5 Key Lessons from a 33-Year Mortgage Veteran You Need to Know

Dylan Silver (00:00.694)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Dylan Silver. And today on the show, I have Tina Lombard out of Denver, Colorado, mortgage loan officer for over 33 years. Tina, welcome to the show.

Tina Lombard (00:03.323)
filling silver.

Tina Lombard (00:13.499)
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Dylan Silver (00:16.064)
I like to start off at the top by asking folks how did they get into the real estate entrepreneurial space on the loan officer side? How did you get into that space?

Tina Lombard (00:25.361)
Well, gosh, when I graduated I wanted to be a business mogul, but I actually started off as a stockbroker, my first job out of college. I did that for a while, then I got into banking when I got sick of stockbroking, and it just seemed like a lot of the mortgage loan officers and the processors were making way more money than me, even though I had several degrees and a whole bunch of certifications. Processors were making more than me. So at that time I did seek out a mortgage company, or they sought me out, and I jumped into it and I never looked back. I so much enjoyed it. It seems to pay all the bills and then some.

But it’s a, just, I stuck to it. And I’ve just been doing it all these years. I love it.

Dylan Silver (01:01.036)
And so I’ve actually had quite a few people who have made this exact move from stockbroker to mortgage broker, from stockbroker to real estate agent and then real estate broker, or in stockbroker to investor, so on and so forth. Were you based out of New York when you were a stockbroker?

Tina Lombard (01:15.907)
No, I was based out of Seattle. Yeah. Yeah, there is a NASDAQ in Seattle that we did a lot of our trading on.

Dylan Silver (01:18.733)
Seattle.

Dylan Silver (01:23.17)
And so when you left school, stockbroker, I’ve spoken with a number of people who thought they were gonna go in and they were gonna do analysis and be able to tell people, you should look into this stock. But a lot of people, I’ve gotten the feedback where was basically they were calling people on lists and more or less saying, get this, but they weren’t doing the analysis portion. And so they didn’t love that. What was your experience like as a stockbroker?

Tina Lombard (01:47.154)
Well, the stock market was a gamble. me tell you, is one of the riskiest, actually one of the riskiest jobs ever. Both stressful, but yeah, you would buy leads. You would buy, this is like 1989, 1990. We were buying leads for $5 a name. And right now that’s still expensive, but you’d go down the list and you’d say, Hey, you know, my name is so-and-so and would you like to make some money if I can show you how? That’s, that was our only line. And people, know, we had a gambler’s list. We had people who gambled or they actually did buy stocks and bonds and they’d say, um, yeah. And I said, okay, I’ll save some information. So we would, you know,

snail mail, we would send them information and they would open it up and we’d call them up and say, you know, we’ve got a company, DDI, their stock is opening up at so and so, with $50,000 we can get you how many stocks. And people would buy, just like that. And it was really frightening. I was the only female in a branch with 25 men, then I was the only black person in a branch with 25, an Asian person, whatever. And was very, very bad. In those days, there was no sexual harassment laws, there was no discrimination laws, there was nothing. So was really, really, really frightful.

I was making a lot of money. mean, we closed 10,000. I’d close $10,000 a day, $5,000 a day. If I closed $2,500 a day, you know, that was just an average day, what have you. So we were making a lot of money, but you know, we watched the stocks go up, and we watched the stocks go down. We were dealing with dollar stocks and penny stocks. And you know, it was very, very stressful. And when my friends and family started trying to buy from me, I was like, oh, I’m out. I’m out. I’m not handling any stress of, you know, giving people stock and then it goes down and…

You know, so for me it was extremely stressful. I mean, I could either be dancing on tables or selling stocks. For me, it was the same ethical thing. And so I said, I can’t, you know, I don’t want to dance on tables. I don’t want to sell stocks. If God struck me with lightning, I would go straight to hell. So I, you know, I had to come to Jesus moment and I said, hey, I need to go into something where I feel good about my soul. And so I went into banking and you know, I got paid pennies to what I was making as a stockbroker.

Dylan Silver (03:34.412)
Yeah.

Tina Lombard (03:40.933)
But I was able to get up in the morning and not be stressed out. know, nobody, my friends, none of my friends or family were mad at me because I sold them something crazy. So I just started my career doing banking that way. But Stockbroking was just, just like the movie Wolf of Wall Street, Wolf of Wall Street in the 80s. That wasn’t even a joke. I mean, I watched it and I cried. It wasn’t even, I mean, it seems funny on the big screen, but it was, it was that bad. It was, I can’t tell you the war stories I had, but it was, it was just like that. It was a documentary. That wasn’t a movie.

