The Intricacies Of Loan Servicing With Tim Griffith

There are certainly times when the business of loan servicing can be tricky. Between dealing with constant audits, shifting state matrices, and of course, difficult client cases, it’s a whirlwind—but at the end of the day, it’s also financially rewarding. Kevin Shortle is joined by Tim Griffith of FCI Lender Services, who also serves as President of ExchangeLoans. Tim speaks to Kevin about the intricacies of the loan servicing industry that companies and people working within the industry constantly have to tiptoe around. This informative exchange is certainly not one to be missed!

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The Intricacies Of Loan Servicing With Tim Griffith

I do appreciate you reading the blog and also, once again, do refer to people. I appreciate that as well. It helps the show and especially if you’re on iTunes, go ahead and if you enjoy the show, give me a five-star. That also helps the show and enables me to do more of these. I do have plans to increase the number of episodes. I know it’s been a little intermittent but I am working to correct that and make sure that it’s scheduled to come out. I appreciate you for having patience in that. Also, the YouTube channel, I’m posting some new videos on there so you can find me under my name on YouTube as well.

There are not many live events coming up for you this month to talk about, although if you are in Orlando and you are a client of NuView Trust, it is a trustee for those who do self-directed IRAs and 401(k)s and I’ll be the keynote speaker at their member-only event on March 25th. You can mark your calendar for that if you’re a client. If you’re not, you may want to look into that. Coming up in April, I may be back out in Arizona. I’ll give you a heads up on that and I plan on being out in Phoenix for a special mastermind group in May and then to Alto Oregon. I’ve got some travel coming up. I will make sure to put that on the website as we confirm the bookings. The website is www.KevinShortle.com. Thanks once again, everybody, for reading the blog and I’ve got another great one for you.

I’m excited to reconnect with my guest here. We both attended a high-level note conference held in Fort Lauderdale. It was the nonperforming and reperforming note conference down there by IMN. They glanced up at lunchtime and they’re over there waving their hands. It was great to sit down and catch up with them. They have grown once again and invited them to be on the podcast. I’ve got Tim Griffith on here. He is with the FCI. Many of you are familiar with FCI. Tim is the President of Exchange Loans over there. It’s great to have you on, Tim.

How are you doing?

I’m doing great. Once again, thank you for the time out to do this. I appreciate it. You had done many different things in many areas in this business. It’s great to have you on and see the continued growth. That’s a positive sign for the industry and the way that you have even personally invested within the industry. I’ve got a ton of things to talk about with you. We’ll start chipping away. For those who may not be familiar with you and with FCI, give us a little background on that.

FCI Lender Services is a family business. That’s how I got into it. My dad started the company in 1982 and we’re a loan servicer. We’re the nation’s largest private servicer. We passed $12 billion under management and licensed in all 50 states to handle the entire loan after origination through foreclosure. That’s the quick pitch on FCI.

The growth, the $12 billion, is in my opinion, bragging rights. I want to talk about that a little bit. The last time I saw you, it was at $8 billion. That was, I believe, and correct me if I’m wrong, but only a couple of years, you all have had tremendous growth, which I read is a good sign for the industry because I’m sure you are aware that for a period of time, a lot of people in the note investing world thought the inventory was all going away. It’s like, “There’s nothing out there anymore.” I kept telling people, “No, we’re in a little bit of a sandbar.” I explained the reasons for that. I said with the inventories are strong and the way that banks handle these loans is going to continue. I see continued growth in the industry. Is that what you saw on your side as well? Give us some insight as to that as it pertains to your growth as well.

Yeah. The market went down a little bit, but that market is still large there’s a place to grow. That’s what we saw. Gordon who works at FCI, he’s the top head contact when you bring loans over. He was throwing numbers around, I don’t want to quote the exact numbers because I don’t have them off the top of my head, but it’s something along the lines. If it was $12 billion in nonperforming loans, maybe it’s down to $3 billion or $4 billion, but that’s many loans that it’s going to keep feeding the pipeline.

You mean the total out there that eventually will work through the system and trickle down to the smaller investor, right?

Exactly, to be able to buy. Those giant pools are still trading. Maybe it’s less, but even if it’s half of the pie, the pie is still gigantic and nothing to worry about.

To go back and look at how many notes that we had at one point, that was crazy and we knew that wasn’t going to last forever but the banks are in a load, which makes sense. Why go through foreclosure these properties and then have to deal with them and all the expenses around that? Why not use the same system you’ve been using, which is bundle these up and sell them to the big players and let them naturally trickle down to the investor?

