The Chassis of the Reverse Mortgage System, with Brady Mullen

0:02 You know, when you talk about reverse mortgages and there's a lot of negative baggage to it, but really it's just one of several financial products that you had the opportunity to use an asset and borrow against it and either make payments or not make payments based on your strategy. You know, everyone's familiar with margin loans on stocks and how they can be used effectively to help move cash flow and pay for things in advance and allow you to balance things when you want. And also borrow against life insurance is a very powerful tool that sophisticated financial planners use often and to advise clients in how to get through being asset heavy and liquidity light. Reverse mortgages are almost the same and really I think the problem is that people don't understand the underlying chassis of a reverse mortgage. We're excited to have here an expert, a you know, a reverse mortgage expert who understands the process as well as anybody and explains it well, for letting Brady Mullen of CrossCountry Mortgage. Brady, thank you for joining us today.

0:57 Thanks, Bill. Good to be here. You know, and I was sharing before we started that you know, here I have a podcast that talk about reverse mortgages all the time. I'm on the phone with a leading attorney who I have a good relationship with and I was scared to even ask about a reverse mortgage because the negative connotations and you kind of properly scolded me that really it's no different than other similar products. Talk a little bit about the mechanics and the chassis and how a reverse mortgage is built and how that creates the opportunity to use it as a as a powerful cash flow tool.

1:26 Well, you're talking about I'll say it this way. I think most reverse mortgage originators skip over probably the most important question that people have and we jump right into who qualifies, you know, what happens if you die, what happens it's non-recourse, so if it exceeds the value of the home, blah, and we all we all talk about that pretty conversantly. But I think the main question in people's minds is what is it? What is this thing? And I find the easiest way to describe that, not that this is perfect, but just worked for me cuz I get a lot of light bulbs coming on and people say, "Oh, how come nobody's ever talked about it that way?" So, this is what I currently say, use. And I have some visuals that do this, but I paint a picture and I say, "Bill, let's say you're a lender." And I go to you, Bill, and I say, "I want to borrow $300,000. What's that going to cost me?" And you say, "Money costs 7% right now." Or some number, right? I'm oversimplifying lending to a large degree just to make this point. So, you say, "Money costs 7%." And I say, "Okay, what are my payment terms?" And you say, "I can amortize it over 15 years and that'll cost you about $2,700 a month. I can amortize it over 30 years and that'll cost you about $2,000 a month. Or I can give you an interest-only loan and that'll cost about 1750." And I say, "Whoa, hold on a second. Are you saying that if you can give me an interest-only loan or a 30-year loan or a 15-year loan and those are the payments I have to make or are those minimum payments?" And you say, "Well, those are just minimum payments. You can always pay more if you want to." And then I respond, it takes me like a second to answer that question. I say, "Give me the interest-only, please." Because the interest-only loan lets me turn it into any amortized loan that I want by simply making the appropriate payment. So, if I want that interest-only loan to be a 15-year loan, I just pay the $2,700 180 times and I'm done.

3:09 But I can always fall back on that minimum in case something changes sometime in the next 15 years. And then I like to remind people like, "When's the last time you would live through a 15-year period of time where something happened that you didn't expect." Like happens all the time. So, flexibility is a very huge financial advantage. And so, I would always pick that interest-only because I can make that a 15-year loan if I want to or a 30 or a 26 or a 35 or whatever. I mean, a perpetual interest-only loan doesn't really exist, but we're just talking about how money works. I would choose that every day all the time because it gives me the most control over my cash flow, my resources.

3:44 And you can go that way, you can't go the other way. Meaning, you can't get a 30-year fixed and then say to the lender, "You know, I changed my mind. Can I just pay interest-only payments? Money's a little tight." That doesn't work that way. Once you sign for 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, you're forever paying on 30-year fixed amortization basis.

