Podcast Interview—Financial Dads
Episode: Mortgage Tips for the Self-Employed
June 6, 2022
Episode summary:
During our interview with Alejandro Szita we discuss things you can do to obtain a mortgage while being self employed. Most of the mortgage environment has been designed for those who are employees and not self employed. We get into some great nuances and the different mindset of the self employed.
Podcast Transcription:
Intro: The Financial Dads are not providing any financial, economic, legal, accounting, tax, or other advice in or by virtue of this podcast. Hello, welcome to the Financial Dads podcast with Paul Fagan and Paul Becker. This podcast is for all the moms and dads out there who struggle with life's topics, especially related to family and finances. Now, here's my dad, Paul Fagan.
Paul Fagan: Hello everybody. This is Paul Becker. Paul Fagan got a little tied up with work today, so we're going to keep going with the show here. And today we have our guest, Alejandro Szita. So Alejandro, he's a mortgage broker and owner of Prosperity Lending. Prosperity Lending is a boutique mortgage brokerage for self-employed borrowers. He specializes in helping this community and agents understand the market and access the deals they may not know. So we're going to skip the news in the banter because I'm not going to talk to myself, although I do do that frequently. So welcome to the show, Alejandro.
Alejandro Szita: Thank you very much, Paul. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Paul Fagan: We're excited about this. You know, I've always really mostly been employed at a larger organization, and so getting a mortgage as a self-employed is a little different to me. I, I know a little bit about it, but not much. So I'm, I'm interested in this, but let's get started. Can you tell us a little bit about your journey and how you ended up doing this sort of work?
Alejandro Szita: Well, I, I ended up doing it. I started at the age of seven actually, and I had a very rough time. My brother used to ask me for money. I would lend it to him. I would make this huge legal sized contracts that I would type on my grandmother's typewriter. And then my brother, when he couldn't pay, he would bring them to my mom. And my mom would say, how can you do, how can you do this to your brother? This is not fair. And after like seven or eight times of that, I decided that lending was not something that people really liked. That's how I started. And then much, much, much, much later in life in 2005, I used to do infomercials, but in 2005 I stumbled on the world of real estate through an infomercial client.
So then, then I started in lending. You know, and sometimes in real estate you have this saying that your first offer is your best offer, meaning you are selling a house, you want to, you have a certain target price, then an offer comes in that is nearly that or nearly identical to that. And then most people have the reaction of, well, it's the first offer, it's the first day on the market, not now, you know, but before and traditionally, sellers will not take the first offer and that was their best offer. So with me, my first offer was the lending. Then later on in life in 2005 was the lending again. But to make long story short, I have worked in every single aspect of real estate. I have been a lender, I have been a listing agent, a luxury listing agent. I've worked in, in commercial real estate, in commercial lending, in raising money for a hedge fund for real estate. And then after doing all of that, I decided to come to my roots, which is just mortgage lending.
Paul Fagan: Oh wow. That's pretty interesting, especially the contract with your brother. I wish I had known that when I was younger, because I probably would've done something similar. Not that they borrowed money from me, but always little banter back and forth with him, I guess. So I think I should leave it at that in case he's listening.
Alejandro Szita: Yes.
Paul Fagan: So, you know, specializing in individuals who are self-employed, how is that different than someone working for an organization, larger organization side?
Alejandro Szita: Well, if you are working for an organization and you're getting paid through a W2, then the system and the lending, a financial world is made for you. Everything, the programs, the algorithms, loan officers, the training, everything is made for you. However, if you are not, if you are a self-employed person or an entrepreneur, then the business world is not made for you. I mean, the lending world is not made for you. Sure, there are programs. Sure, there are lenders and there are ways of doing it. But since W2 employees represent over 95% of applicants, there is no interest to develop technology strategies or services for the other 5%. Now in America, in where we are, hundreds of millions of people, that 5% is a lot of people. It's many millions of people. But the industry at large is automated. You know, in the old days you will go to your bank, to your local bank that you, sometimes you could walk into, the account executive would know you, they would know your birthday, they would know how you make your money. So if you needed any money, you went there and you said, hey, you know, I'm going to buy a house. But he already knows how much you make. He can look at your checking account with his fingertips. And he can immediately, after you were answering a few questions, make a decision. That was the traditional way that, that's the system that I grew up. Even though I come from Chile, that is the system. I went to my bank, I have my local bank, I have my account executive, and he knows me. I know a lot of people would like that service, but that service in America, unless you have 10 million or more, or you are a very high network individual, most people don't get that service at all.
