The story

I am Thad Kerkhoff, a loan officer with CMG Home Loans on Bainbridge Island, Washington.

Before this I spent five years in the Army as a Military Police officer, with two deployments to Iraq. Then fourteen years as a police officer with the Renton Police Department. I have been doing mortgages for about five years now.

If you found a page somewhere that says I am a vice president in Gig Harbor, or that I work in Tacoma, those are old. This is the current one, and it is the only one I control.

What does a police officer know about mortgages?

The honest answer is that the job was never really about crime. It was about walking into somebody’s worst afternoon and being the person who stayed calm and worked the problem. You get very good at two things. Asking questions until you actually understand what is happening, and telling people the truth in words they can use.

That turns out to be most of this job too.

Nobody calls a cop when things are going well. Nobody calls me when the paperwork is easy, either.

The people who come to me are usually somewhere in the middle of something. A house they want and a timeline that is tightening. A loan that fell apart somewhere else. Pay that does not fit neatly in the boxes on the form. That last one is the one I care most about, because I have lived it.

Why the pay stub thing matters so much

If you work nights, or pick up overtime, or get paid extra for the shifts nobody else wants, your income does not look like the tidy example in a lender’s training manual. It looks lumpy. Somebody who has never worked that way looks at it and gets nervous, and then you get a phone call that starts with the word unfortunately.

I know what those pay stubs look like because I used to get them. I know which parts count, which parts need a history behind them, and what to go and collect before anybody has a chance to say no.

What I do that a lot of loan officers do not

When my client makes an offer, I do not just talk to my client’s agent. I call the agent on the other side too. I tell them who my buyer is, why the file is strong, and how quickly we can be done. Then I ask, directly, whether their seller would put money toward my buyer’s costs.

Some people find that surprising. It should not be. The two sides of a deal are not supposed to be enemies. Somebody just has to be willing to pick up the phone and make the case, and it may as well be me.

What I will not do

I will not promise you a number I cannot see yet. I will not tell you where things are heading, because I do not know and neither does anybody else who says they do. And I will not use a piece of industry shorthand at you without stopping to say what it means.

The rest of it

I have four kids. I coach a basketball team that feeds the high school. I hunt and I fish and I grew up in the woods. I play a lot of golf at the veterans course, which is where a decent amount of my week actually happens. One of my kids just left for college, and I am told that gets easier.

Same town, same week, same stuff as you. That is sort of the point.