2019.01 Back at it

I see that I left this poor blog in the dust over a year ago. It’s not that I haven’t thought about it, just haven’t been very committed I’m afraid. While my financial recovery remains slow, it is steady. Remember those blackberry bushes from the last post? This summer I carved two thirds of my back yard into small piles of dried up sticker bushes and dug out 174 of them babies by the roots. Yep, I counted them and yep there are about a bazillion left, BUT it looks amazing back there! No, I got nothing else done this summer other than taking a final class at the university to finish a degree that I don’t need but am glad to have obtained.

Most of my summer was spent chasing my tail with one of my grown up children that is struggling to become an adult. She is just not as emotionally equipped as her peers and siblings and has made some unfortunate choices that caught her up into a spin cycle of difficulties and she had enough already. Life’s lessons have been hard and many for her this year. Two weeks ago it came to a head where she needed to make some choices in order to get off the merry-go-round and she wisely chose to go live at our friend’s ranch where there are others who are figuring life, themselves, and their relationship with God out like she is. It just so happened that the day she ended up going out there was also the previously scheduled day my youngest had set up for his move out into an apartment of his own. Her move is temporary but could be 3.5 months or 3 years. His is permanent. So I find myself after 31 years of being a parent, 14 of them as their only parent in an empty nest.

Admittedly this past year has been really hard especially since my daughter hasn’t had a car for awhile and I have often been her transportation. To say I feel relief is an understatement! This week I have mostly slept and regained my own rhythm of life. I pampered myself too – toes done, hair done, indulged in a couple of movies and took myself out to eat. Lovely! I’m also on the cusp of a much better financial life and am more than thankful to have time to focus on it as it will take some doing.

Before there was a return to school and career change and in a different life I owned a mortgage company and was a mortgage broker, but very unhappy as one for many reasons pretty much mostly unrelated to the mortgage business, though there is plenty I dislike about it. In retrospect, I can see that I spent the last ten years really searching for my path and trying to understand the train I missed somewhere along the line. I figured it out – I should have been and really wanted to be and still want to be a Research Psychologist, who writes about and aggregates what other people research and learn and pull them together. It is what I was born to do and I see that I still can do it, BUT (there is always a big but) it will never make a living that makes me comfortable if I go there now. Had I gone there earlier in my life, it would have been fine, however, it is too late for this to be the paying gig I would need it to be. That’s OK.

Back in June I sat down next to a dear friend and mortgage business colleague who has navigated the challenging landscape we came through. She looks good and she told me she is happy. “Do tell” said I and she did. After doing the series of retail lenders, she has gone back to work for a regular broker and the loan amounts are higher and it’s a different living than before when we owned our companies, but it is a good living again. I was dumbfounded and came home and threw the idea up on the whiteboard about returning to origination.

This was a hard one. I left chewed up, spit out, burned and burned out. To renege on this commitment to leave it behind forever seemed like hypocrisy. To move forward by going back to it was to have to do it entirely differently. I did the math, talked to a LOT of people and came up with the slim criteria that would cause me to return and choose it rather than it choosing me. You see it was my fallback career, the thing I knew how to do and could do in my sleep, the thing I was good at and wished I wasn’t cause it meant I had to take care of all of these other people when i just wanted to be mom more than anything and take care of my kids. Once I decided to do it, it was a Tuesday, I signed up on Wednesday, started classes on Friday, finished them late Monday night and took the test Tuesday and the class was not a test prep.

I then spent the next 8 weeks looking for a place to land. The first place bait and switched me with file minimums and after doing all of their tedious onboarding, I bailed. Tomorrow I start the onboarding with another company. It looks promising. Pay per loan is great, rates are better than the competitors I think and I will have every product and 70 lenders. I will have no processing or QC or payroll, or anything other than the fun part of putting the deals together. I still get to work from home, have no minimum and am self-employed. For me it seems like the best of all worlds. I can hardly believe this is possible. My time is my own.

Hopefully I will be able to be more faithful to my blog. The seasons have turned. I am thankful.

May you find joy in the place you are planted today as I am,

Kiki