The checklist I ran before every call-out

When the phone went off for a negotiator call-out, the clock started before I stood up.

There is an order to it. Check my gear. Check it again. Make sure the radio works, because finding out it does not at the scene is finding out too late. Fuel in the car. Then I am moving, and on the way I am already thinking about the next part: who am I going to be talking to, who else is on scene, who is going to be running it.

Then you get there and it is all coordination. Talk to the commander. Work out what the scene actually is. Find a phone number that rings inside. Find out who is in there, whether there are kids, whether there is a dog, anything at all that gives you something to work with.

Every bit of that is fast, and none of it is rushed, because the slow part happened days earlier in a parking lot with a checklist.

If I am rolling to a call-out and my car needs fuel, that is not a small problem. That is a wrench in the machine.

What that has to do with your mortgage

Sometimes a window opens. Something changes, and for a short stretch it makes sense to refinance, which just means replacing the loan you have with a different one.

The people who miss it are almost never the people who did not want it. They are the people who needed two weeks to find their paperwork, and the window was not two weeks long.

I will be honest about my own side of this too. Loan officers miss these windows. We do not all have a good system for telling people in advance, and so a file that could have been ready sits there while the moment goes past.

The list, and it really is the whole list

If you are employed and paid through payroll, I need seven things.

Your most recent mortgage statement. If we are in September I need September, and if this rolls into October I will need October, so it is the only one on here that goes stale.

Your current homeowner's insurance.

Your last two W-2s. That is the wage summary your employer sends you at the start of each year.

Thirty days of pay stubs.

And this is the one that matters for anybody reading this in a uniform: if you work overtime, I also need your year to date stub, or your final stub from last year. Overtime counts, but only if I can show it has been landing for two years. One strong month does not do it. The record does.

If you work for yourself, swap the W-2s and the stubs for two years of business tax returns, your business bank statements, and a current profit and loss statement, which is just what the business took in and what it spent.

And your homeowners association dues, if you pay them.

Send it before anything is happening

That is the part people find strange. There is no deal. Nothing is pending. You are sending me documents for a thing that might not happen for months.

That is exactly the point. I build the file out and it sits there finished. When your number comes up, I need an updated mortgage statement and updated pay stubs, because your insurance has not changed and your W-2s have not changed. That is a phone call and an afternoon instead of two weeks of digging.

None of this is a prediction about what is going to happen or when. I do not do predictions. It is just that being ready costs you one evening, and not being ready costs you the whole window.

The honest reason I go on about this

I have sat in a car outside a scene knowing that everything I needed was already in the trunk, and I have watched somebody else arrive and start looking for something. Those are two completely different days, and the difference between them was decided the week before.

Go and find the seven things. It is one evening with a drawer and a scanner, and then it is done.