Buying Dreams, Blaming Insurance: FHA Loans Under the Microscope

Headlines say rising insurance premiums are crushing the American dream of homeownership. But is insurance really the problem? Shane and Tonya discuss FHA loans, skyrocketing costs, and why insurance keeps getting blamed for issues created elsewhere. This conversation tackles affordability, financial reality, and the vital role independent agents play in helping clients see the truth behind the clickbait. 

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Transcript

Announcer: [00:00:00] This is IA forward your Playbook for Success as an independent insurance agent. Here to help you knock it outta the ballpark are your host, Shane Tatum and Tonya Lied.  

Tonya: Welcome to IA Forward, Shane. My insurance brain kicked in yesterday at the Hilton in Houston.  

Shane: Oh, please do tell  

Tonya: I had arrived at the Hilton on Thursday night. 

Friday morning. At about 5:00 AM the normal person that valet parked the car was not available, and a security guard parked my vehicle. When I went to check out at noon yesterday, they could not find my car in the two hours it took. For the people at the Hilton in Houston to find my car, my insurance brain kicked in and I started thinking, okay, if my car is gone, how do I handle this? 

Is my car insurance cover? The fact that my [00:01:00] car is gone? Does the Hilton's insurance cover this? How am I gonna get home? Who's gonna pay for my rental car? I totally went insurance geek and spiraled,  

Shane: obviously security guard. That's a little weird to have your security guard instead of the valet park, your car. 

Tonya: There was nobody at 5:00 AM to park my car except the security guard. I  

Shane: guess. He or she just took it upon themselves to say, I'll park your car. Why not? But it's probably. Enough information to say that the hotel or the valet company or the security company, depending on whether that's a contracted role or not, certainly has some responsibility, if not all the responsibility. 

It does make you think about things like that, and if you had comprehensive coverage, physical damage coverage on your vehicle, you can follow on that as theft potentially. But then police report. There's a lot of messy stuff there. Obviously, the people that are [00:02:00] doing the damage, the service that can't find your car needs to step up, but your brain starts going all these places. 

Obviously this should be on the business's insurance, but what happens if they don't have the appropriate coverage? Because it's the security guard. What if it's excluded? If it's not the val? There's so many. Insurance geek out things that you could pull into this conversation,  

Tonya: and I think I went through all of them in those two hours. 

Shout out to the folks at the Hilton Post Oak at the Galleria who did treat me to lunch and tried to de-stress me. I just wanted to go home. I knew I had this really long drive and the bellman there has been there for 34 years. I've stayed at that hotel a great deal and. He's such a consummate professional and he just says, you know, miss Tonya, I've got it. 

We'll find it. Just, he's absolutely fantastic and a somewhat iconic fixture there at the hotel, and he just kept saying, we've never [00:03:00] lost a car before. I said, I would think that would be a rare occurrence because Cadillac's not that easy to lose, like it's a pretty big vehicle. I got home at midnight last night, and when I got home I was thinking, okay, I am gonna crawl into bed and go to sleep. 

My husband was watching one of my favorite sports movies for Love of the Game. When I walked in. It was right in the eighth inning where it hits Kevin Costner that he's pitching a perfect game. Nobody's been on base. When my husband told me he was watching this, I let him know when I crossed over into Alabama, because that's like an hour and 20 minutes. 

He told me he was watching this and I said, clear the mechanism. He said, what? I said, for love of the game, clear the mechanism. And he said, what are you talking? I said, are you actually watching the movie? Have you ever watched this movie? He's like, yeah, I love this movie. But somehow he [00:04:00] missed, clear the mechanism. 

He called me back about five minutes later and he said, oh, I, I, I saw before he does that. And I'm like, if you will watch the whole rest of the movie and pay attention, clear the mechanism is actually a thing. He had totally missed that.  

Shane: People watch Bull Durham and miss breathing through their eyelids, so it happens. 