3:57 Yeah, and I think I think a lot of people talk about financial planning like, "Oh, if you just build a complicated enough spreadsheet, you can predict the future." Well, I hate to break the news to you, that isn't the way financial planning works. I mean, you build complicated spreadsheets and use software, but you already know the plan when you deliver a plan to a client, you already know that it's wrong because you know you're using assumptions that you can't predict for sure, so you stress test things and like there's value in financial plans, but you always know they're going to be wrong. So, what we try to value is preparedness, flexibility, your ability to flex with different, you know, environments and economic, you know, economic developments, let's call it. So, flexibility is a massive advantage in personal finance, right? So, we've laid out those three. There's the 15-year, the 30-year, and the interest-only. I'm going to pick the interest-only every day, you know, if the interest rates are similar, because it gives me the most flexibility and I've always got the lowest minimum that I can fall back on if I have something better to do with that money. And sometimes something better to do with that money is food. Right? If things are tight, that minimum might really save me in a in a pinch. Or sometimes it might just be an investment opportunity and I want something better to do with that money than pay a low interest and sometimes deductible mortgage rate. I might have something better to do with that money. So, those are the first three. And then Bill, you say to me, "Well, hold on, I've got a fourth option that I want to offer you, Brady." And you say, "I've got a mortgage where the minimum payment is zero." Now, if I didn't understand finance, I might scratch my head and say, "How are you going to lend me money and not charge interest, Bill?" And your response is, "I can't do that cuz I'm not lending my money." I'm, you know, mortgage loan officers don't lend their money. They're bringing people with resources together with people who want to borrow them and they help people strike a deal, right?

5:34 And you say, "So, there's it's not that there's no interest. You just don't have to pay it if you don't want to. You can you can let it accrue on the balance if you want to, and the loan is still in good standing." In other words, the payment is zero. You can you can make the you can pay the interest if you want to, or you can pay interest and principal, or you can let it accrue on the balance and the loan is still in good standing. And I say, "Wow, that sounds amazing. Why doesn't everybody do that?" And my response if somebody asked me that would be like, "I don't know. That's what I would do." It would take me a like a fraction of a second to be like, "Well, give me that option." Cuz now I can make that loan anything I want. I can make it an interest-only loan. I can amortize it over a period of time. I can change my mind 5 years later and be like, "Oh, you know what? I do want to make this an interest-only loan." Or maybe skip a payment or not make any more payments ever. I have full control over my cash flow. And sometimes you get you get some people to look at listening to that and they'll be like, "Oh, yeah, but if you never make a payment, the balance will rise." And it's like, "Okay. Like what if I have What if I have something better to do with that money?"

6:31 Right. I don't I don't care. Like it's the training wheels are off. I'm an adult and it's you're just making my equi- equity liquid to me. And if I want to make a payment, I'll do that if that's in my best interest. And if I don't, I won't. But I want the flexibility to have that option. So, if I miss a payment or miss 10 payments, I'm not losing my house. It's not in foreclosure. I don't have to make a payment. I'm allowed to let it accrue on the balance. That's the flexibility that it offers. In fact, whenever I whenever I explain it that way, I always follow that up with, "To be frank, I don't I'm not a huge fan of the term reverse mortgage. I don't think that's very descriptive of what it is. I use it because everybody else uses that term. But at the end of the day, what's reverse about that? It's just It's flexible payments. It's optional payments. That's a Those are better terms for it. I don't know what's reverse about that."

7:14 Right. You know, it is I think the only loan where you can borrow and not make payments and not be in trouble, right? Anybody else, you know, I have credit lines, I have credit cards, you know, I pay them full every month. But if I don't, yes, my you know, I don't I don't have to make a payment. They charge me a penalty, they charge me interest rate, and then at some point, they shut the account down. At some point, they're going to sue me versus the reverse mortgage product, which is optional, is the only product I'm aware of that you don't have to that's available as a mortgage. But as you mentioned, it really isn't that odds because there are other financial products that really have the exact same feature. Talk about that, and why is the stigma of reverse mortgage stick with it where it doesn't apply to the other cases where you can borrow money without paying making payments?