Dylan Silver (03:55.564)
Yeah, love that movie. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (04:10.67)
I 100 % believe it. Do you know what the status of that industry is like today? I can’t imagine that there’s people cold calling people like they were back then. So what’s the industry like today?

Tina Lombard (04:10.865)
Yeah.

Tina Lombard (04:23.597)
Ah, well the industry, you could call, there’s a time where people could call like Charles Schwab, you know, or Fidelity, and they can buy their own stocks and bonds and do their own self-management. But you know, now you’ve got wealth management people who actually could advise on 401Ks and products in the market. You know, a lot of people are doing the Bitcoin. They’re doing the Red Robins, you know, they’re going out there doing their own. So we have information in the palm of our hand with our cell phones that only stockbrokers had access to back then.

Dylan Silver (04:43.342)
Yeah.

Tina Lombard (04:51.633)
So when I was that, I would watch the ticker all day long. We would have stocks and bonds. We’d do all the analyzing. We wouldn’t sell a stock unless we knew the profits, the REI, just everything, return on equity, everything, balance sheets, the background of the CEOs. And now you can get that at the palm of your hand. And you can do your own self-infliction if you want on your phone. And there’s some people that are very successful at it, but know, NFTs and Bitcoin and Ethereum, whatever it’s called.

all these things you can actually watch second by second on your own. So does it take out the need for a stockbroker? In some cases, yes. But if you do not know the market, if you are not sitting on, if you’re not walking around, know, a New York Stock Exchange on the floor, if you’re not privy to that, you should talk to a stockbroker because they are very, very active. You cannot replace a stockbroker’s experience in their training with an app.

So I know when I took the stockbroker test, had to get a series 7, the series 6, 42, 43, Bruce Guy laws. I had so many different certificates I had to get. And when I took the stockbroker test, it was a series 7. You can only take that test three times in your life. You can only take it three times in your life. If you don’t pass the third time, you’re just out of luck. You’re never going to be a stockbroker. So I failed it the first time. I failed it the second time. The third time around, I passed it. And the law changed when I passed that test and said, if you don’t pass it three times, you’re out.

You’re just too stupid to sell stocks. And so, you know, and I’ve got, I’ve got, you know, a business degree. mean, I’ve, very, very, very, very studious and very, very smart, but I could not pass that silly test. And, I did. And so that is something that, that education, stocks and bonds options, there’s things that a common person would never know unless they take these classes. So if you’re dealing with big money and it’s, something that’s very risky, it’s something very important to you. Do not perform open heart surgery on yourself. You know, go ahead and talk to a stockbroker.

Dylan Silver (06:24.578)
Yeah.

Tina Lombard (06:45.295)
because they really do know what’s going on. They can’t be replaced.

Dylan Silver (06:47.374)
have a buddy who tells me that he used to work for Edward Jones. told me that managed money is better than unmanaged money or doing it yourself. And so I thought about that.

Tina Lombard (06:55.373)
It’s true. Yeah, I mean, there’s yeah, there’s Well, there’s both managers and, know, you can take your test to sell annuities. I think you have to take a test to sell annuities, what have you. It’s an insurance test. It’s not a financial. It’s not a financial test. If you get a series seven, that’s a financial what have you. But some of these houses like the Edward Jones and World Financial and stuff, they’re very good for people who want to self-direct their IRA. I mean, that’s that’s great. But if you want to play the stock market, playing the stock market is different.

than wealth management or Everett Jones or World Financial, they’re actually taking care of your assets and they’re managing your assets because you don’t. I know my girlfriend last year, she said, oh my gosh, Tina, you got all this stuff around, what are you doing with it? And so she did put a structure to my 401k and my different things. That’s structured as management. But you want to play the open market. You want to watch, you want to buy, you know, want to invest in, you know, futures or you want to invest in different things, different stocks, international markets. This is not where you go to one of these management. It’s not.

You know, so if you are investing in, know, maybe some people don’t even qualify to invest. I know when I was back in the day, you had to have a $500,000 net worth, and that was 1990.

Dylan Silver (08:01.451)
my gosh. That’s like over a million dollars today easily.