Clear. The mechanism to me is like focus. There's also another great sports movie. That has sort of that kind of mindset around I, it's a legend of bagger Vance maybe where the focus comes in on the fairway and the shot. I love sports movies in general. I could talk about an entire podcast series on sports movies. 

I think that's relevant to the insurance industry personally.  

Tonya: This is a great idea. We should do this.  

Shane: Sports movies are incredible.  

Tonya: You're clear. The mechanism moment happened when you rock back on your heels. Then you shift your weight forward to the balls of your feet right before you speak or [00:05:00] right before you go on stage to do something. 

You have this shortstop moment where you shift your weight back and forward.  

Shane: Oh yeah, I didn't know I did it, but it makes sense. Heel to heel, toe, heel to ball of feet. There's a whole thing there. Not everyone, by the way, is a balls of their feet athlete. There are athletes with different settings and it's kind of. 

Shocking to find that out because I was always taught to be on the balls of your feet, never be on your heels. That ball played him. There's actually athletes that are better by being more grounded and more heel. That baffles me because I'm more of the balls of my feet kind of guy, so that's not shocking that I do that. 

When I speak  

Tonya: as a dancer, you ground through the balls of your feet. If your weight is so far back, you're in your heels. Life is not gonna work. You're gonna be on the floor. It's not gonna be attractive.  

Shane: There's actually an infield drill, heel to toe that starts with the toe up and [00:06:00] the heel down, and I would've never been allowed to do that drill when I was playing. 

And so we would've never taught that. But now they teach that. And it's interesting now that I see what. Infielders can do comparably. There's been some great, obviously great infielders, Ozzy Smith, you know, Jeter, we talk about him a lot. There's some great defensive infielders across the our, our history. 

But now you just have more athletes. So I'm open to this idea that. There could be better ways, there could be better drills, there could be ways to improve your game. I think that goes for everything. Certainly the insurance agency business.  

Tonya: So for our listeners who have complained that we don't talk about sports stuff enough, there you go. 

There's our, our sports segment for today,  

Shane: sports Intro.  

Tonya: I wanna discuss an article that came out recently in Market Watch, but I've seen this. Everywhere, [00:07:00] especially in the last year, and I had this challenge personally here in the Florida insurance market. There was an article that came out recently about people that have FHA home loans and how they're not being able to afford their houses because of how drastically insurance premiums are going up. 

This article opens talking about how someone's premiums. In California went from $7,000 to $12,000 in a year. They'd been in their home for three years. This happened this year. We're in a very similar situation. We had a very similar percentage increase, actually a little bigger percentage than that here in Florida. 

It makes such a huge difference in your standard of living. It puts that idea into your head of, okay, well. I thought I could afford this house when I bought it. I really can't now. And then there's other things you have to [00:08:00] remove from your life if you decide to stay in your house. And it's, the idea to me of owning your house is, is the American dream. 

And if we're looking at people that make 40 to $50,000 a year, which are most of our FHA. Home loan people. What does that look like when you have rates that have those 40, 50% jumps?  

Shane: I'm gonna defend the insurance industry, of course, and be a big advocate here of the agencies and hopefully maybe help agents understand how to have these conversations. 

First of all, let's start with, this is a real estate generated article. Market watch is the first. Inclination of, okay, who's writing this article? What's the source of this article? The source of this article is to paint. The mortgage industry positively and find someone to distract the consumers from what's [00:09:00] going on inside the mortgage industry. 

Interest rates are up  

Tonya: and we love our real estate and our mortgage partners, but they blame us for a lot of stuff.  

Shane: It's definitely a strenuous relationship. We love our mortgage partners. We love our real estate partners. I know agents have mortgage partners across the country, and it's a big source of referrals and centers of influence. 

Look, we're in this together. The mortgage companies and industry leaders that try to throw insurance people under the bus, it, it's frustrating on my end because what you have in this article is number one, state of California has had regulatory issues, and so we all know that and we watch that over the last few years, we had multiple decades of suppressed rates. 