Absolutely and that’s where we can make our money. I see it’s the same old thing. It’s like stocks, they go up and they go down, but there’s always something to be done is how I feel.

Even that number is down to where it may be, that’s still much higher than foreclosures. People buying foreclosures are paying huge premiums and I don’t get it because the margins are thin. If you’re buying it that way, it would make more sense in my opinion to get a nonperforming note. That’s a lot of a service that FCI can do. Are you doing all services across the board or are you specializing in certain areas of service?

It’s all services across the board. For closure, workout, and everything.

Converting and getting notes to a reperform, making the outbound phone calls and doing all of that. It’s all the accounting and everything.

It’s the collections, workouts and the whole thing.

Is that divided into divisions? I know there have been some changes in the law and various licenses and things like that. I know your father and then you by association was always big on following the law and keeping up on everything, which is important because you don’t want to make a mistake early on and find out, you cut some corners and now you’re in trouble. What law has changed and how has that affected your company specifically?

While the market has gone down, it's still large and there's room to grow. Click To Tweet

It’s affected everything and I feel like what you’re talking about is the secret sauce of FCI. What it boils down to is we have a license for everything. I want to say this was before I got here, let’s say the mid-’90s somewhere around there he had 1 or 2 licenses and that covered the country. It was no problem. He’s up to 110, 115 licenses or something around there when there are only 50 states. Some states want debt collectors’ licenses. Some states say, “If you do a modification, you need an origination license, which it’s red tape and making it more difficult on everybody.” FCI, since we have licenses in all 50 states, there are about three-state audits going constantly. When one state finishes, a new one comes in. It changes everything like disclosures. We have the state matrix that powers the servicing system. That’s how we’re able to do it. We take in all those rules, we pass all these audits with flying colors, which is fantastic, but it’s a headache. These rules will come out. There’s this one state that wants us to put this disclosure, not just for loans in their state but for the whole country. How they have the power to do that, I’m not sure but they do, we did it, we complied. It’s that thing.

There’s the whole CFPB that came into being a couple of years and that shook the whole industry. You can track FCIs balanced that’s being serviced going up as CFPB came in because a lot of people close their doors. They either didn’t have the technology to follow up with these new requirements or it wasn’t worth them to it anymore. Market share grew that way. It’s been difficult, but it keeps getting bigger because this foundation is secure, “We’re going to get all the licenses, we follow the rule book, cross every t and dot every I,” and it keeps working.

You’ve got to have the proper infrastructure to even keep up with that. That’s a near-impossible task for every servicing company to know every law that’s being changed because it can be even done at the county level. I congratulate you all for doing that and taking the lead, which it is. It’s the lead in the industry because you guys are on top of it and that’s servicing this note investor community well. We do appreciate that. At the conference where we met, it’s brought up another topic. I did a State of the Industry Address at the NoteWorthy Convention in Anaheim. Part of what I put in that address, of course, it’s talking about various trends. Along the same vein of what we were talking about, I noticed and it stood out clearly to me that there were more attorneys at this last IMN Conference in Fort Lauderdale than I’ve ever seen as well. Did you happen to pick up on that or is it just me?

I’m with you, 100%. I get it with all these states going after every little thing, I want to say the number is four attorneys that are hired onsite at FCI to keep up with it. If that’s what we have to do, for every step of the process, everyone’s litigious. That’s not breaking news or anything but any little thing, it’s something. You have to add that when you’re purchasing loans, set a cushion amount that you’re going to have to fight a couple of battles. Sometimes when you go to these conferences, people make it sound like the end of the world like, “Don’t bother, it’s not worth it.” I don’t agree with that for one minute, but what I am saying is it is a reality. I have a note we foreclosed and they’re squatting in there. I’ve got 3, 4 extra months to try and kick them out. Budget for it, you’re still going to be okay. As long as you’re buying right, this stuff happens. That’s how the world works but it’s not the end of the world is what I’m trying to say.

I sat in on several panels and between the new laws for originating a loan and the laws in foreclosures and you get into land contracts and everything else. On the positive side, I also read that as this industry has matured because it wasn’t more than 7 to 10 years. It was still Wild West. Everybody did drove the thing and nobody worried about certain things when it came to compliance and all of that. When you have an industry that is a niche that you can get away with that. In my mind, this is in a way a good thing for the industry, quality investments, better understanding of procedures and the fact that it has grown to this size and it’s drawn attention to itself and it’s not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to growth. Would you agree?

