her career. “The owners of New American are very, very protective of the senior population and want to make sure that they’re given fair and accurate information,” she says. “We get thank-yous from our clients all the time.” The relationship with customers continues even after the paperwork is done. Skaggs and her team send birthday cards and share recipes. The commitment to clients’ well-being pays off in customer loyalty and return business. As past chair of the Orange County chapter of the National Aging in Place Council, Skaggs learned the details of user-friendly spaces for older homeowners, from wheelchair navigability to counter heights. She tells her loan officers, who perform only reverse mortgages, “You have to immerse yourself, live, eat and breathe reverse mortgage in order to understand this loan and this client.” A trip to the grocery store reminds her why she is passionate about reverse mortgages. There, she sees elderly shoppers on a fixed budget, buying a full cart of food when their Social Security checks arrive but getting by with only the essentials the rest of the month. “Not everybody needs to have a reverse mortgage, but for a lot of people, it’s a really beneficial tool,” she says. Other clients leverage reverse mortgages as a retirement tool, establishing lines of credit for help with daily cleaning, laundry and other needs. “They have the ability to use their home to stay at home,” she says. Today’s seniors are “pretty savvy” and want to make their own decisions. Family, friends and financial planners are welcome to join calls and meetings. Increasingly, those financial planners are viewing reverse mortgages as another retirement tool to make a portfolio work better or free up pension dollars for daily expenses that would otherwise be siphoned off to pay the mortgage. One of Skaggs’ clients lived in a $1.3 million beachfront home in California, but a balcony in disrepair was too dangerous to venture onto. Once again, Skaggs brokered an agreement from a contractor willing to do the work and wait for payment from money put into escrow from the reverse mortgage. “It doesn’t matter where you are on the homeowning spectrum,” says Skaggs. “It doesn’t matter if it’s someone with the lowest income or the lowest-valued house, or if it’s high value.” Today, a kind of perfect storm—lingering uncertainty from the pandemic, rising inflation driving up the costs of daily essentials, and record-high home values—is piquing renewed interest in reverse mortgages. “I had 14 calls by the time I was up and working this morning, from all across the country—Tennessee, Virginia, Maine, North Carolina,” Skaggs notes. “People are asking, ‘Can I get a reverse mortgage?’” Before she found her calling in the mortgage industry, Skaggs’ life path wove from delivering wild animals for Lion Country Safari to waiting tables at a Utah resort. When a former colleague from a restaurant in her hometown of Newport Beach, CA, offered her a job back in her home region of San Bernadino doing mortgages, she made the leap. The first person she met was a loan officer named John Skaggs. Thirteen weeks later, they got married. They have been married for 37 years and colleagues the whole time. Today, he is Skaggs’ Spanish-speaking loan representative. One of their two sons has been working with them since he was 15 and is now national operations manager for New American Funding’s reverse mortgage division. Skaggs’ drive to become a Certified Reverse Mortgage Professional (CRMP) around 2015 was inspired by her belief in being “a student of the business.” At her urging, three of her team members have also become CRMPs, and she hopes to have an all-CRMP team. “The more you invest yourself in it, the better you are able to establish an articulate vision and serve the needs of any individual,” she says. “I think the CRMP puts me up above and beyond the average loan officer who’s just doing reverse mortgages for no real, passionate reason.” Most consumers don’t yet know what a CRMP is, Skaggs believes, but that’s why she wears her CRMP lapel pin and puts the credential in her email. If a prospective client seems leery, she might bring up CRMP and its meaning: “That I’m held to a higher standard of ethics and a higher standard of information than people who have not invested in themselves.” What is Skaggs’ motivation? Simply doing the job right, educating clients and prospective clients and providing a listening ear. “The motivation, in my opinion, is that I want to treat people the way I want to be treated,” she says. CRMP: Across the Kitchen Table REVERSE MORTGAGE / MAY- JUNE 2022 17
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