And this is the problem. The problem is that to make it cheaper and to automate it, that service got rid of for most of us. And that's why it became complicated. If you don't fit the system, then you need to have something special. If you need to have something special, somebody needs to invest more time on you. And that is the part where it becomes tricky. Some mortgage brokers are willing to put the time, and many, in my opinion, and that's why I'm doing this, would not do it. And because I consider, consider myself one of those people, you know, I always have problems obtaining a mortgage credit card or whatever because I am not a W2 employee. It came sort of naturally to me to do this.
Paul Fagan: So it's not made for that because it's, everything's made for the other. Have you seen the environment change? You know, when I mean, change more people in that situation? It seems like with the gig economy kind of growing and more people doing that and, and let alone people moving all over the country and starting new careers and doing things. Have you on from your perspective, has it changed much in the last couple years?
Alejandro Szita: You know, you are right that it should have changed. In my opinion it hasn't. And I will tell you why. It's because the training that you get is transactional. You know, I go to a lot of online seminars. Actually yesterday I was going to an online seminar by one of the banks that we use. And fortunately the perception, the training, the way the industry is set up, it's not made for that. The industry is set up to aggressively sell you something and to immediately put you in a box and to immediately start with a loan application. It's almost unheard of the loan officer that sits for a month or two, like sometimes we do to prepare the person to be able to get the mortgage, or let's say that you qualify to get the mortgage, very few officers will stop and say, you know what, you qualify. But if we do this and this and this, which is going to take two months, now you can get a better mortgage. Almost no one will do that. We do that. So, you are right. It should. The lending environment should go there. But it, in my opinion, it will not because of the inertia. You see, it's not just the training, it's also the actual technology. There is so much money invested in the infrastructure the way it is right now, that unless something cataclysmic happened, it won't change.
Paul Fagan: So, so what makes it harder for someone self-employed versus someone who isn't?
Alejandro Szita: I'll give you a couple of examples. A self-employed person works on cash flow. Interestingly, a person that works for a company works on a salary. What does it mean? A salary means that at a certain time, very predictably, you're going to get an amount of money. You more or less have the amount of money allocated and you will disperse it in a certain, you know, way. When you are a self-employed or a person that works on a gig, it's not like that at all. You get number one, various amounts of different cash flows that come at different points in time. So you might get in a certain date, a small amount of cash flow, and then a month or two months, you might get a big amount of cash flow. Once you get this big windfall that happens in a periodic way, but sometimes it's not a hundred percent predictable. Meaning that you know that on May, for example, you're going to get the check, but you don't know if it's going to be the 15th, the 16th or the 20th. But you know you're going to get it. So you, you cease to manage, you start to manage on cash flow, meaning, okay, I got this cash, how can I get the best return on this money quickly? And that's what the entrepreneurs or people that start businesses do. They get the cash flow. It's not all theirs because you have to pay product, you have to pay taxes, you have to pay your rent. But for a few days you have this amount of cash flow. So your first instinct is not to pay what you owe. Your first instinct is how to use that money to generate more and then pay.