7:54 Well, I have I have a couple things to say about that. So, why the stigma? We can only guess, right? And I'm a big believer in the fact that I think one of the reasons people make up make up horror stories about, you know, like why reverse mortgages are bad is frankly because it sounds too good to be true. But, what people forget is that there are two other very common financial instruments that work this way that people use every day all the time very comfortably. And one of them is a you mentioned it earlier a margin loan. I can borrow against my stock account, and I don't have to make payments on that if I don't want to. I can let it accrue, or I can make interest-only payments, or I can make interest and principal payments, or I can pay the whole thing off. People do that all the time, and it's brilliant. In fact, it's so successful that wealthy people do that very comfortably all the time because it saves them from selling assets at a gain and paying taxes. It's very tax-efficient to borrow against the assets rather than selling. And so, wealthy people do that so successfully that there are people trying to lobby against that to make that not so simple for them to avoid taxes. Now, I'm not sure how I feel about that because you can't make debt distributions taxable cuz then every time you swipe your credit card, you'd get some kind of a tax on that. That's weird. So, I don't know how they'll solve that, or I'm not even sure if I want them to solve that. I'm not sure how I feel about that. But, regardless, people do that all the time, and it's like you're selling the asset from a balance sheet perspective, but in but instead of paying an opportunity cost of selling the asset cuz you're selling it and giving up future gain, you're paying an interest cost instead, but your balance sheet recognizes an interest cost and an opportunity cost the exact same way.

9:20 It's just going to subtract dollars from the balance sheet. And so, they figured that out and saying, "Well, if I pay, you know, 7% interest or 6% interest and keep the asset that's making me 6 or 7 or 8% then it's as if I sold the asset, but I don't have to pay the taxes."

9:35 Right. And so, people do that all the time with margin loans, all the time. Right. And that's exactly how a reverse mortgage works, except with a margin loan, if your if your loan balance reaches a certain margin between the value of the asset, the value of the stocks, and the loan itself, then they will force a margin call saying, "Well, this is too close for us to be comfortable. You need to pay this down, or we're going to require you to sell the stocks to pay off the loan, or at least part of it, or whatever." They're going to have rules around that because a margin loan is not non-recourse. Whereas a reverse mortgage is non-recourse. There will never be a margin call. They're never going to say, "Hey, you've borrowed too much of the equity. You have to do something about this." These are insured by FHA. Well, they're non-recourse. Even the non-FHA reverse mortgages are also non-recourse. They just priced it in a little differently, but all reverse mortgages are non-recourse. So, there can't be a margin call. So, it's like a margin loan, except instead of it being a brokerage account, it's your home equity. Why on earth is that a bad thing? I can't understand.

10:31 Well, in the margin loan is way more riskier because we've all seen stories. And I'm involved with one now where you have stock, and the stock can go down 50%.

10:41 Yeah. If you have a margin call, let's say you margin 50% of your stock, and the stock goes down 50%, you literally have to sell almost all your stock to pay off the loan because they can require you to pay a mount, or they can require you to pay the whole loan off. And then on top of that, now you've liquidated the stock, and maybe have taxes due depending on how you accumulate the stock. You know, after you pay off the loan, you have no money left. Oh, and here's a tax bill for all the gains you had over time that you didn't really realize until you sold it. So, in to really look at it fairly, a margin loan is way more risky than a reverse mortgage is as far as borrowing money without making payments.

11:16 Yeah, it certainly can be, especially if you get up into like if you if you if you borrow as much as you can, and you're really close to that margin, it can force you to do things that you don't want to do, or it might be the bad You know, if the stock market crashes and causes you to it a margin call for you, then that you're having to sell stuff while they're down, which is not when you want to sell it. Right. So, there's But, people do that all the time, and you can do it safely. Like, if you only borrow 10% of your portfolio, that's really unlikely for a margin call to happen. But, you know what's funny? There's a very high-profile transaction that everybody's familiar with when Elon Musk bought Twitter. He borrowed 25 and 1/2 billion dollars against his Tesla stock. And so, a lot of people hear that and they're like, "Oh, he's avoiding taxes." And I'm like, "Hold on a second. His advisers, I'm sure, came to him and said, 'Hey, Elon, we If you want to raise 25 and 1/2 billion dollars worth of your Tesla stock, you can sell it and pay about 6 billion dollars in taxes, or you can borrow against it and pay no taxes.'" It's like, "Okay, one option you pay taxes, one option you don't." And what everybody gets confused about, cuz they're not looking at the whole picture, they'll say, "Oh, yeah, but he has to pay interest on that loan." And it's like, "Yes, but he still owns the Tesla, which is accumulating." Right? His balance sheet doesn't Again, your balance sheet doesn't care whether you're paying interest or opportunity cost. Because by selling his Tesla stock, he's going to pay an opportunity cost into the future for that, and it's compounding over time. But, it's hard to recognize that because you don't actually see it. It doesn't show up on paper. But, by holding on to the Tesla stock, that remains on his balance sheet, and it remains growing, while the interest accrues, or if he's paying the interest, which I'm guessing he probably is on a loan that size. I don't know for sure. But, he did the exact same thing that we're talking about. It's a margin loan, essentially. And he did that because it saved him 6 billion dollars of taxes. It also let him control He didn't have to sell Tesla stock, which I imagine he doesn't want to do because he wants to keep his influence at Tesla.