Tina Lombard (08:05.669)
Yeah, yeah, so I mean, can go, you know, I get a call and go to the store and go buy some oregano oil and I can, you know, take it myself, okay? Or I can go to the doctor and he can say, hey, Tina, this is what’s going on with you and this is prescription because you don’t have a cold, got something else. So if you want to go and get some oregano oil, you know, for your finances, go to the store and get it, you know, go to what have you. But if you really have something that’s complicated and detailed, you really need to talk to a licensed professional.

You cannot self-inflict, you cannot self-manage your stuff without any knowledge. Even the people that get average hours, they have to go through many financial classes and many financial tests. They have to pass something that’s state-structured. And the same thing with loan officers. We have to go through crazy tests. We have some crazy NMLS tests that we have to take. I know when the banking, yeah.

Dylan Silver (08:46.722)
Yeah, when I was going to take my real estate license in Texas, right, so I got it done in as short a time as possible. I got licensed about three weeks ago in Dallas. And the school that I went to, great school, Lots of curious students, right? But what really it boiled down to was how good of a test taker are you? You could get all the knowledge, but if you aren’t great at taking tests, you could not potentially do well. So.

I went in and I thought, wow, I really got to study hard. I studied hard and I left the exam. I knew I failed. I knew I failed. was like, that was one of the hardest tests I feel like I’ve ever taken. As soon as I hit like submit on that, I was like, I gained so much respect for real estate agents in the state of Texas. Because previously I would see some of these people and I would be like, what are they really? Now I’m like, okay, regardless of what I previously thought about them, they passed that test good on them. So I left that exam, Tina.

Tina Lombard (09:21.073)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tina Lombard (09:30.661)
Yeah, yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:43.744)
And I knew I failed. The woman hands me my paper. It says, passed. I look up at her. I look down at that thing. I’m like, I’m leaving. I’m taking this and I’m going home.

Tina Lombard (09:50.094)
That’s great. Well, you know, it’s crazy because that real estate test, know sometimes it’s mental, you know, people say, it’s going to be so hard and they don’t pass it. And some people say, hey, I’m going to get it. And Tuesday, I’m going to start showing houses as those people get it, you know, but it’s something, you know, even with mortgage license people and stockbroker, you know, and real estate, what they should have on the test is, is ethical or moral testing. I mean, a lot of people get their test and they were so immoral. They are just

Dylan Silver (10:14.06)
Yeah.

Tina Lombard (10:17.339)
They’re doing all types of crazy stuff. They’re shuffling, they’re hustling, a lot of laws are broken, a lot of clients get hurt, but that tells you, that’s nothing to be fiddled with. I’m glad that you passed the first time around. Congrats.

Dylan Silver (10:30.014)
I mean, let me tell you what. So I have a wholesale background, right? And so with wholesaling, there’s so much maybe unscrupulous, but you also have a lot of people who, like me, want to understand it from the real estate agent side of things. So I go into this class, Tina, and they’re talking about wholesalers not in a favorable light, like borderline, borderline criminals, I want to say. And here I am in the class, and they’re talking.

Tina Lombard (10:55.427)
Hmm, hmm, hmm, yeah.

Dylan Silver (10:58.584)
They’re talking about, and they’re like, do we have any wholesalers in the class? So I raise my hand and this woman who’s studying to get her broker’s license, I didn’t know this was gonna happen. So I was just happy to be there. This woman says, you’re a wholesaler? What are you doing here? And I’m looking at her and I’m all of sudden realizing like, my gosh, maybe I wasn’t supposed to say yes to that question. I kind of laughed it off and that was kind of my, again, realization that

There’s kind of this conflict between wholesalers and real estate agents. But in fairness to both sides, real estate agents are held to a very high ethical standard, definitely in Texas specifically under the Deceptive Trade Practices Act. wholesalers as well are not held to that standard. So what ends up happening is you have wholesalers coming to real estate agents saying, I’m going to buy this property. know, when in actuality they have no intent to buy the property.

Tina Lombard (11:39.985)
correct.

Dylan Silver (11:57.058)
They wrote an offer so that they can assign it. And so that’s where it becomes tricky because real estate agents cannot do that. You can’t say you’re going to buy it if you intend to assign it, whereas wholesalers can. And so a lot of realtors think that, you know, who are these people? Who are these people? But there’s a lot of them. And it’s only going to get, I think, more and more and more as more people get exposed to it. But I digress here, Tina, back to mortgage lending. So.

Tina Lombard (11:59.398)
Yes, yes, yes.

