You Can’t Cheat An Honest Man, Unless He Bought A Home In America In 2007

This truism, made famous by the great W. C. Fields, has never been truer than it is today. The regulations that are coming down on the sales industry, particularly around mortgage loan officers and stock brokers, are designed to save, “normal folks”,  from dishonest sales goat tactics and methods. These methods utilized by unethical and predatory sales organizations and salespersons are understood to be related to your character and actually your court records and credit reports.

I remember many years back a loan officer asked Dr. Billy what was the best way to figure out which customers had the best credit when you were selling door to door and needed that customer to have a good credit card ready once the sale was closed and ready for payment. Partly as a joke, and partly as a method of selection, Dr. Billy suggested this sales person look for the best kept yards, because the best kept yards probably would be indicative of the credit status of the homeowner. Our limited and unofficial survey, conducted on the just the best kept yards at first, indicated Dr. Billy was right, these folks with super clean yards had great credit.  However, we also uncovered one more glaring consistency.  The folks with the best kept yards were often the craziest, and meanest, and the hardest to close for a sale as well.   After a while I found some of the salespersons hitting the lesser kept yards, finding many of the folks there nicer and easier to close.  That is, if they could close after the credit review, because those with the crappier yards often had crappier credit as well.    It was a case of,  Sales Goat choose your poison.

The current regulators are doing the same thing, judging the book by the condition of the cover.   If you made a mistake and lost your house in foreclosure it is rumored you will not be able to work in the lending industry anymore.  So, if you are a Loan Officer and participated in the home purchase boom, erorred on your home mortgage calculation, and lost your home, you not only lost your home but probably your livelihood as well as a loan officer.   The regulators assumption is that if you can’t keep your finances straight at all times in life, if you got caught up in the economic Katrina,  that you shouldn’t be allowed  in the lending business anymore.  How’s that for fair?   That’s like saying a butcher who doesn’t know how to cook a meal for himself should not be able to butcher meat for customers for a living.  Dumb!  It’s stupid and cruel and no way to judge people out of their livelihood.

Anybody who bought a house in 2006 or 2007 probably got caught up in this mortgage crisis in some way, and may have lost their investment, their home and their life savings in the mix, even if they were in the lending business and were smart as hell.  They easily could have destroyed their credit as well because losing your home does that to you, and maybe even got divorced in the process further flushing themselves right down the financial commode.  The fact that banks are doing credit checks and foreclosure checks on their employees and firing them if they lost their homes or ruined their credit is unAmerican and should be a class action lawsuit.   The banks are the very ones that lent the money out of their behinds, with their eyes closed and hands over their ears, and the banks required an enormous government bailout to stay financially afloat.  Now the banks want to fire little folks, who worked for them, who didn’t get the same favored government bailout treatment for their financial problems that the banks did.  As a matter of fact the little folks got just the opposite treatment with regard to their financial problems, no bailout, just thrown out!   Credit ruined, quality of life ruined, now they want to add, ability to make a living ruined!  The perfect storm for the little guy.

However, these little folks did  pay part of the hefty taxes the government used for the bailout of the banks.  Oh Yes!  The big banks were to big to fail and we little folks were to little to succeed!

Dr. Billy says amnesty for everybody working in the loan and real estate business through 2011. The little folks deserve at least some of the same treatment the banks were lucky enough to get…like how about something unique like, “We understand.  We want to help you.”   For all the  loan officers, loan managers, Realtors, and processors who lost their homes. Ok, we didn’t bail the little guy out like we did the big guys, but at least we should let the little guy keep his job!

Write to Dr. Billy and let me have it if you think I’m wrong.  Bahhhhhh!