13:09 Right. And that may not You might be hearing that and thinking, "Well, that doesn't really affect most of my clients, cuz they're not multi-billionaires." But, it does because if your home is an asset that you want to control because you live there.

13:20 Right. And you So, you can't sell your You can't sell a portion of your home to raise some equity. If I have, you know, half a million dollars of equity in my home, there really isn't an efficient market for me to sell $50,000 of equity to somebody so that I can, you know, pay my bills for the next year. So, the way people do that is they assign they attach a line of credit to that asset instead, and now it becomes liquid. And what everybody's afraid of is they're thinking, "Oh, but you don't want debt in retirement." It's like, "But you own the asset that's collateralizing it. It's still there on your balance sheet. You're just not thinking it through if you don't get past that."

13:50 Well, to use example, to take the example of Tesla further, when Elon did that, there was concern about the value of Twitter he bought. It's since recovered and it's a profitable, you know, decision he made as far as that the stock's worth more than he paid for it. But, at the same time, the Tesla stock at the time was in the 280s. I remember cuz I owned Tesla stock quite a bit. And it went down to like 220, 230, but he got I think was able to get margin around 280. Well, today it's in the 400s, like 430 or 420, depending on today's price. So, the money he borrowed in essence was free because rather than selling the Tesla stock, and as you said, paying taxes, he kept it, didn't pay taxes, and now the stock that he otherwise might have sold has gone up by more than the money he borrowed to buy the Twitter/X business. So, he made money on the Twitter purchase. He also made money on this Tesla stock he didn't sell. And he didn't pay any taxes in the whole thing. So, obviously that was a good decision for him. And I think the same holds true for many people in real estate. They're forced to move because they can't afford their house, but some liquidity can give them the chance to stay there and avoid a transaction they really don't want to make.

14:57 Yeah, and if they stay there till they pass away, their heirs get a step up in basis. But, I also like to remind people like we're not trying to make we're not trying to create the wealthiest dead people in the country. Like, the whole the whole reason people save money is so that they can live comfortably when they don't want to make money or earn money anymore.

15:13 Right. And for whatever reason, I think this is a this is a really common mistake, people they call it oh, there's a term for it, mental accounting, where you're like, "Well, this money is for that and this money is for that and this money is for that. And it's like, well, it's all the same pool. This A good example of this is when people say, yeah, but I want to leave my house to my kids. And I think to myself, well, that's a noble that's a noble intention. That's great. However, guess what? Your kids are going to get everything. So, if you if you if there's some reason that's tax efficient to spend some of your equity instead of some other asset, they're just going to receive more of that other asset because you didn't use that for whatever expense that you made. And whatever interest you're worried about accumulating on this borrowed money, like the loan that you used against your home, whatever interest you pay on that is offset by the gains in the in the assets that you kept by not using those instead. And this is again, this is a phenomenon that wealthy people have been using for it literally hundreds of years. It's not a new idea at all. It's tax efficient. It lets them control the asset if they want to keep it. Now, again, they also sell assets and pay taxes sometimes. So, I'm not saying that they do this exclusively. What I'm saying is they understand that it's a resource that makes sense when it and when it makes sense, they will use it and when it doesn't make sense, they won't. But for some reason, Dave Ramsey scared everybody into avoiding debt at all costs, which is dumb. Like, you can't avoid debt. When I eat food at a restaurant, until I've paid the bill, I'm in debt. When I'm a landlord, when I collect a check for rent, I'm in debt cuz I owe that tenant 30 days of shelter. We Debt is obligations to other humans. How are you going to avoid that?