There's the foundation, what they don't talk about until deeper into the article after they've gotten you with the headline. Of insurance costs so much now that people can't afford to pay their mortgages. That's the headline right? Now. We look at this and go, okay, wait a minute. This [00:10:00] actual policy being indicated is the policy of a real estate professional. 

The policy is written through the California Fair Plan, not a private insurance company, which is even further of a depressed market because they're. Severely underfunded. The home is in the Sierra Nevada mountains close to Yosemite National Park. So we're talking about a mountain home. Number one, we're talking about a major wildfire risk number two. 

And so what we don't talk about in any of this article is the actual value of the home insurance that we're being asked as an industry. To provide coverage for, that's just mysteriously left out of the article. And then you get buried deep in the article and you read that the average homeowner is expected to spend an extra $261 on insurance premiums this year. 

That's not quite the shock effect of the insurance premium going up $5,000 a [00:11:00] year and I can no longer afford it. And then the really fun piece of this. Is that our real estate industry is selling homes to people who can't afford it. Because an FHA backed loan requires a 3.5% down payment industry standards. 

Economic standards for years have always been 20%. Now we can get down to 3.5%. Oh, and by the way, if you don't have the 3.5%, we can help you with that. We can figure out a way to help you borrow for the down payment. Then we can load you up with PMI. We can load you up with all kinds of stuff, and then when the insurance premium goes up, we can blame the insurance industry for all the problems. 

Is that a good rant?  

Tonya: That's a good rant. As we read through the article, it does talk about Florida some and it talks about. How Utah saw the biggest jump in premiums between 21 and 25 at 59%, followed by Illinois and Arizona. And it does go a little further, [00:12:00] you know, through throughout the article, the significant upticks in Florida, South Carolina, Georgia, all of the things. 

But going back to the idea of people being able to get these home loans, I was really shocked two weeks ago. One of my very best friend's daughter, who is 22 years old, just graduated from college and is about to get married. She works full-time at a snow cone stand. He does not yet have a job coming out of college. 

They were able to qualify for an FHA loan to buy a house. All I could think of was this is a person. That the last time she came to Florida, which was last summer, they rented an Airbnb that for some reason I think I've had four of my friends' kids rent this Airbnb in [00:13:00] Pensacola and they arrive and it's behind two tattoo shops and like some kind of. 

Chinese restaurant, and it is in the drive by shooting area. It is not even in the stray bullet zone, like it is a scary place. And then I get these phone calls either from parents or these kids. Hey Miss Tonya, like there's eight of them down there. They're scared to death. Yes, they can come stay at our house, but these are kids that can barely afford to pay 49, 50 $9 a night to stay at Airbnbs. 

They're being able to get home loans and they have no idea what insurance costs, what this is. This article even goes on to say that I think it was something like 80% of people that get an FHA loan have less than one paycheck in the bank.  

Shane: Yeah. And that's kind of part of the frustration when I read an article like this is we're throwing blame [00:14:00] at an easy target, the insurance industry, while such a huge. 

Backbone to the economy and such a important element in the economy constantly gets tossed under the bus with the idea because it's mandated. I mean, you gotta have insurance if you're gonna get them part of the mortgage qualification. So it becomes a mandate. People get frustrated about having to pay a mandate and filling like they're being forced to do something. 

But that financial interest that has to be secured and protected is the only way you're gonna get qualified for the loan in the first place. That education isn't happening, which is full circle back to why the independent agency system is so vital. The advisor level of an insurance agent is so important. 

Being able to get in there and have that discussion, it's a slippery slope. The real estate agent referring new customers in the mortgage company, referring new customers. They don't want you to mess up their, their sell of their house or the mortgage that they're trying to book and sell and portfolio [00:15:00] eyes out to the buyer and the buyers of these security elements that these things get packaged into. 