Yes, you may incur a late fee here and there, but for most people in the gig economy, that is part of the cost of doing business. And it's not that they don't pay, they do, but they don't pay exactly on time. And this is one of, this is the first issue. The people that invented the credit score system did not invent it for that. You know, the people that created the credit score, created the credit score to detect what are, who are those people that are going to make them the most money. Having a high credit score doesn't mean that you're successful in business. Doesn't mean that you're responsible, doesn't even mean that you are moral. We have built in all of these assumptions into it. What we understand that the credit score system was built with people that want to colocate money in the market, that want put money in the market, and they want a predictable return.
And the credit score system is designed to, to signal who are those people. Now you start to understand how to play the game. If you are a bondholder, if you put money out, you want a certain amount of money, like, like a salaried employee on a certain time, the guy that is an entrepreneur is not going to do that. Now once the entrepreneur grows and now, he can afford to hire a bookkeeper or an accountant, then he will start behaving a little bit more that way. Although not quite. I've seen that entrepreneurs are very good at selling, are very good at talking to people, but they're not good at paperwork. They're certainly not good at accounting. Not that they don't know of it, they do know of it, but are not good at behaving in the way the bondholders want you to behave. So most people in the gig economy have issues with credit, not because they don't pay, it's because they don't pay in the manner that the bondholders want you to pay.
Paul Fagan: Very, very interesting. We've done an episode on the credit score and things like that, and it, it does affect a lot of things. Everything from your homeowner's insurance policy rate to your car insurance, everything. So yeah, the system is very much designed around that.
Alejandro Szita: Yeah. And I'll give you one more example. Let's say you get a credit card with a $5,000 limit. If you're an entrepreneur, you go, great, I have $5,000 to play with, I'm going to buy this, I'm going to do that. But that's not what the bondholders want you to do. The bondholders want you to get a $5,000 credit card, only use $500 and then pay, make payments on the $500. You see how completely opposite views of one versus the other?
Paul Fagan: Yeah.
Alejandro Szita: That's where the entrepreneur runs into trouble. Entrepreneurs go, well, they gave me $5,000, why should I use $500? It doesn't make sense from a business point of view.
Paul Fagan: You're right. But if you use more than really 6%, your credit score goes down very quickly. So that $5,000, you know, you're, you're talking a fraction, you know, 5% of the five thousand, $250. Right? So yes. What are you going to do with that.
Alejandro Szita: Correct. Exactly. Now from the income point of view, and this is very surprising because I come from a country where income tax was not the norm. You know very respectfully, I just want to point out that the idea of the income tax was created by Karl Marx. Taxes have always existed through history, but the income tax in particular was something that was created by Karl Marx and was something that countries administered only on concord nations. So just a little bit of historical background. So, when I, when I came to America, one thing that shocked me is, we want you to prove your income, show us your income tax. And I thought, why would anybody do that? Because from a self-employed, you know, a self-employed person has a completely different goal. Their goal is to pay the least amount of tax. The person that works for a big corporation wants to do the most accurate reporting. Now those two things are not inconsistent because remember this, most of the laws that allow you to pay less tax are created by people that make a lot of money. So if you have an accountant that knows those laws, you can take advantage of those. They call it loopholes, but they're not loopholes because they're legal strategies. And by the way, I'm not a CPA, so I'm not trying to answer a tax question.
I'm just trying to say what I've seen. What I have seen is the people that are very successful, and they have millions of dollars, they, percentage speaking, pay less than let's say a salary employee. Not because they are more clever, it's simply because they did more digging. So the entrepreneur, which is in the middle, you know, he's not an employee, but he's not a, he hasn't got into the millions of dollars yet. He's sort of in the middle. The middle is where we cater for. That's the, that's the hardest spot to be in because you're not a millionaire yet you're not poor. But you are sort of like half full in one world and full on the other. And those, for those people, the system, even though we're in America, the land of free enterprise, the system is not made when you are there. The system is made, if you are, you know, on the salary side, great. If you are on the high net worth side, great. If you're in the middle, you're sort of neither here or there.
