Mortgage Blog

Happy Valentines Day. Hope you all have a great time with your lovers and your family.

I am glad that I finished the book Liar's Poker yesterday. And I also completed 40% of the book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy (Books). I like to read a few books at the same time. It is interesting to do it that way.

According to the Author Robert Frank of the book Success and Luck: Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy (Books). A successful person needs luck as long as hard working and talent. There are so many hard working guys, but only lucky ones got successful. As commented by UCSD Professor Lane Kenworthy: In this very valuable and readable book, Robert Frank presents the evidence and tightens the case for an important and vastly underappreciated fact: luck has more influence on personal success than most of us recognize or admit. He also makes the case that luck's role in where we end up in terms of income, education, status, and other outcomes has a big impact on how we perceive government, taxes, and public social spending.

I always think I am a very good lucky person. I got my Master of Computer Science degree while I was on Statistics Ph.D program. And in the Christmas break of 1995, I spent 3 weeks and completed reading the book: Oracle Database, the complete reference. And in Spring of 1996, one company asked an intern with Oracle Skills. And I was the only one had it(There was no Oracle courses in the colleges). So I got the job easily. At the summer of 1996, I got my degree, and the boss at the job left, so the company hired as full time employee, so I got the job easily. And in the fall of 1996, I contacted with a local attorney about my H1B visa, and he said that we can try to apply green card directly. And I got it within one week(By using NIW).

I started working in the bayarea in a few companies as Oracle Database Engineer. In 2002, I met a girl who ate alone at the company kitchen. And I talked to her, and it turned out that she was a loan agent at her side job. She told me how to take courses, how to apply license, and how to work on the loans. Pretty lucky. And then in Jan 2008, I figured out that the interest rate should drop so I quit my job and worked as a full time loan agent. I did pretty well ever since.

During the whole process, I got the help from a mortgage coach, a CO mortgage company contacted with me to ask me join them for the loans, and it turned out that company had a lot of good rates lender, and it was the first time I did the correspondent loans. During the 2008 financial crisis, Citibank cut off the wholesale in most of the California, and I was one of the a few agents who can still sent loans to Citi Mortgage then. 

And very interestingly, I always got advise from someone. Starting this year, the mortgage business started slowing down, and my mentor told me to try my best to provide more "contents" to my clients. Let's see how it works.