16:44 Just because it's accounted for on a piece of paper doesn't mean that's debt and those other things aren't. It's just debt. And so, you can't avoid that. So, by borrowing against an asset that you own, that has the same effect as selling the asset and giving up the opportunity cost. You're just paying interest instead of the opportunity cost. And it's more tax effective in many cases. It's just It's something that people need to not be afraid of. They just need to understand it.

17:06 The other product that you mentioned before we started recording that's analogous and used, I think, much more comfortably and looked on more favorably is borrowing against life insurance. And it's true that there are life insurance policies, not all do that term policies, but whole life and other universal and other products accumulate a cash value that you're able to receive upon death or receive upon retirement or whatever the terms are. But you can also borrow against it on certain terms. Having had such insurance, I never understood how much I could borrow and what the costs were. It just seems so opaque and hard to understand. And yet that product is routinely recommended by financial planners in a way that reverse mortgages are treated like the plague or the elephant man to use the famous movie or play. And so, you know, again, I think it's part of it is the marketing and that's why you have this podcast. I think part of it is that the average delivery of the of the product of reverse mortgage is not from somebody professional like you, but it's from tip most typically somebody a call center where there's a 800 number and a person they think they're calling and they end up talking to some non-professional who just is delivering you know, transactions. And so how So I guess the question is, how do we as an industry, I know you personally as a company also work with financial planners and wealth advisors and accountants and attorneys, how do we as an industry, you know, change this perception or educate or and I have my answer, but I'm just curious what how you see this change or maybe it's good that it doesn't change and you get to win one at a time by helping people understand the truth and the rest of your competition isn't doing it very effectively. So how do we change this or do we?

18:44 I think of it like buying a glacier. Like it just takes effort, it takes consistency, it takes people. It also takes, I think, the financial planning and the accounting community to come online and say like, "Oh, okay, this is a reasonable strategy." Because it is, by the way. Like the most common reverse mortgage is an FHA loan. That wasn't an accident that Congress put and they're not trying to When people talk about reverse mortgages like they're a scam, I think to myself, "Okay, you're nuts." because what you're saying would require fha, cfpb, hud, and the and the lending industry to be colluding together to take mom and dad's equity. That's ridiculous. What they're trying to do is give people access to the wealth that we all know is there on terms that make sense in retirement where payments are more flexible and optional. That makes sense to me. That's a it's a fantastic idea. But I think what's really helpful is Now I know that reverse mortgages can be seen as a as a product of last resort and frankly when they are, thank goodness for that.

19:40 Yes. Because if somebody's stuck financially and they've got a bunch of equity and we can use that to help them buy the medicine they need or the food they need or just live a life of dignity for the last 10 or 15 or 20 years of their life, that's awesome. But here's a question for you. Like Microsoft for example, they're worth they're capitalized at over $3.1 trillion. Like this massive company. And I like to remind people like a trillion a trillion seconds is 39,000 years. A trillion is a massive number. And they're worth over $3 trillion. Now here's a question for you. Do you think they have lines of credit set up with financial institutions all over the world?

20:15 I know they do. Of course they do. And it's not because they're broke, it's because lines of credit are extremely useful financial tools. But households who just haven't really wrapped their head around it, they just shy away from anything that sounds like debt which a line of credit is productive use of debt. And so they're kind of scared away from it. So when financial advisors when that community and the and the accounting community CPAs, when they wrap their heads around it and say to clients like it's okay. This is This is how you spend your equity in retirement because you can't spend it piecemeal and it's okay to spend it. This is just how that's done by borrowing against it and retaining the asset. Your balance sheet doesn't care whether you do that or you know, the opportunity cost versus interest. This is fine. Once they wrap their heads around it, people will feel more comfortable. But as long as it's the as long as it's only the destitute that are using this to save themselves, then it gets sort of associated with that with that avatar so to speak. And again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't help them because they need help and it's awesome that we can help them. But I think the when the when the financially astute start recognizing this for what it is, which they have by the way, like you know Dr. Fowle and I think he's been on your show. He's one of the most objective and amazing financial thought leaders in the space. I absolutely love that guy. And he's very articulate, writes great content, but his audience is typically financial advisors. He's very dense, like the That sounded wrong. He's not dense, but his material

