Mortgage Professional America: Describe your career journey to today. How did you start in your role? What attracted you to the profession?
Tammy Saul: My career journey was very atypical. I am frequently referred to as the accidental loan officer. My background has nothing to do with mortgages. I went to business school, and then I went to law school, and I graduated law school, and I was a practicing attorney for two years with no thought to do anything more than that because that is what one does when one goes to law school – they become a lawyer, and that’s what they are for the rest of their life, right?
But my then-boyfriend, now my husband, was a mortgage loan officer and sales director at a mortgage company. I was suddenly and, without notice, fired from my legal job, which was devastating to me because it was my identity, my career, my everything, and my intention was to go and find another job quickly. So, I started applying, but not wanting to lose face and not wanting to not have a job in that interim period, I asked him, ‘Hey, can I work with you? I’ll just be a loan officer for a few months until I get hired somewhere else, and of course, I’m not going to stay here because I’m a lawyer. I went to law school. I need to continue practicing law because this is what I’ve invested years of my life, and this is my passion.’
On my first day in the mortgage industry, I was given about 20 minutes of training on what is a loan value and what is that to income. And I said, ‘OK, I understand there is no licensing’ at the time. You didn’t get licensed in 2003. You basically just got hired. So, they gave me a little bit of background. They gave me a script, put me behind a desk with the telephone and a computer, and said, ‘OK, we have this dialer. The dialer calls out, gets leads, and then people are gonna call in, and then you have to sell them a mortgage.’ And this was all subprime.
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