I mean, there are movies from the 2008 mortgage backed securities and just what happened to that. Inside our economy, we continue as an industry to be thrown under the bus by our peers. We need to hold our ground, educate. Talk to consumers. We can't allow certain other industries to make us look like the bad guy. 

The reality of it is that insurance is not the reason you can't afford your mortgage. It's the reason being blamed by the other individuals in the equation. But the reality is you shouldn't have been sold the home in the first place. You shouldn't have been approved for the loan in the first place. Now that we've done all that and people have gotten paid and people are getting paid, we are left holding the bag right? 

That's the reality. I mean, the mortgage [00:16:00] guy is gonna sell the loan, right? So they're gonna make all their money up front and they're gonna sell the loan. The real estate agent is getting their commission up front. You know, my question is, is that if others industries had similar compensation plans to what the in independent agency did, where it was more of a long tail compensation plan instead of an upfront front loaded compensation plan, would they see the world differently if you didn't get all your money upfront? 

They're like washing their hands and done, and then we are there for years and years and years. The mortgage company gets to say to the customer when the customer calls and says, why did my payment go up $400 a month? Well, your insurance went up so we had to increase your payment. Okay? We start that cycle. 

I think that good partnerships should be able to hold each other accountable for that. The really good agents are holding their referral sources accountable to those kinds of statements.  

Tonya: Another one of those moments in this article is. That's diaper [00:17:00] money. That's money for food that you're taking off the table. 

Yes, that's the case. I mean, you know, I, I can see where diaper money and, and food being, being taken off the table because you're having to, to pay the big bad insurance company. Of course, with ours, we had a double whammy because our taxes went up rather drastically. Welcome to Florida. But to me it goes back to this idea of you should be able to buy a home coming right out of college. 

There are parents telling their kids, don't throw away your money. Renting, I think back to 19-year-old Tonya coming out of college and if I had bought a house then, or even thought about having the money to buy a house, which I did not, I wouldn't have had a clue how to take care of that house. My poor dad would've had to have moved in the house because I wouldn't have, I didn't have a clue how to do that. 

Coming out of college, I always laugh and say that I had a pager. This tells [00:18:00] y'all how old I am, but I had a pager that the company I worked for gave me. If somebody needed to get in touch with me, they would page me and I would walk a block to the payphone on the corner. And give it my quarter and call the person back. 

This was life. The idea that three months out of college I would be buying a house is unfathomable to college graduate Tonya. Just because of where I was coming out of school. I definitely wouldn't have understood the idea of trying to budget for an increase in taxes and insurance. I was just trying to figure out how to put gas in my car and I was excited if I could fill the gas tank of my car up as opposed to just trying to put $5 worth in. 

Shane: My story is we get married young. We're 22 years old. Our first place to live is an apartment. We live in an apartment for a year. We rent, and [00:19:00] then we decide to buy this little home and remodel it. Now, I will say this, the home we bought. Little frame, two bedroom, one bath. Literally a four room house. Very old, but built well, pier and beam, not on a slab. 

We added a bathroom and a utility room to the back of it. The cost of that home in 1997 when we remodel, everything was right at $60,000. Okay. That was it. We went to the bank. We got a loan, $60,000. When I think back. To these moments. We lived in that little two bedroom, one bath home for eight years. We were 31 and 32 years old when we built our house, nine years, one year, renting eight years, having purchased a home that we were able to afford, we did not purchase. 

350,000, $450,000 home [00:20:00] at the age of 23, 24 years old. We purchased a little frame home that was probably not much to anyone, but it was affordable. It was cute, right? It was my, my oldest daughter remembers that home. Loved, loved that she was born there. Both of my daughters were actually born there. The youngest doesn't remember it. 

She was less than a year old when we moved out. The oldest was five, like when we moved out. Like she remembers it, her room, the bedroom, the girls shared. We didn't think a thing about it at that moment. The world was our oyster at 22, 23 years old. Let me peel it back a little bit further. We lived in very modest apartment and dorm rooms in college. 

