John Meussner's Blog

“There are three types of lies -- lies, damn lies, and statistics.”― Benjamin Disraeli  Much of what constitutes "news" in today's world, it seems, is in reality click-bait and ad-dollar attention seeking.  From world news and politics, to the latest sports controversy being discussed ad nauseam ...

Why Are Credit Scores Different? If you’ve shopped around for any kind of loan, one of the things you likely noticed is that the credit score a lender pulls seems to be different, sometimes by quite a wide margin, from what you see when tracking your own credit scores.  What gives?  It comes down...

The Infinite (Mortgage) Game This month's ActiveRain Challenge was to write a book report.  As an English Literature major who spent 4 years of college doing that, I'm a bit rusty, but couldn't pass up the opportunity for "easy" points.  It so happens I was in the middle of reading Simon Sinek's ...

Let A Pro Handle It This is a post about referrals.  I'm licensed in 20 states, and my team has an additional 3 (Idaho, Hawaii, and Washington).  Because of that, we see a lot of referrals from folks that don't cover as wide a range of states.  We get a lot of referrals from other loan officers t...

Should I Cosign A Loan When considering qualifying for a loan, one topic that often comes up is getting a cosigner.  For an applicant, a cosigner can mean qualifying for more money, compensating for difficult credit situations, and strengthening a loan file.  Some perks of having a cosigner inclu...

Just One Year In Our team loan partner, Erica, just received her "1 year anniversary" certificate - one year in the mortgage business, one year on our team, one year of the craziest market we've ever seen.  For those who have worked with our team, you know 2020 was a struggle - my processor was p...

I'm in No Rush "It's Urgent""I need a preapproval letter now""Offers are due!""Please call the listing agent!""Could you help on short notice?" Ever heard these phrases?  If you work in lending or real estate, odds are they're a pretty regular part of your every day conversations.  And to be clea...

Day One Certainty (And Why You Should Care) A lot of people for a lot of years have made a lot of money in the mortgage and real estate industries without relying too much on technology.  "All I need are my relationships!" is a common refrain.  "This is a people business!" is another.  And while ...

The JM Loans team is (2x) licensed in AZ Arizona!  We finally made it.  On the heels of our recent Utah licensing, I applied to get licensed in AZ - we've had a team member licensed there, but I can't officially market our licensing without my own license, so here we are (rules are rules, even wh...

We're licensed for Mortgages in Utah I'm happy to write that as of Monday this week, I'm licensed to do mortgage originations in the state of Utah.  I've put Utah off for some time because the licensing requirements are a little more tedious than most states due to my being the only licensed LO i...