The Naked Truth About Real Estate & Lending
For those of you who are paying attention, you might remember that I wrote about an experience I had at my local gym with a gentleman who was heavily “inked” – that’s the cool way of saying he had tattoos, in case any of you are wondering. As we sat in the sauna, he told me that all the work done on his upper torso amounted to approximately 100 hours of work, and it cost $85/hr to have an artist repeatedly jab you with a needle (I’ve done that for free at the local blood bank when the technician couldn’t find my vein). Fun! I used that experience to write about how this guy was a walking “down payment” for a house because he had spent $8,500 – more than enough to purchase a home in the range of $200,000. If it’s all coming back to you, I apologize for boring you. For those of you who don’t recall, you have just read the Reader’s Digest version (truth be told, though, the original is MUCH funnier). Since that experience, I’ve kept a small notebook and written down some of the more wacky experiences I’ve had with my fellow sauna enthusiasts (and in case you’re wondering: no, I don’t take the notebook in the sauna – I wait until I get home and write in my notebook at that time). Here’s just a sampling of those experiences:
The gentleman who stood up and proceeded to inhale deeply through his nose and exhale through his mouth. On the surface, nothing weird about that. However, he either ate a 55-gallon drum full of rotten fish or something had died inside him. Within seconds, the odor FILLED the sauna. With my eyes watering up at an alarming rate, I barely made it to the door before being blinded by my own tears.
The gentleman who insisted that we turn out the light in the sauna room because IT GAVE OFF TOO MUCH HEAT. Really? You’ve VOLUNTARILY walked into a room that’s kept north of 200 degrees, and you’re worried about a 60-watt bulb pumping out enough ADDITIONAL heat to make you feel uncomfortable?
The NUMEROUS gentlemen who walk into the sauna without nary a towel (and they sit wherever they want). I’ve found there’s an interesting matrix involving age and body mass to predict how much clothing someone will be wearing in the sauna: the older and bigger a man is, the more shamelessly naked he will enjoy his sauna session.
These three types of sauna goers are perfect examples of people we mortgage and real estate folks deal with on a daily basis. The bad-breath guy is like the client who needs help with his credit score – the equivalent to giving him a Tic Tac – so his offer will get accepted. Then there’s the light-bulb guy. This, of course, is the client who lucks into finding a home in his price range with a beautifully remodeled chef’s kitchen but complains about the color of the grout in the backsplash. And last but certainly not least is naked man who is the pathological oversharer. You ask him for his birthdate, and you suddenly find that you’ve lost thirty minutes of your life and know everything about his gallbladder surgery and where he has travelled so far around the world to collect spoons. Obviously, we have to be licensed to perform our jobs, and it’s this very licensing coupled with our knowledge that adds invaluable worth to the transaction. But where we really EARN our living is dealing with so many different personalities and making it look easy, right?