Tonya: Yes, we did not have granite countertops in our dorm rooms. We  

Shane: did not. So let's just keep peeling this back to college educated individuals, finance business majors, me and [00:21:00] my wife in the nineties, buying this little small frame house thinking, this is wonderful. This is fantastic. We, we were, were proud  

Tonya: of that house. 

We were  

Shane: so proud of that house. We also lived in apartments and I lived in a house my senior year with uh, five other baseball players there, critters. Lots of really disgusting things because it's six guys. We didn't care and it was cheap. My rent for that was $150 a month. Those were our college days. 

College housing was kind of rough. Julie lived with, had a roommate. Her and her roommate had a nice apartment. My view was that they were very upscale because they had a nice apartment. It was not a fancy apartment at all. It was a very simple apartment. I lived in border slums as a college student, and it taught me a lot of appreciation. 

If you keep peeling [00:22:00] back, what creates the expectation that you're supposed to graduate from college, get a job making a bunch of money and buy a three, $400,000 house? Like that is not a good financial thing to me, unless you have a trust fund. That for the rest of us that don't have trust funds, it's fine to rent. 

Like I disagree completely with pundits and the Dave Ramsey's on this like this. It's okay to rent for a couple of years. Get your feet under you, save a little money. That money you're spending on rent isn't crazy throwing away money, especially when. The house you're trying to buy, you can't afford, right? 

It's not the insurance industry's fault that your insurance premiums are what they are because it's not the insurance industry's fault that the inflationary factors and the construction [00:23:00] cost has gone up so high and that you can't build a house for less than $250 a square foot. That. Thousand square foot house, by the way, it was about a thousand square foot, that two bedroom, one bath house. 

The reality is that there is no way on this planet, that house should be $200,000. That house even adjusted for inflation should be about 80 or $90,000 period today. Okay? That's affordable. Now, are people gonna be willing, young people gonna be willing to come out of college after living in granite countertop homes? 

Fancy dorm rooms and settle for that because if you can't then rent the apartment. That's my suggestion. I talked to my daughters about this and it's like, you know, don't load yourself down and go FHA because you can, doesn't mean you should, because that doesn't mean you can afford it. And then turn around and listen to the mortgage company. 

Blame it on the insurance [00:24:00] industry because you can't afford your payments anymore.  

Tonya: So many consumers believe clickbait, right? And we can talk about all day long in a B2B world, but our listeners are dealing in B2C transactions, relationships, conversations. How can we help our listeners through conversations like this? 

Shane: I think we have to be truthful. I think we have to have compassion and we have to have some empathy there, but I do think it's right to truthfully share what the reality of it is. Everybody's not gonna feel comfortable here. Everybody's not gonna feel comfortable getting into this counseling kind of mindset, but somebody's gotta be honest. 

If other parties to the transaction are not being honest with the consumer, then somebody's got to be, because we'd end up in this perpetual state of. People not being able to [00:25:00] afford what they're buying. They're making this stuff affordable without looking at the true capability of that buyer. I understand everybody wants the dream, like I wanna play major league baseball. 

I want to be a professional athlete, but I can't. Why do we think it's expected or necessary that everyone should be the same when it comes to what they can afford? Everybody's not the same. When it comes to what they can afford and nobody. Nobody wants to be honest and, and nobody wants to be compassionately transparent about that. 

You don't have to be rude about the statement. You just have to look at the evidence. Hey, you know your combined household income, what do you want between you and your spouse? Do y'all want a one income home? Do you want a two income home? Okay, you gotta be a two income home. Okay? You're combined household income's, $80,000. 

Hey, you can't afford a $500,000 house. It doesn't work. Let's back up here. But they said, I can go FHA and my down payment can [00:26:00] be. I can borrow. I can do this in a way that I don't actually have to come out of pocket. That's a gimmick. That's not real. It's worse than paying rent to get into a home that you can't afford, that you have to sell. 