Dylan Silver (12:23.682)
When you got out, you’re in banking from the stockbroker world, you know, talking about like the Sodom and Gomorrah of the stockbroker world into banking, totally different lifestyle. And not as fiscally rewarding, but definitely lifestyle and wellbeing, you’re feeling much better in that lifestyle. So then eventually you make your way over to getting your license.

Describe that process, what that first year was like when you’re going from traditional banking into the mortgage world.

Tina Lombard (12:57.499)
Well, know, it’s something because a lot of times, when I was in it, baking was ran by women and the men actually had all the titles. So I was the number one loan officer in five states of US Bank. That was the entirety of US Bank at that time. And I wasn’t making any money. So when somebody came in and said, we’re looking for a marketing rep. And I was sitting in the second largest branch of US Bank.

Dylan Silver (13:06.478)
Hmm.

Tina Lombard (13:25.105)
in the state of Washington, I the sales manager. had like five salespeople underneath me. And I would just give this lady my declined home equity loans, what have you. And they would take the loan and they would do it in their private market. And so they asked me, and at that time I had two kids and I was like getting to the branch at seven o’clock in the morning and doing the vault and then leaving at seven o’clock at night and undoing the vault and what have you. And so when they said, hey, we have this job position, this is what it pays. My first week I was,

So stress relieved. And instead of working from seven in the morning to seven o’clock at night, I was working from nine o’clock to maybe four. And I was driving around all day long. And I made more money in the first month than I did in three months at working at the bank. You know, I was like, take my title, take my whatever, give me money.

Dylan Silver (14:01.646)
Hmm.

Dylan Silver (14:08.376)
So.

Were you were you at that point involved in mortgages and prospecting and that field or was it marketing at this point?

Tina Lombard (14:18.777)
It was marketing. actually would go to the banks and I would ask them. I gained relationships with the banks. So when they had declined loans they couldn’t do, they would refer those people over to us. And so I called on 300 banks. I would go to like Seattle and I would take like the downtown district and I would go to Chase banks, Washington Mutuals, on the Bank of America, whatever. And I would actually form relationships with people there and ask them to give me their declines. And so I’d go from there. I would go to Chehalis. I would go to Anacortes.

Dylan Silver (14:33.645)
Hmm.

Tina Lombard (14:48.143)
I go to Burlington, I would go to Mount Vernon, Everett, I would go everywhere and I talk to bakers. And so I actually would solicit for the loan, I’d solicit the loan, we’d get the loans and I would refer it over to a loan officer within our system. But I got commissioned on getting the loans and giving it to our loan officers. And you know, I wanna say,

Dylan Silver (15:02.83)
Let’s do a deep dive into that here. you basically are creating your own funnel of other banks, clients, customers, who they could not get approved on loan. So you saw gold, where others didn’t see an opportunity. Were these banks shocked that you were coming to them, willing to…

Tina Lombard (15:14.993)
Mm-hmm. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Tina Lombard (15:21.829)
Mm-hmm.

no, no, I had worked, I mean, one point in time I had worked for Security Pacific Bank, Seaforth Bank, Bank of, let me see what is it, Key Bank, Puget Sound Bank, all sitting from the same chair. The banks were like moving around like crazy. They were trying, they were all consolidating. I knew people in the bank all over the place. I knew regional managers all over the place. I knew bankers all over the place and people would move and change. So these were all my friends and banks didn’t care. You know, they had Mr. Smith over here crying because he couldn’t get a loan. You know, his wife just had a baby and they don’t know, we don’t know what to do with it.

So give it to us and we would do the loan. were actually heroes. know, banks actually cannot do all the loans that are out there. So the people who’ve got their high risk, bad credit, know, low down payment or whatever, we would take those loans and turn them into gold. We turn them into loans. And so we saved so many people. so the bank, you know, they saved Mr. Smith, got him a house. And now their breaking relationship actually was strengthened because we weren’t a bank. We weren’t stealing the client. We were just setting them up for a mortgage and then they would retain the relationship with the bank. So in other words, we were an extension of the bank and

It was always open arms. Always open arms.

Dylan Silver (16:26.734)
Okay, so in my head, Tina, I’m picturing you guys are really facilitating the dreams of these clients who are getting turned down elsewhere. in a way, you’re really helping people, but also it’s business for you. So it’s a win-win. You have all these connections with banks all over the country. And then 2008, 2009 happens. So what happened and how did that affect, you you guys were the main industry affected. How did this change things?