Paul Fagan: Very interesting. So going back to the mortgage as an entrepreneur, you know, so we talked about the cash flow versus salary. What are some of the other requirements? Is it, you know, more look back in time for that cash flow to get the mortgage? Do they generally pay a higher rate? How does that work?
Alejandro Szita: The way that enterprising banks have done it, they've seen that to really qualify a self-employed. They don't look for a tax return anymore. If you don't have a tax return that qualifies you for the loan, that's our first alternative. We always do that first because that's the cheapest rate and we want to give you the cheapest rate. But if you don't qualify using a tax return, there are other seven methods. We can look at your bank statements, you can look, we can look at your personal bank statements, business bank statements or a combination of both. We can look at your profit and loss. It has to be signed by a licensed CPA. Doesn't have to be audited, but it has to be signed by a licensed CPA. We will look at your funds and your assets.
Some people, and I've seen this over and over, let's say they want to buy a house. The price of the home is already on their bank account. They could buy it cash. However, those people cannot even get a loan. So for those people, there is what is called an asset depletion program that allows them to use their resources. That's how they qualify to buy a home. So there are like seven other ways besides the tax return to qualify someone to buy a home. And when I say qualify, the foundation of any loan is income. You know, you always hear, oh, I have a good credit score, I should get a good loan. Or, oh, my house is worth a million dollar, it's paid off, I should get a loan. Those are incorrect, incorrect assumptions. Every single loan, even from a credit card perspective, the foundation, is the income. Once you show to the lender that you can afford the payment and you can afford all of your other, other debts and you can afford it sustainably, over time, 90% of the loan is done. Then the credit score is simply to price it. If you have a high score, then you have a cheaper rate. If you have a lower score, it will cost you more money. And the house or the equity is the collateral, which is the least important. You could have a million dollar home paid off, but if you don't have the income to sustain a loan, no one will give you a loan except the hard money lender. But that's another story. So income, income, 90% of the loan. Credit, 9%, collateral, 1%.
Paul Fagan: Wow. That's interesting.
Alejandro Szita: That's how we focus. I'll always focus, can you afford the payment? Can you afford it sustainably over time? Okay, the loan is done. Now we need to work on your credit to get you a better rate and we need to make sure that the collateral is going to meet with the guidelines of the bank. And then you are done, and then you're done with that.
Paul Fagan: So you say over time, what do, what do you mean by over time for say, improving your credit score? Is it six months? Is it two years? How long does it take, have you seen to help improve the score there?
Alejandro Szita: In our experience, in between one or two months, we can average raise the score by about 50 points. Self-employed people work on cash flows and they have access to cash flow. So they need to reduce balances. If they need to like do something like that, to them, it's very easy. I'm working with a, with a lawyer who's self-employed. He needed to pay like $30,000 in order to increase his score. He did it one night because he has the cash flow. So you see this is one, this is one example where the cash flow that you didn't use to pay when you should have paid actually now helped you to pay. So one or two months is the average. We had one case whether it took six months, but it took, it took six months. Not because it was complicated. It's because this entrepreneur and I see this all the time, has been in business for over 20 years, has what he believed was a wonderful relationship with this big, big bank in downtown Los Angeles.
Everybody treated him well. By the way, he has millions of dollars on his account. So one day he steps in and he goes, you know, I want to buy this house or I want to pay this. You know, can you give me a loan? Account executive, oh, just no problem for you. You're a 20 year client, you know, we'll give you 2%. You know, this was last year when you could get it. You know, now you can't. And then, he didn't qualify. And he was outstanding because they have all of his account information. They know how much money he makes. They handled all of his deposits. He's been with them for 20 years. He couldn't get it. Why don't I qualify? Oh, it's because in your credit report you have this and this. Which by the way, were very small and really in the scheme of things unimportant. But again, when you are in the matrix of lending and when you depend on systems, because remember they, they took away personal banking and replaced it with the system. The system doesn't care if you've been, if you have a 20 year relationship, doesn't care that you are a successful entrepreneur. The system only cares for its variables. So there was a variable in the system he didn't comply with and therefore we couldn't give him the loan. Even though they had all of his information for 20 years. Isn't that amazing?
