The Planning Meeting

I usually set up my planning meeting for a couple of days after I’ve sent out the scenarios.  I want them to have a chance to fully review everything, create question discuss it between themselves so when we meet in my office or do a phone call for this meeting it’s a back and forth conversation.  If it’s a one-sided conversation it doesn’t work.

I always start out the meeting addressing their questions, I want them to be just as engaged in the call as I am.  My concept of this is that they are fully invested in building out their mortgage plan that’s going to work best for their situation and I’m the expert helping them do that.

I then start going over the scenarios, I make sure to start with the simple 30 year fixed at no points. Then I dive into what do points really mean, what’s the break-even, what does an arm look like for them and is it really as scary of a product as most people think.

It’s also really important to explain that they can have 1 mortgage plan for a turn key end all be all home but anther mortgage plan for a different type of home.   I have some clients that have said you know if we end up doing a condo we’ll do a 10-1 arm since we know we won’t stay there forever but if we find a perfect SFR we’ll do the 30 year fixed.

The final thing at this meeting is you need to end it with: “the next step is…”

You need to go over what happens from here, your follow-ups, them out looking at houses and they need to know that anytime they see a home that they might offer on that they need to call you so you can update the scenarios specific to that house, give them an updated pre-approval letter and have it on your radar so if it’s accepted you can hit the ground running.