Tina Lombard (16:48.689)
Mm-hmm.

Tina Lombard (16:53.841)
Oh yeah, oh yeah. We would sit there and watch the mortgage implosion that happened. Like every day we’d watch all the banks close. So a lot of lenders, I want to say 85 % of all the lenders left the industry. And I actually sat at it for.

Dylan Silver (17:07.192)
Did your bank get smaller as well or no?

Tina Lombard (17:10.609)
No, no. I worked for a small bank called Westside Community Bank. And I was the only Aboriginal officer there. And I sat in a John L. Scott real estate office in Seattle. was one of the biggest franchises in Washington state. And, I mean, Tacoma, Washington, I’m sorry. The biggest in Washington state. And I sat right for the military base. So I didn’t have to do the zero down, 125 % loan to values, two-year fixed rate, three-year prepay. I didn’t have to do those loans. I did VA and FHA. I made more money.

2008, 2009, 2010 that I had in 20 years. Everybody came to me.

Everybody came to me. Yeah, so that’s how you change the market. Everybody who walked into our office had fatigues on. They were military. So I was cranking out VA loans. People didn’t have any money to put down. I’d get them a 3.5 % City of Lakewood or Tacoma, Washington State grant. I’d give them an FHA loan. So when everybody was closing down and there were no options, I was the only ice cream shop on the beach when all the other ice cream shops closed down. I was the only ice cream shop. And so I did a lot of loans. So it’s just how you look at it and how you sell.

Dylan Silver (17:47.649)
Unbelievable.

Dylan Silver (18:19.0)
This is a specific question, I guess, for people dealing with military. I’m imagining there’s still, you still have to have income requirements, right, for these VA loans, right? So if you’re lower enlisted, I’m imagining a lot of these people, based on needing three times the mortgage payment and so on and so forth, weren’t always qualifying. What was the, they were qualifying.

Tina Lombard (18:25.649)
Right.

Tina Lombard (18:36.779)
no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. you kidding me? people in the military have BAH. They get housing allowance. So when they get base pay of like $5,000 a month, they get housing allowance of maybe $3,000 a month. So the military pays if you’re active military. So if you’re an E1 or an E2 or E3, maybe even a warrant officer, and you’re pulling your Washington state at that time, they were pulling in, whether depending if they had dependents or not, they were pulling in their rank and how many years they’re in the service.

Dylan Silver (18:45.389)
Okay.

Dylan Silver (18:53.678)
Mmm.

Tina Lombard (19:04.305)
They were pulling $18 to $2100 a month in housing. That’s on top of their pay. And then there’s basic sustenance. The sustenance are anywhere from, at that point, was like $279 to whatever. Now it’s more like $400 or $500 a month. So the military, you know, I sat in front of like McCord Air Force Base and Fort Lewis McCord was, Fort Lewis was also there too. So they made their base pay of whatever it was. Let’s say it was $2800 a month as an E1. Then they got paid $2000 for housing. Then they got paid another $300. I never even touched their income.

So, and I’m so glad you brought that up because a lot of letters don’t know this and they always tell VA, you don’t make enough money. They don’t look at the, there’s COLA, there’s, know, cost of living where you’re living and there’s all different types of bonus pay if you’re married. And so, a lot of people didn’t even know that. So I’m sitting there and people, and so when you get a VA loan, don’t look, they don’t get a pay stub. They get a leaves and earnings statement. And it says right there, it says basic pay, then it says housing allowance, then it has cessness allowance.

Dylan Silver (19:38.797)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (19:49.976)
Yeah, I didn’t know it.

Tina Lombard (20:03.151)
And a regular person that comes in, just has pay. So the government pays for BAH, depending on where you’re at, the county, the state, the rate, all that kind of stuff. So VA was like, VA is the number one loan out there.

Dylan Silver (20:17.294)
So for housing allowance, for housing allowance, a lot of, I’m imagining lower enlisted or really anybody coming in military may not know that they can qualify for a home right out of the gate. They do know. I know.

Tina Lombard (20:27.749)
they know. no, they know. They know. They get taught that. But you have ignorant lenders. When I came here to Colorado, a lot of ignorant lenders would not do VA loan, which is illegal and discriminatory. But E1, E2, E2, E3 was my favorite because they qualified. And they will come in there and say, hey, I need my certificate of eligibility. They are trained. And you’ll get a lender that says, I don’t even know what that is. If you don’t have it, when you get it, come back. I pull it up. We go straight to the VA. And we can go to the VA portal. We can pull it up.