Paul Fagan: Wow. Wow. So, you know, I'm thinking, I'm listening to you, I'm thinking about, you know, the mortgages I've done over time and, you know, points or zero point loans versus paying for points. Do people have the same level of options to them that are self-employed? Or is it, or is that also more challenging for them?
Alejandro Szita: They have the same options, but you know, I am a licensed realtor. I always was a realtor and we are licensed by the Department of Real Estate. One of the first things you learn when you're in real estate or when you have a real estate license is you have to disclose, disclose, disclose. So disclosing for me was ingrained on my training. We always disclose. However, many of my mortgage colleagues don't like to disclose. They also don't like to disclose how much they make, even though the law is very clear that you have to disclose. However, if you are in California, if you're licensed under the Department of Corporations, they change their name. Now they, they're called something else. And if the lender is paying you, because you can get paid by the borrower or the lender, but not both. If the lender is paying you, there is a way where you don't have, have to explicitly disclose how much money you are making as mortgage broker.
It's there in the numbers, but you know, you have a hundred pages of disclosures. So unless you pointed to the borrower and you say, this is how much I'm making, they will never know. We, when we are licensed to the Department of Real Estate, we don't have that. But we again, we're, we're not trained that way. So we have a form specifically, that specifically shows how much we make. So this long story, just to tell you this, because most mortgage brokers don't want to disclose how much they make. They sell the quote-unquote no point mortgage, which really does not exist. Literally, yes, there are quote-unquote no points, buy that's not true. What happens is the mortgage broker or the loan officer is getting paid directly by the bank. In order for the bank to afford to make that payment, they raised the rate of the borrower. I'm just going to make this up. Instead of paying 5%, now you pay six. Now it would be nice if the mortgage broker told you, look, I make the same money. Whether the bank pays me or whether you pay me, will be the same. But if you pay me, I can get you this. If the bank pays me, it's going to cost you that. We will make the same. That for us does not change. And that's what I do. I tell them, you have this option, you can pay us directly. Directly. It's also a misnorming. Because if you're doing a refinance, you're going to build it on the refinance or the bank could pay us. We make the same and then we give them the choice. But very few of my colleagues do that because my colleagues are afraid to tell the borrowers how much a loan really costs. A loan cost between $5,000 to $30,000 just on mortgage broker fees, depending on the loan amount. That's what it really costs. And my colleagues are afraid of saying that.
Paul Fagan: So, so where on a form can I find that? Is it just under closing costs or how would, where would I find that?
Alejandro Szita: It's on the second page of the loan estimate. You know, you get the loan estimate, you get like four pages. You get the first page, which is the summary of the loan, the second page goes into the details of the loan. Then on section A you go to the first line, which says discount. But that line that says discount can say the wording can change slightly. But this is the, this is how you can tell. A discount is usually no more than 1%, meaning discount, meaning, what you pay the lender, not the mortgage broker. What you pay the lender to get a reduced rate, that's usually no more than 1%. So if you go to the first line section A, second page of the loan estimate and you see 4%, blah, blah, blah, then you know right away that at least 3% is going to the mortgage broker. So it's there, but it's not explained.
Paul Fagan: Very cool. Thank you for that insight. That's great. I'm going to go pull up an old mortgage doc and see, what it shows on there.
Alejandro Szita: Now that doesn't necessarily mean you got a bad mortgage, it's just that I believe, you know, coming from the real estate background, I believe you should be informed of all of the options and you decide, because we're sort of an agent for you. You know, this is again, coming from the real estate world. In the real estate world, you're thrilled that the principle is the one that, I mean you help the principal as an advisor and as an agent of the principal. But once you've given all the options to the principal, in this case the borrower or you, you are the one that takes the decision, not me.
Paul Fagan: So why would someone then come to a broker like yourself versus just going directly to the bank down the street?