21:34 Is dense, yes. It is it's a lot of financial stuff. And so it's hard to read for the public, but once that community starts digesting this and saying to clients, oh yeah, it's okay to do this. In fact, I'm going to get a reverse mortgage the day I turn 62. I want that line of credit compounding as long as I can because I want it to be millions of dollars by the time maybe it will be because I pass away, my life my wife outlives me by 10 years. I want her to have access to the wealth. And that's all you're doing is making your equity liquid and all things equal is liquidity better than illiquidity? Well, yeah, of course it is. So once that community starts using it more and more, I think that will that will help people see that well, lines of credit are awesome. Microsoft uses them and somebody who run out of other resources but has equity can use it too and everybody in between. It's just a line of credit.

22:24 Being as in your name on here, you have CFP Certified Financial Planner with the registered trademark, talk a bit about your history and experience in education and why that's important for you.

22:34 The designation or just the education? Both or either. I think the designation's important because it's just a quick it's just a quick way to show people that you're serious about what you do. There are really good people without the designations, there's really smart people without them and there's smart people with and frankly, there's bad practitioners with designations. So it's not foolproof, but it's a good way to let people know like hey, I've cleared the bar of at least being smart enough and diligent enough to pass that test among other things. So it's helpful, but it's not a it's not a cure-all, it's not a silver bullet. And here's what I mean, my passion, if you can't tell, I'm kind of passionate about what I do. My passion isn't necessarily just reverse mortgages. I find it to be one of the most misunderstood financial tools out there. But my passion is to help people bring together the financial impact of real estate related decisions because we all know that they're connected, right? My personal finance isn't separate from my real estate. They're very much intertwined. But the businesses, real estate and financial planning or personal finances, those have evolved into two separate industries that don't talk very well together. And that's a problem for the for the customers or for the for our community, right? These are these are the our neighbors and friends and our children and our parents. That's a problem because they are they are connected. And yet these two industries aren't talking well together. So, we need to learn how to do that better. And that's my passion. So, I'm huge on home ownership and when does that make sense and how to think about that, upsizing, downsizing, refinancing, and planning cash flow, not just rate, and thinking about how all those things affect a financial plan. But I do talk end up talking about reverse mortgages a lot because it's probably the most misunderstood financial tool that I know of. And when people get it wrong, when they don't understand it, they frankly suffer. I mean, there are people in homes with plenty of equity who are eating hot dogs and peanut butter and suffering and they don't want to tell their kids about it cuz they're embarrassed cuz they ran out of money.

24:17 You didn't run out of money. You're living in a you've got $700,000 equity in your house. You're not out of money. In what world are you out of money? In what world are eating hot dogs and peanut butter a bad thing? Now, if that's all you can afford, it's a bad thing, but in what world is that bad?

24:30 You may as well have a hot dog peanut butter sandwich right now, yeah. No, it's separately they're great. Hot dogs are great. Peanut butter's great. I Again, I you don't want that to be your staple. I get that. And take what I say to a step further. Not only does it affect their financial wealth, but I really think it affects and this is part I think is lost in our in my lifetime, what went from normal to abnormal was it was normal for parents to live and the children live nearby. They all afford a house nearby their parents and either help care for the parents or give the parents interaction with the grandkids, which is good for the grandkids and good for the parents to want to live a long healthy life. And as we've made financial decisions, you have to move to retirement or you have to leave LA and move to Arizona or Florida for financial reasons, we tear apart those families and both sides I think suffer. The young kids don't get the guidance and the elderly don't get financial, medical, personal support they need versus being able to make the choice on where you want to live and you talk about the financial side of it, I think it's very important, but I think if you're forced to, you know, move, you can't age in place, as if that's a thing, but you're forced to move, let's say, to convert your equity and use it in for income. You know, I'm going to sell my million and a half dollar house in LA and buy a half million dollar house in Florida because I need that million dollars, the reverse mortgage addresses that. But by not making that an option, we're forcing displacement. We're forcing tearing apart family. We're forcing I think a lower quality of life or at least we're removing an option from the table that people might consider, "Hey, I can take money out monthly and still live here. I can take a chunk out and remodel the property and make it work for me or I can remodel the property and move the kids in with me and make it work for us as a family to our to our standards, not somebody else's standards." So, I'm very passionate, too. I find that you know, as a real estate broker, I think we do about 1/10 of the reverse mortgages for purchase that we should be doing and I think we

