the auto parts store try to sell you.   T he other little morsel of wisdom is in order for a car to start and run, it needs three things: air, spark, and fuel.   For an internal combustion engine, if you take one of these three things away, you don’t get the controlled explosion that makes the heart of your engine pump. ...

In late December 1944, the German army launched a major surprise attack that became known as The Battle of the Bulge (a term which would later become sor t of a rallying cry for people trying to lose weight – sometimes it’s embarrassing to be a human).   With the commanding officer back in the United States for a staff meeting, command of the 101 st Airborne Division of the US Army and the defense of the besieged city of Bastogne, Belgium fell to Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe.   With the city surrounded by the German army on December 22, 1944, General Heinrich Freiherr von Luttwitz of the 2 nd Panzer Division sent a note to General McAuliffe recommending that the US forces in the city surrender to avoid annihilation of the troops, further destruction of the city, and an increase in civilian casualties.   To drive his point home, General Luttwitz detailed the resources he had at his disposal and was willing to use to take the city and wipe out the Amer...

We don’t like to do pre- quals .   There, I said it – but now I better explain it.   A very large number of potential homebuyers think a pre-qual is a short two-minute phone call where a loan originator asks them a handful of questions about their income and other sundry financial details, punches some numbers into a calculator, and says, “You’re golden!   Go out and put an offer in on that house and have fun riding your pet unicorn.” Obviously, there’s a bit more to a pre-qual than that, but when loan originators simply ask a couple of questions, they’re setting themselves (along with the buyer and the agent) up for failure – a failure that usually manifests itself AFTER a home has gone under contract – and the last I checked, that’s not good.   For the most part, when a potential homebuyer comes to us for a “pre-qual”, we ask a lot more questions and, quite often, go so far as to ask for certai n documents before we issue anything that says the person i...