She ended up taking a break from her nascent career to work at retailer JC Penney instead. Ultimately, she secured a license before moving to Missouri. That’s when she decided to walk into the offices of GE Capital to ask for a job, securing a mortgage consultant slot in 1997. “I used to look at those loan officers coming in and realized how much money they were making,” she reasoned. “And it didn’t seem like they did that much work.”
The refi boom was very, very good to her
There was a refi boom going on at the time, and Schulz capitalized on it. “At GE Capital, we were in a call center taking incoming calls just from the GE Capital mortgage database from clients doing refis,” she said. “I remember being in that call center and there were 99 calls at all times – which was maxed out. I could just sit there and take calls all day and write loans all day.”
It was low-hanging fruit to be sure: “I didn’t want to take breaks or get off the clock because I was getting paid per loan that closed. I was taking 30 calls a day and 12 to 14 loan apps a day. It was a trial by fire.”
Taking so many calls in such rapid succession sharpened her skills at communicating with clients over the phone, she said – a trait that served her well in subsequent stints at Countrywide Home Loans, Home One Mortgage, the Advantage Mortgage Group and Brightside Mortgage LLC, where she’s been since April 2018 working in Arizona.
Looking back at her career, she recalled developing an aversion for corporate America again – a decision she made while at GE Capital – even after having profited from the experience. “While I was on maternity leave, they shut down our San Bernardino [Calif.] office and shortly thereafter they shut down our St. Louis [Mo.] office. GE is such a huge company, they cut things off when they’re done. So all those people were unemployed. I said ‘ewww, I don’t like corporate America. It’s so cold-blooded’. I didn’t know.”
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