I agree. I feel like I came in right at the end of the Wild West cowboy days and you still see some lenders in that mindset, even though it’s radically changed. There’s a bit of a transition period for some of those types of people but overall, it’s positive. One of the examples when the CFPB came in, once a loan crosses certain delinquency, you’ve got to start these phone calls and it was a big headache to figure out how to code. How are we going to throw these loans into the queue so we can make sure that we call them not only three different days but three different times of days? The timestamp has approved, we did that but if they answer for the first time, we don’t have to call a second time. It’s all these headaches, but at the end of the day, once you have that process in place, we don’t think about it anymore. That’s how I feel about a lot of this stuff. I’ve dealt with some people on the loan trading side. Not too long, we weren’t even trading collateral files. I wasn’t even looking at them and I can’t even fathom that but it’s probably good to have a collateral file.

 

Similar to what you said, individual investors are going to have to learn how to adjust. Part of the complaint there for example in years past about servicing companies was, “I’m still waiting on them. I’m still waiting for this. I’m still waiting on that.” Part of this is figuring out the right way to make sure things are done. Part of it is other companies in their procedures and things. Investors when they start to look at the benefits of coming to a company like FCI and saying, “I don’t have to worry about those competency issues on my shoulders because they are licensed to do this.” In my mind, outsourcing most everything in this business to make sure it’s compliant, I think compliance is simply the key. I agree with you, we need to budget for that in our investments. The benefits are huge because you have that knowledge. Back in the day, it was, “We’re fine with that, don’t worry about it.” You sleep better at night when you go, “We’ve got everything in a row here and we’re doing this the right way and in the long-term that’ll serve us better.

I tend to think that this business, buying loans, investing, that thing, I know this is my goal, but I have this feeling that everyone’s trying to get to that idea where you’re sitting on the beach or whatever and you look at your phone and it’s like “Another payment came in.” You’re making money for doing nothing. I’m a son of a servicer, of course, I’m going to say, “Use a service.” That’s what I feel like all the attorneys at all these conferences are doing as well. The idea that I would have to get on the phone and there are a lot of people who make this argument that if you’re the lender, they will be better to make a deal because you’re the lender, you can make the call, which you could do that at FCI still. We have our specialty department that has the full servicing and then we have a $30 program where we don’t make the calls. There’s even a hybrid approach. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to say the wrong thing. Even on that sub servicing, we’ll do the CFPB calls I talked about. If you were self-servicing and there are different rules for self-servicing, but I want that peace of mind. I want these investments to be passive. I want fewer problems and more money, not more problems. Maybe if you do it wrong, less money. That’s my outlook.

There are some scary things for long-term investors, especially on the loan origination side, which is important. People are buying real estate and selling on seller financing. Once again, if they’re not doing that in compliance, lawyers will tell you that the borrower and years down the road may be able to get all of their money back that they paid you because they’re unable to pay anymore. You’re supposed to somehow have this crystal ball of knowing that they’re going to have the ability to pay. There’s a checklist, there’s a compliancy list than that if you have that, you’re going to be okay. Imagine owning a note for many years and you’ve got to pay back that borrowed every penny that they’ve paid you. That’s crazy when you could have paid a little bit more money upfront to make it compliant.

That’s FCIs motto and what you’re saying, if you do it right upfront, it might be a little harder. It might cost a little more money. It might take a little longer, but that’s not going to happen to you.

Let me ask you this then too because I hear it from both sides. When I consult with people, I do one-on-one calls and all those things. Every once in awhile, somebody is going to drop the ball and a deal does go right. Everybody understands that, but I keep telling people, “You can’t expect a servicing company to do something when you didn’t tell them to do it. A lot of times they’re waiting on you.” What do you think is the best advice that you could give somebody and take it where they’re new in the business, even though my readers are new and advanced? If it’s somebody new to the business and they’re boarding something with a servicing company in general if you will, what’s the best advice you can give us on how to interact with them so everything goes as smoothly as possible?

I like the analogy and it’s not just an analogy because it’s true, but we’re your back office. We do everything in your direction. Sometimes there’s this idea that once I set it up with a service, it goes through the machine. They make all the calls for me and then hopefully, I’ll get X return because they waved their magic wand on it and it’s not like that. It’s going to go through the machine. At every fork in the road, we’re going to reach out to you and say, “The borrower called and they’re asking for a modification. Do you want to go yes or do you want to go no?” That’s the main thing, I’m not saying to double-check the work, but know what’s going on with your loan so that when that time comes and we ask that question A or B, you know which way you want to go.

