May/June 2022 Reverse Mortgage Magazine

RM: Has COVID-19 impacted the types of borrowers you have traditionally worked with or their reasons for wanting to get a reverse mortgage? CS: Not that I’ve seen directly. I have had several clients retire earlier than they planned. The part that has changed is the willingness and preference for clients to meet over Zoom. I was initially hesitant to use Zoom. I enjoy the personal contact but discovered that I can have more frequent touches with clients utilizing Zoom. The clients who want to get together, we’re still willing to do that, too. RM: As a small-business owner, what has been your biggest professional obstacle thus far? How did you overcome it? CS: It’s all about finding the right people who share similar values and are willing to sign on to what we’re accomplishing for our clients. That led to us allowing staff to work remotely six months ahead of the pandemic. The first person was Sandy, who’s worked with me for over ten years. She was set to retire, but she said, ‘If you give me a computer, I’ll help out,’ and she’s still helping out two years later. She’s awesome. That’s the standard we’re trying to achieve. Remote working has allowed me to find great staff who are not restricted to the local area and allows us to accommodate a range of family situations and make it positive for everybody. RM: That’s interesting how you adopted remote working before it became the norm. CS: We were very fortunate. Our industry has had that flexibility, but now it’s a necessity. Many people don’t realize how working remotely, with all the tools, can really be effective. Having good people, that’s the bottom line. We need good people because the client experience is the most important thing to me. RM: What do you consider to be your greatest accomplishment in your career to date? CS: I’ve actually had three professional careers. All were building blocks and experiences. I would say my greatest career accomplishment is that I’m able to make a good living at something I thoroughly enjoy. I don’t know how many people can say that. It doesn’t feel like work. It is a great personal reward every day to help people. My business is entirely referral-based, so that must mean I did something right along the way. People associate a CPA with numbers, but it’s more problem-solving and getting a transaction done in a way that maximizes the most benefit to a client. Being able to help somebody who doesn’t have financial experience or background and help put pieces together is really a lot of fun. Although I have a pretty good sense early on what might benefit a client and how the transaction should be structured, I’ve got to educate and help bring them along to that same point and give them all the options we can think of. When it comes together, it’s very rewarding. A lot of clients have said, ‘I had no idea we could do this,’ which is the coolest thing for me to hear. Usually they start out with, ‘Huh, if we could pull this off.’ I know what is possible, but you can’t say, ‘Just sign here.’ It’s the journey along the way that’s fun and coaching clients along the path towards improving monthly cash flow, providing a safety net for the future or getting their dream retirement home is what makes what I do rewarding. RM: If you could offer one piece of advice to someone who wants to get into the reverse mortgage business, what would it be and why? CS: I suggest working alongside someone who knows the business well. There’s plenty of resources to learn the technical aspects of how to do reverse mortgages between NRMLA and all the lenders. But I think a much larger part of the business is understanding how to strategically apply a reverse mortgage. It’s different than the forward mortgage side, where the goal can be fairly straightforward: to purchase a house or refinance to get a lower rate or reduce a monthly payment or to cash out. In a reverse mortgage, you must pay attention to a lot more variables in a retirement plan—personal, family and financial. The loans themselves are more straightforward, but you need to understand how to apply it to the client’s overall financial plan. Working with someone who is successful, who has been around a while, can help a loan officer who’s new to the business better understand how the reverse mortgage fits within a client’s overall retirement plan and, more importantly, how it doesn’t and what you shouldn’t do. It’s equally important to learn how to work well with seniors. I took care of my grandmother pretty much full time from when she was about 85 to when she passed away at 104. I guess I was the From the Top continued on page 14 From the Top REVERSE MORTGAGE / MAY- JUNE 2022 13

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