Ignorance is NEVER Bliss.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about my “doom and gloom” outlook on things. I became a licensed Real Estate Broker so that I could help people save their home from foreclosure, giving a better long term financial outlook for families that were struggling during the Great recession. I have a ton of experience with helping families when everything went wrong with their Mortgage and therefore their home. Now that the market is much much better, I get to help a lot of the folks who were in distress, get back into homes again. I often struggle with my outlook on things, I wonder if I’m being too negative. My personality is such that you always know where you stand with me, I don’t do fake, and I don’t sugar coat things. I just cut to the quick, I’m about as straight forward as you can be. Yes, I’m a huge smart ass and I speak sarcasm as a 2nd language (some might even day primarily), however if you ask me a straight question you will get a straight answer. Every. Time.
It’s my plan for the worst. hope for the best attitude that I’ve kind of questioned a bit lately. Buying and/or selling a home is a major life change and can be super stressful, do you really want your trusted advocate telling you all the things that could go wrong, so that if they do, you are prepared? I think the answer is yes, and no. It was bugging me a bit and I was considering being a bit less harsh about the worst case scenarios in preparing my clients, for example-
I always do a “Buyer Consultation” when getting a buyer set up to start their home search. Its an opportunity for us to set expectations from and for our clients. One of the things we talk about is making sure that when we make an offer we are considering what the house would sell for, if shortly after closing there were to be a tragedy, such as loss of job, or loss of life that would force the immediate sale of the home. I say things like, I cant blame the other broker for selling you an overpriced house, because I expect that once we have worked together you are so pleased with the results we got for you, that you would never consider using another agent.
Well, I’d been considering that this could be a bit too harsh a reality to discuss, until this last weekend when I was swimming in a pool with my kids, watching my daughter try to do an underwater somersault. She would always plug her nose before going under water, and I pointed out that when she only has one arm available, she ends up facing the other way because she is doing more of a corkscrew. I started talking to her about how she needed to stop plugging her nose in order to do the somersault properly. Well she went and proved me wrong, she worked at it and eventually did a one armed somersault, keeping her nose plugged underwater.
I started to explain to her about how when I was younger i would jump off and bridges and cliffs into the water, I would always plug my nose and when I hit the water the force would sometimes knock my hand off of my face and i had to be prepared for that, and be able to slowly exhale through my nose as I swam as fast as i could back to the surface.
I found myself telling her that she needs to be prepared, and know what do to if her hand ever comes off of her nose, underwater. I started to explain it to her much like to do to my clients at times. AS we started practicing what to do in the event that she was underwater without her nose plugged, I realized I could not stop doing this tyope of exercise with my clients either. If we don’t have a plan for when things go bad, they will go very, very bad. In being prepared for the worst, we never have a worst case, just better and best.
IGNORANCE IS NEVER BLISS!
L Ike your style