26:33 Do about 1/10 of the people who own properties free and clear not getting a reverse mortgage and I think that costs us as a country, costs us as a city where I live, costs us as a community where I live tremendous pain that can be avoided just by evaluating it as an option. I'm not saying you to take the loan now. I'm saying just talk to somebody who knows what you're talking about. One of the people that knows a lot about this obviously is Brady. Brady, you must also get brought in to talk to the financial planner. I can just imagine conversations, you know, where somebody has a plan and they come up with the idea of a reverse mortgage and they use the word and the financial planner goes, "reverse mortgage, whoa." And somebody might say, "Yeah, but I'd like you to talk to somebody who can speak your language and share with you perhaps how this can be used." So, tell me, what's your role in the kind of the huddle or the calling of the play, so to speak, with people's lives? Is it you one-on-one with them? Are you more commonly involved with their estate planner, more involved with their investment advisor? How does that get involved and those decisions get made?

27:34 Well, current currently my role, I don't I don't talk a lot with many borrowers. That does come up occasionally, but I'm I work in a corporate role at CrossCountry to help our loan officers communicate these ideas with financial advisors, real estate agents, attorneys, accountants, things like that. So, I create a lot of content and I deliver a lot of content in CE classes. I fly around the country and speak at events to help people understand several concepts. It's not just reverse mortgages, but it's mostly that now anyway. Just about how real estate and personal finance, how they should be thought about together and blended together for the sake of the client. And one of the things that I've noticed and probably everybody listening to this conversation will understand right away what I mean. This is a difficult topic to bring up to people because of the negative stigma.

28:23 Yes. And so, another one of the things that I think is a priority for me and probably all of us in the industry is create content that is easy for your referral partners to deliver, whether it's a video. I wrote a book about it, so I buy that book all the time for my for my, you know, clients and partners and loan officers and things like that. Give them something that makes it easy for them to have this conversation. So, a financial advisor doesn't have to say to a client or a Realtor® or an attorney or an accountant, they don't have to say to their client, "I think you should do a reverse mortgage." That's a very That's a very difficult sentence to let flow out of your mouth or even just to bring it up. But, if you have something that says, "Hey, this is something that isn't really what most people think it is. You ought to You ought to take a look at it. And if it's not right, that's fine. But, ignorance is a bad strategy. Let's learn if this might be a solution. And then here's a 8-minute video to watch." Or I have another one that's like 23 minutes that goes in a little more detail. And a lot of people think, "Well, nobody watches videos that long." And that's not true. Like, if

29:22 That's true. You don't You don't watch videos that long if you're scrolling through Instagram. But, if somebody says, "Hey, this is a six- or seven-figure financial decision. You don't want to make this with no information. Watch this 25-minute video." People watch that. And so, I go through the Here's how this works. And it's just to try to give some referral partner something easy to deliver. And one of the reasons I love videos, by the way, is it's something they can watch over and over again. It's something they can send to a son who has questions or a financial advisor who has questions if it's the client. Or the financial advisor can send it to their client saying, "This is how this really works. Don't listen to a YouTube schmuck talk about it. Here's some authority on Here's how this works from a CFP and a CPA." I co-authored these with my brother who's a CPA.

30:01 So, like, we It's authoritative stuff. It's good. And I love Wade Pfau's book, but it's not a very good book for most of the general public because it's so It's very financial. So, we try to take a lot of those concepts and put it into everyday language so people could understand it. But, whether it's videos or books, you got to have something you can give to your referral partner so that they can give it to the prospect cuz it's a hard idea to sell because everybody has only heard negative things about it. And that's just That's a hard hurdle to overcome, no matter how you slice it. Hopefully, that isn't true five or 10 years from now, but it's certainly true today.