Dylan Silver (20:39.491)
Hmm.

Tina Lombard (20:57.557)
VA, they’re taught they have a certificate of eligibility. It’s a benefit to them. It’s not, hey, yeah, we’re going to give you a bonus. It is a benefit when you’re fighting for our country. It is a benefit. So you go into the right lender, I get your certificate of eligibility. I find out this and that, how much you qualify for. I tag in your disability. I do everything. But the VAT, especially E1, E2, you have to have six months of military service, and that counts for basic, what is it called again? Bootcamp. So a VAT, I mean,

Whereas a lot of letters out there will stop at 20 45 percent debt to income or maybe 50 VA I just closed alone last month the debt to income ratio was 89 percent

Okay, so in other words, their income to their debt. You know, over half of your debt, a lot of lenders, only half the debt. You can only have half the debt to your income. So I did a VA loan up to here.

Dylan Silver (21:53.954)
So for people who are military, 18 years old, just getting out of high school, and they want to buy a house, right? This is a win-win for them because they’re automatically going to qualify as long as they get to do six months.

Tina Lombard (22:04.261)
If they have six months worth of training, yeah, have six months, absolutely.

Dylan Silver (22:08.066)
And then if they get deployed, they still get that housing allowance, I’m assuming.

Tina Lombard (22:11.825)
Oh, absolutely. And a lot of times, know, military, they get married. lot of military get married and you can have a trailing spouse or a spouse. Let’s say your spouse lives there in Washington state or in Dallas. Let’s say you’ve got somebody, a trailing spouse, she can get the loan. He’s off to war, he’s in the Gulf or he’s in the Kuwait or something like that. And he or she, and then they can buy the house in Dallas and spouse can live there with the kids. Or they just, they, you know, they’re stationed in Fort Braggs or something like that.

Dylan Silver (22:34.754)
Wow.

Tina Lombard (22:38.129)
and they want to buy a house, South Carolina or North Carolina, they want to buy a house there, they’re off to war, they can still buy the house. So many people discriminate against military, I tell you what. People join the military just to get a house. In two years you can get a house where somebody else waits until he’s 27 years old and they graduate from college. do not discriminate against military. Do not, like 19 year old that came out of boot camp, that’s an E1 or E2, for a year he can buy a house. And usually the BAH is…

Dylan Silver (22:55.384)
Yeah, that’s right.

Tina Lombard (23:06.993)
is it goes along with the cost of living in that area. So San Diego’s BAH may be different than Dallas, may be different than Fort Bragg’s or to come and watch Banger Naval Base. it depends. So usually the BAH replicates what the housing is for that area. So you can buy a house. So when you’re in the military, oh my God, I’d rather go the military at 19 years old and get a house than wait till I graduate from college four years from now with my business degree. Because that military person already has $50,000 worth of equity.

Dylan Silver (23:31.384)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (23:34.776)
No debt. Yeah. I’m with ya.

Tina Lombard (23:35.611)
So that, tell you what, military, if you’re letting out doing VA loans, you’ve got a problem. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (23:42.478)
So you carved out this niche, military VA, I can sense the passion. And so from there, you didn’t feel the dip and the burn that a lot of people felt with 08, 09. The economy starts recovering. You’re doing the VA loans. How does this scale from there? Catch us up to today chronologically.

Tina Lombard (24:03.739)
Well, know, business is as normal. A lot of people started, a lot of letters started offering different programs that combated the 9QM. So 9QM was the market that pulled us all down because people were doing optional arms, this goofy, predatory, letting stuff. Now 9QM has come back with a fury. 9QM is extremely, well, there’s a lot of people who are sole proprietors out there, so you can do bank statement loans. We’ve got some loans that are called community loans that don’t ask for income or assets, like we did back in 2007.

So there’s a lot of loans out there that weren’t here back then. COVID actually is very interesting too. Because of COVID, the way we do loans are different. I can do loans anywhere from my cell phone, I can originate a loan. there are loans where, like the community loans, there’s community lending loans where there’s no income, there’s no employment. You just have to put 20 or 25 % down depending on your credit score. Those programs did not exist before COVID.

