30 days to change someone’s life

I still remember a day back in 2003 when I was working at Washington Mutual.  I was already doing loans, but would still help out with operations from time-to-time when the office got particularly busy.

One of the operation supervisors, who was elderly and had a bad back, asked me to help her carry some bags from the vault room, across the public lobby of the bank, over to the ATM room.

My inner Boyscout beamed as a I helped Gloria carry a few heavy bags across the bank and went about my day.

When I realized about 10 minutes later what had just happened, I was kind of besides myself.  What I had just done is carried 150 pounds of $20 bills, roughly $750,000, across a public space and hadn’t even thought twice about it.  Gloria was on her way to refill three ATMs that were running low.  We had just gotten a delivery by three armed guards and they placed the ATM money in the wrong vault room.  Gloria, not able to lift the heavy bags of money, had asked me to carry them for her.

At that point in my career, after having already worked with large amounts of money for three years, the idea of carrying three quarters of a million dollar across a public space didn’t even seem weird.  I didn’t give it a second thought.

It wasn’t until I returned to my desk that I realized I had just held in my hands enough money to payoff my house, my car, my mom’s house, and still have money left over for my sister’s college education.

I write this story as a reminder to myself, other lenders, and real-estate professionals about the levity of what we do for a living.  Working in the real-estate industry we handle the biggest financial transaction that 99% of our clients will ever be involved in over the course of their life.  Sometimes I think it’s easy to lose sight of that fact.

Like me carrying two giant bags of money across the bank… it is easy for those of us in the business to forget about the fact that every deal we work on is the most important deal in the world to someone.  In essence, we hold the keys to the gold that has the power to transform lifes.

By assisting our clients in realizing the dream of home-ownership, we help to create communities, build wealth, and assist in one of the most stressful deals our clients will ever be party to.  If you work in the business of helping clients buy a home… take a step back once in an while and reflect on the responsibility we take-on and how much we affect the long term plans our clients.  Don’t be like I was when I non-challantly carried that bag of money around like it didn’t really mean much.  In the course of a normal escrow, we have 30 days to change a life.  I take that very seriously… I hope you do too.