30:34 I'm committed to changing that one originator, one attorney, one client at a time. That's why I do these videos, one podcast episode at a time. I think that, you know, the number one thing I can do to help improve them restore the American dream of home ownership in families is this is underutilized is misunderstood and the solution is education with great people like you Brady leading the way. So thank you so much for being on our call today. If you want to find more about Brady he's at CrossCountry Mortgage. He's really one I guess the from what I see kind of the thought leader of the company as far as preparing this kind of content information. I you can catch up with them on LinkedIn. Just LinkedIn / Brady Mullen is his contact info and then down below I have his contact info if you want to give him a call or reach out to him via email. If you're listening to this and don't have a chance to write down feel free to reach out to me. I'd be glad to make a introduction. I imagine that the other people I imagine that you might get calls from or reach outs from or people that should be calling you would be originators at other companies because I know CrossCountry is a national company. I've used your forward people throughout my career. I know some of your reverse people as well. But it seems to me that if you're a reverse mortgage originator and you're not getting the clarity and support you need, I think Brady is a great source. Look at his content and reach out if you can. Get his book. Read it. I have it. I actually moved all my books back to the bookshelf. I used to have it right here and they kept falling over.

31:53 So Brady, thank you so much being on the call today. Thank you for educating us and for taking the lead on this continuing the good fight and let's work on this one together. Thank you so much for your time today.

32:02 Thanks Bill. Can I can I say one quick thing before we go? Yeah. For originators, I didn't write the book to make money by the way. There's no money in writing books on such a narrow topic. For reverse mortgage originators, if you want the book, I mean you can buy it on Amazon. It's called Reverse Mortgages the Financial Ugly Duckling and I sometimes buy it on Amazon myself just cuz they'll fulfill an order. Like if I'm going to mail it to somebody in Wisconsin or something, I just go on to Amazon and have them ship it. But if you want like if you want them in bulk for half the price, there if you just go to the financial sorry, financial ugly duckling. You know what? I can't remember what it is. I need to know that. It's Yeah, financialuglyduckling.com. There's no the. Sorry, it's bookmarked, so I just click on it. But financial ugly duckling, you can order them in bulk in groups of 10 in quantities of 10. And I just I just try to make that a resource for financial advisors, originators, real estate agents that have people that think would want to read the book, and you can buy them in quantities of 10 for 10 bucks a piece instead of what they cost on Amazon, which is 20 bucks. So if that's a resource my whole passion isn't that people will buy the book so I can make money. My whole passion is I want people to read this. I want people to know because we can change lives. It makes a huge difference. I mean, you'll find originators all over the place that will say something to the effect of they have clients all the time that when they're done with this after a month or two, they respond, they call back, and they're like, I just I don't I don't really know what it feels like to not worry about money. That's new to me.

33:24 Like, isn't that how you want to have That's the effect we want to have on people's lives, and it's there. It's sitting in their equity. So, well, I'm just very passionate about that, Bill.

33:33 I originated a few in the what I call the reverse mortgage 1.0 version, and had great feedback from customers on the product. I just couldn't find a way to deliver it consistently myself. And to this day, I get people call me, and I refer people to reverse originators, and I always get that response. Thank you so much. This has been fantastic. It's really made a big difference financially. So, I got to say, thank you so much for leading the charge on this. Can I continue success? And if I can help in any way, please reach out. Thank you so much for your time today.

34:00 It's always a pleasure, Bill. Thank you. And this is actually this Reverse Mortgage Podcast where we interview people every week, originators, management in this case, thought leaders, vendors. Think ideas. What can we do to be more effective in helping our customers achieve their financial goals? I really believe we should be doing 10 times as many reverse mortgages as we are as an industry, but for lack of education. And I think this podcast, my goal at least is to break down those barriers to make that happen. Both to help originators be successful and the homeowners get the equity they need. If I can help, please reach out at Bill Gross Probate on social media. As always, make today your best day.