It's like buying a car you can't afford. You could end up upside down in a market like this. There could be a real estate correction. Hopefully not a crash, but we could see corrections happen. That $500,000 house may be worth 400,000 bucks. Now you're in trouble 'cause you got no equity. Somebody's gotta be truthful as insurance agents to be the advisor if we have to, because part of being the advisor and stepping up and doing that is worth protecting ourselves. 

We really have to like, we're the ones getting backed into the corner and blasted in the media and in articles as the big bad wolf. So. Somebody's gotta stand up and show some truth in this conversation, and I volunteer us to do that. I'm sorry if you don't want to [00:27:00] do that, but I think we don't have a choice. 

Tonya: I love that you brought up this statement that you want to play Major League baseball. Right? We all know that Shane wants to be the shortstop for the Yankees. Right? Like we all get it. If he didn't have that information, now you do, but. You got the opportunity to throw out the first pitch at an Astros game. 

You actually did get to have your moment on a major league field. It wasn't the one you expected, but it was still a pretty cool experience, right? So maybe you encourage your client to buy that $200,000 house as opposed to that $450,000 house for that first home, and they're able to afford the insurance. 

They're able to afford the taxes. All of the things. It's not gonna be the same experience, but it's still gonna be a pretty good one.  

Shane: I have the framed picture, the memories, my girls watching me throw out the first pitch. Nobody knows that I was one of [00:28:00] three and it was a business promotion. Nobody knows all that. 

Just like my college degree on my wall. Nobody has ever said, Hey, what was your GPA? Nobody said that unless you're gonna be a doctor trying to get into med school. Maybe some law school stuff,  

Tonya: C equals jd. They will tell you that all day long.  

Shane: There are some areas where it matters. Most places it doesn't matter. 

You just have the degree and you got it. If you are a welder, your work is gonna speak for itself. Throwing out the first pitch was a great experience. That's kind of one of those man that's, I didn't even know it was a bucket list item, but it became a bucket list item after the fact. That's cool. I got to stand on a major league field. 

I'm not getting paid to play for the Yankees. Still waiting on the call. That is a perfect example. An illustration of maybe not the half a million dollar home, maybe the 200,000 home, maybe not the $200,000 home. Maybe it's one 50, right? Maybe there's something else you could do. Maybe it's a fixer upper. 

[00:29:00] Maybe there's just a path you need to take. That is a little bit different. If I go to school to be a teacher, knowing what the market is for teachers, what is being paid, argument aside whether we pay teachers enough or not. You know what the market is for certain professions. When you go into that, you look into that, you go, okay, do I want to be a chiropractor or an anesthesiologist? 

Well, if you look at that, the anesthesiologist market pays a whole lot more. Educators don't become educators because they're in it for the money. When they go down that path and they say, oh, I'm gonna be a teacher. It's awesome. We need so many teachers. I have a teacher as a daughter, and who knows, I may have a second teacher eventually with the youngest daughter. 

I spent seven years on school board in our local community. I am a huge of public education. All of these things are really, really good things, but if two educators marry each other and their household [00:30:00] income is what it is. They're not going to buy a $500,000 house and afford it. It is just the facts of life. 

So this is where we are and this is what we're not being truthful about. And I would say the same thing to the young producer. Hey, don't strap yourself with this debt that you don't need when you're starting out. You know, I had an agency friend, older agency, friend of mine. Very old school. I didn't agree with it. 

I never did it because my dad did not do this. I watched my dad as a banker drive very old, used minivan for 10 years because he was not going to go into vehicle debt while he had kids in activities and costs were high, et cetera. And I had a friend that was the direct opposite, sort of an insurance mentor of mine. 

Of my dad and I got to see this really interesting parallel. This insurance [00:31:00] friend was not as wealthy as he appeared. He had a nice home and he always drove a brand new vehicle. He always drove a brand new pickup. He could not afford that brand new pickup. He leased that pickup. He opinion was, he had to look like you had money in order to make money. 