Alejandro Szita: Because the person at the bank, the loan officer at the bank can only sell their product. And it may be that that is what suits you, but it's only one product. It's only one choice and it's only a very narrow margin of what he or she can do. So if you, if you're able to comply with the requirements, then it's fine. But from people that work at banks I'm told that about 40%, meaning more than half of the people that I try to help, they can't because they don't, they don't satisfy the bank's guidelines.
Paul Fagan: But yet you as a broker can get into that bank potentially for that same customer somehow.
Alejandro Szita: You know, it's so funny. But the answer is yes. We work with a lender in San Diego, which is awesome, and they do most of our high-end self-employed mortgages. Then they package the mortgage and they sell it to a bank in LA that if you work on there and open an account, you will not have access to that mortgage. Isn't that incredible?
Paul Fagan: Wow. That's very interesting. And then they package them all up. They sell them to someone else and transfer and somewhere else. And who knows who you're paying three months later sometimes, right? That's, they all do that, not just because it's a broker. Banks themselves do that all the time.
Alejandro Szita: And, and that is part of the infrastructure and that's part of the technology that, that is not necessarily bad. That has allowed the mortgage business to be flash with cash because now you can package all of these mortgages and you can sell them all over the world. And then people or big pension funds, you know, big banks, they need to put their money someplace and to them put money on an instrument that has a collateral is great because most of the financial instruments out there don't have a collateral.
Paul Fagan: Yep. Most don't. So if I'm a gig worker or, you know, self-employed, what's a best, great piece of advice you could give them if they are looking to, to, I don't know about refinancing right now because the rates have gone up so much, but maybe they're looking to relocate, and they want to buy a house somewhere else. What, what are some of the guidelines you would give them? Especially in the current state of affairs where the market's going up and the Fed keeps raising rates. Right now.
Alejandro Szita: I will tell them two things. The easiest way they can start handling or repairing right now is their credit. Go online and look for Philip Tirone. His website is 720creditscore.com. By the way, I'm not affiliated to him. I don't have any relationship, you know, I don't have any money from him. I mean I'm just doing this from the bottom of my heart. He's the best. He was a loan officer. He developed a system called Seven Steps to 720. If you go on eBay, you know, he used to have the CDs that he sold on a, on a plastic binder. If you go to eBay and type seven steps to 720 and you find the binder, which is like 20 bucks, buy it right away. If not, go to 720credit.com and download the system. Although in true honesty, if you have the binder is a lot better. The website, you know, makes a really shortened version. But if you are able to find the cd, so my advice is skip that thing and apply it. Number one. Number two. Remember that that loans are based on income. If you can afford your rent, stay at least, accumulate at least 12 payments of rent. Document every time you pay the rent. Either the landlord sends you an email or you have an account, find a way to document each payment and always keep 12 on-time payments documented. Then when you go and look for a house let me see if I can give you a big rule of thumb. If you are paying like $2,500 in rent, that gives you more or less access to a mortgage of a $400,000. So you can keep this as a rule of thumb, you know, $2,500 in rent, you most likely could, could get a $400,000. And then the last thing is you need to have some savings. You hear over and over and over, no money down payment, you know, FHA three and a half percent, zero down, a hundred percent financing. Just remember this, the least money you put on your mortgage, the more costly in terms of points, fees, and payments is going to be, it's a lot better to, to save 5% or get it as a gift. A gift from your dad, from your family, from anyone is fine. So either talk somebody into giving you a gift and or save at least 5%. Don't fall for the three and a half, zero down the this or that. They all come with strings attached and they all will cost you more.
Paul Fagan: Very good advice. Very good. Very neat. So let's go into a couple more questions here. What would you say is the biggest financial mistake that you have made?