We’ve got programs right now, they’re called DSCR loans, debt service cash ratio, where there’s no income, there’s no employment, there’s no tax returns, we don’t care. We look at your credit score, we look at the monthly payment, and we look at what you’re getting for rent. And as long as the rent is near the mortgage monthly payment, you get the loan. So a lot of investors out there, they’re not showing any tax returns or income. We just put non-applicable on the employment information. They have 20 % to put down, they get that rental property. That loan blossomed out of COVID.

because a lot of these high interest rates, people are not buying houses. So lenders are sitting there with staff, buildings that they’ve leased out, they’ve got expenses and they’re like, what can we do? So one of these loans are the DSCR loans that bred out of that. There’s also the IT loans, it’s the Individual Tax Identification Number. For people who come here that do not have social security numbers, however, they do have an IRS number. Those loans are the number one performing loans in the United States. Those loans do not default.

And those clients put 20 % down and they do not default. That program was not prolific before COVID and back in 2008, they didn’t have that program. They had it, but it was far fewer in between. Now, a lot of the prudent smart lenders do offer ITIN loans. So the year 2025 is a very exciting year for me because I have been seeing loans since 1990 and there’s been no other time in history that you can do the crazy things we’re doing now legitimately.

Tina Lombard (26:26.839)
Government

Dylan Silver (26:30.38)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (26:42.732)
You

Dylan Silver (26:49.847)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (26:55.992)
Best time to buy a home was five years ago. Next best time is right now.

Tina Lombard (26:56.078)
So.

is right now and I tell people, know, this is why people go to real estate. know how you got real estate, but people are like, my gosh, you can make money in real estate and you get excited. A lot of my realtor friends, they get excited about real estate and they’re trying to pass that information on to their clients. It’s like, listen, you can buy this house and get equity and your family’s happy and your kids are educated. I all this benefits, your tax write-offs. So for me, the most exciting time in history right now in my years of doing business is today. If you don’t get loans because of…

Dylan Silver (27:30.712)
You gotta find a good, you gotta find the Tina Lombard near you. I think that I’m in the business and I think that there’s a lot of people who are not well-versed. I mean, in so many of the different, we really spent a lot of time talking about VA, but you mentioned DSCR, you mentioned the I-10, so many different loan types that.

Tina Lombard (27:30.777)
I don’t know.

Yes.

Dylan Silver (27:53.558)
a lot of people probably are unaware of and they may come in with this preconception as I have and I’m in the space of it’s so hard to qualify but it really does change the game if you are able to find a competent loan officer.

Tina Lombard (28:07.753)
it’s the difference between life and death basically. I mean, it’s like, you you’ve got people my age and we know how to save and buy a house, get the tax right off. Then you have the younger ones that have access to this. And they think this is all in all. But you know, there’s things like down payment assistance programs in Dallas. I’ve got several down payment assistance programs in Dallas from Dallas Metro down payment assistance program. You know, if you don’t have a down payment, you know, we can help you get one.

When it comes to income, we can tell you what you need. In a lot of places, your income actually can buy housing in your space. So let’s say that you’re an engineer or something like that, and you’re getting paid $120,000 a year, for example. Let’s say you can pay $85,000 a year. There is a house in your community, because the wages in that community support the community. So if you have income, you need to find out how much you qualify for and buy that house. Don’t let down payment get in your way. And let’s say some people had hard times, and they’ve got bad credit. Their credit just is really bad.

We can help you with credit repair. Back in the day, I couldn’t help anybody. I’m like, peace out, I can’t. Someone’s got to call sign. But now, you know, and I tell people, don’t get on the credit cameras, don’t get on the free creditreport.coms. That will cost you 100 points up front the moment you click on credit camera submit. So don’t do that. But there’s a lot of things that we can do now that loan officers couldn’t do before. So if you’re working, you’ve got to pulse. Buy a house.

Dylan Silver (29:31.508)
Amen, Tina, Tina, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to get a hold of you?

Tina Lombard (29:36.337)
Well they can give me a call my number is 253-332-5986 and that’s at Tixanta Bank and once again 253-332-5986 and I have to my NMLS number which is 147594. I lend in all 50 states so in Dallas, in South Carolina, Miami, New York, Washington state I do a lot of loans, California so anywhere you live in United States I’ll be able to take care of you.

Dylan Silver (30:04.472)
Christina, thank you so much for coming on the show, for educating our audience, multiple different loan types. gave us tremendous value. Thanks for coming on the show.

Tina Lombard (30:11.078)
Thank you for having me.