This was his opinion. He was of that sort of breed of people. And then over here I had my dad. Who was driving this old vehicle, the local banker, and he was buying land instead of cars, and he was planting seeds for the future instead of wasting money. And he just, it's just the millionaire and the overalls kind of effect. 

Right. And so I just feel like there's this miss that young people that people who are trying to. Make it so to speak are getting bad advice because it's being made available to them [00:32:00] because they can do it. They think they should do it, and that's not the case every time.  

Tonya: Is it okay to want those things? 

Absolutely. When Mercedes announced last year that they were discontinuing. C class and E-Class convertibles in the US market. That's kind of like my dream. I've always wanted that pretty Mercedes convertible, and could I have made that happen? Yes, but it didn't make any sense. I love my car. It's in great shape. 

It gets me where I need to go. It packs enough luggage that I'm able to do all the things I need to do when I travel, just because I wanted it. Does not mean that it was what was good for me, right? And so there my Cadillac is still sitting in my garage. Sometimes we don't get what we want because we already have what we need. 

Shane: Yes, it is 100% okay to want and dream of having those things. I have no problem with people [00:33:00] wanting to make money, increase their wealth. I think that is the American dream. The problem is not. Being realistic or patient about the process, like I want it now type of mindset because comparison is the thief of joy. 

I've watched both sides of it happen. My wife and I didn't drive the vehicles that we do today. Like I still don't. I drive Toyota pickup and so, but my wife drives A BMW. Okay. My wife, I, I've documented that on this podcast in previous podcasts. She drove a Chevy Traverse before she drove. We had a suburban couple of Suburban, we had a used suburban, right? 

She had a a, a neat maxima. These were the stepping stone processes as we had a family. And today as an empty nester, when we don't have a lot of people to haul around, it's just her. 80% of the time, and the rest of the time it's me and her. She now has a BMW. She has a, you know, and no, she [00:34:00] doesn't have A-B-M-W-X seven. 

She has A-B-M-W-X three. What? Why? Why does she need an X seven? She doesn't need an X five. We could afford it probably, but it's feels silly. She wanted A BMW, so we have A BMW. We can afford to do that now, but we couldn't afford to do that 20 years ago. That's the whole point. So and so bought a house when they were 26 and it's a 350 $400,000 house. 

It's a 500,000 house. Okay. What's the rest of the story? Are they on an A FHA loan buying that house? Did they get a gift from parents or grandparents for the down payment? They're. Is probably more to the story. Do not let yourself get sucked in. At the end of the day, it's pride and that will get you upside down, and you can't focus on achieving your goals because you got sucked in to. 

Articles that started this conversation, you become one of the casualties where you [00:35:00] bought the home that you couldn't afford because they set you up for Phil. And that's the part that I think us as independent agencies and as counselors and advisors like we are in this economy, we're the backbone of this economy and there's nothing that says we should not be the one the advisor. 

The truth talker about what really is happening here. If our friends in the mortgage industry and real estate industries aren't going to do it, somebody's gotta do it and it's going to help your business. That's my view. It's always helped my business to be that truth. Talk. To give people the reality of the advice. 

It's always helped my business. It's never hurt my business to do that.  

Tonya: I'm gonna leave us today with this quote from Ray Lewis. You have to be willing at any moment to sacrifice who you are, for what you will become.  

Shane: Attitude's a choice. Make a great one.  

Announcer: Bye y'all. [00:36:00] At the Integra Partner Network, we understand that carrier access is the key to your agency's success. 

That's why Integra offers direct access to top-rated personal and commercial carriers. Ensuring your agency thrives in today's challenging market. And with our comprehensive resources, profit sharing and bonus opportunities, technology and peer support, all while you retain a hundred percent of your book with no penalties to exit Integra, it's ready to empower you and your agency To find sustained growth, find your way to Integra. 

Visit integra of partner network.com today. That's integra partner network.com.