Alejandro Szita: Not buying a house on time because of an erroneous expectation. You know, from many years I live on the west side of Los Angeles where the cheapest house that I like cost about a million and a half. And at that time, I could not afford it. That was my biggest mistake because I should have bought the $500,000 or $600,000 home that I could afford at the time I would be sitting in a one and a half million home now. But that doesn't only apply to me and I'll tell you a very little story. I know that we're running short on time. When I started on this business in 2005. I love reading, you know, I'm a history buff and I was reading this article about this couple in LA wondering whether they should buy this $300,000 home because in 2005 the trajectory of prices was going up and they knew that that $300,000 home should really cost $250,000. So they were thinking, are we timing the market correctly? Are we timing correctly? So to make long story short, that $300,000 home is today worth $1.2 million. And this is not just in the US, this is not just in the US dollars. I have a good friend in Chile, in pesos, not even dollars, who is a University professor. She bought an apartment or condo, not even a house. And that, and in Chile there is really, is in really in a very bad economic situation right now. That thing has already appraised more than 40%. So that is the biggest mistake.
Paul Fagan: What would you say?
Alejandro Szita: I've made many other mistakes by the way, many others. But you asked me for one of the biggest.
Paul Fagan: No, that, that's great. Thank you. Thank you for sharing. What would you say is a single best piece of advice you have received?
Alejandro Szita: That was in 1994 when I lived in England and I went to a financial seminar that was given by a German financial advisor. And this is what he said. He said, when you run into an economic problem, what is the first thing you do? He said, well, you need money. So you go around, you ask for a loan, you ask for friends to give you money. And he says, doesn't that solution always get you into trouble? And then we all said, the audience, yes. And then he explained why. He said, money is a byproduct, money is a consequence, money is what comes after. And he says, after what? After you have delivered a product or a service that is valuable to the recipient. So he said, if you need money, don't concentrate on money. Don't go running and getting a credit card or trying to get a loan. Concentrate on what can you deliver in abundance to a recipient and then you will create the right to receive money from that person. That to me was like, wow, amazing advice.
Paul Fagan: I really like that one. I'm definitely going to have to re-listen to that again later because sometimes when I record I hear things, but I want to make sure I hear them right and well. So definitely going to re-listen to that. So Alejandro, what are your takeaways from, from our discussion today? How can people find you, get in touch with you and, and so on and so forth?
Alejandro Szita: I try to answer all of my emails and answer all of my phone calls. You know, very early on I was shocked that I tried to talk to people that I consider very successful, and I could never get to them. The secretary, the gatekeepers always stop me. But in the one or two off chances when I go to talk to them, they were like an open book. So I try to emulate that always. If you write to me at info@prosperitylending.us, so that's info@prosperitylending.us. I will answer probably not right away, but I will answer. Okay. Okay. If you go to my website, I will also talk to you. My website is the same. It's www.prosperitylending.us. And if you send me a text message, I will also reply to it.
Paul Fagan: Wonderful.
Alejandro Szita: Being humble I think is something that never left me on.
Paul Fagan: Wow. That's really neat. Now I, I want to thank you for today's session here. I did learn some stuff as specifically really around, you know, understanding the broker fee and, and where to actually look for that and uncover that. because you're, you're right, anytime I've spoken with someone that's never shared, it's, it's buried in there and you, you're just signing away and just trying to get your loan done and, and into a new home. So that's, that's great advice. So at least understand that and so you can have that discussion and I'm very happy that you are so transparent with your customers. That's I really applaud that. So thank you for that. On behalf of everyone, thank you. I wish more were doing that. I really do.
Alejandro Szita: Thank you Paul. Thank you. It's an honor for me to be in your show. Thank you for having me.
Paul Fagan: Oh, thank you. This is great. So again, thanks for being on the show today. Thank you everyone for downloading the podcast. If you have any questions or comments, please email us at financialdads@gmail.com or check us out on Facebook. Just go to financialdads.com. So with that, this is Paul Becker reminding you managing your finances can be stressful. That's why the financial dads are here to help. Please be well, be kind, pay it forward and thank you.