The other thing is to stay consistent. Know what your goal is for this loan and don’t flip flop because that’s going to starts a whole other thing where “Maybe I can do a modification. No, never mind.” It’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for the servicer, it’s not good for the borrower to think that they’re getting a deal and they’re not. Stay consistent with what you want to do. When you know what your end goal is, those decisions will be a lot easier. I have a loan down here locally to me and there’s no reason this person shouldn’t be making their payment. They have the money to do it. This house’s loan-to-value is good but they keep asking their note rate is something along the lines of let’s say 2.8% or something.

It’s low and they want even lower. At some point, it’s like, “This is my line right here and we’ve gone beyond in helping.” I believe there are win-win scenarios everywhere. I know in the end that I’m willing to help because at some point, I’m getting taken advantage of and that’s not a win-win scenario. It’s something like that. We get another modification request and it’s like, “We’ve already given three modifications.” I’m like, “No.” That’s a hard muscle to build up over time. Once it’s built up, it makes everything easier is what I’m trying to say. It makes that back-office idea go because I know exactly where I’m trying to go.

That makes sense to me. I’m glad you said that because I put together a new course. I’ve always been telling people, “Go into these deals with multiple outs and run your numbers.” I put together a course where I took a deal after I did all the due diligence and I said, “I’m going to take this one deal and I’m going to run the numbers on eight different scenarios of what we could do so I can narrow it.” From what I heard on your summary, there was when they come on the board this loan, they board it but there’s got to be an exit strategy in mind that they can start to direct you all to build your task list, so to speak. There are certain things that have to be done, especially if it were to go to foreclosure. You might have to send a letter. You might have to run an ad in the paper.

There are all these different trigger points so they should have a clear understanding of what their number one exit strategy is going to be. There’s always going to be a case where that change is one side or the other, but have a direction to go. The other thing that I heard you say was communication, whether that’s through the phone if you have to with some servicing companies but I know, you and your father, Mike, founded the company. You guys are big on the text. I can’t imagine you’ve got everything on there. There’s no reason for them not to know what’s going on.

We have the system, it’s called LIRS and it comes free with every loan that you service here. What it does is anytime anyone inside the building here does anything on your loan, enters any note within our system, it instantly goes to LIRS. You can see everything that was done on your note every day the second it happens. That’s where the communication comes in, but they’re also going to reach out to you. If someone said, “A last-minute package came in, how do you want to respond to this?” They’re going to send you an email as well. It’s not for you to see each trigger point. They’re going to reach out. I follow my loans and I see, “They finally got this borrower on hold.” We kept getting their voicemail was full or no response and they got them and they said, “If we could work out something, I’d be open to that,” and my wheels are turning.

To edit what I said a little bit, and to go off of what you said, this is one of my dad’s saying is, “I plan for the worst and hope for the best.” When I’m saying that exit strategy, usually the worst thing that can happen is I get the REO back. I know anything above that is gravy. If they want to start performing again, hopefully, I bought it in a way that performing rate would be much better than me going to foreclosure. That’s what I want. That’s why I always want to work with these borrowers because it makes more sense for both of us. They get to stay in the house and I’m getting some cashflow going.

There’s only much. This is heartbreaking, but it does happen is there are times where say somewhere in Pennsylvania that takes forever to foreclose. I’ve had people called the day before the sale saying, “Let’s work something out. What can I do?” It’s like, “You had two years to do this. We reached out to you 20 or 30 times. I’m sorry, I can’t start that timer again because it’s going to make me lose way too much money.” It’s tough but anything other than that was my worst-case scenario. That’s the line in the sand. If I take it at this point, it’s a bummer, but you’ve done everything you can for somebody. This is a whole other thing where sometimes maybe it is the best for them to get something else and they don’t realize that yet. That’s another muscle to work is sometimes the best-case scenario is them starting something new.

I remember at the conference, attorneys talking about that and there are certain things that you need to check with us first before you go ahead and tell somebody, “We’ll do this, we’ll do that.” It’s important because they said we have ways of stopping it because the borrowers on the same hand, the highest growth of borrowers that go delinquent, they’re on their third go-round. They understand the system and they’re gaming the system. As investors, I agree with you. We see that more because property values have gone up. People do have potential equity and property style and they want to stay. That can work out great for us. You’ve got to watch out for those that are going to try to game you in the system like the example you gave.

They’ll reset your clock for two years, where you should pick up that phone and talk with the attorney. I’m saying people in general, the attorney and then they say, “No, you’re restarting a whole clock.” As much as you like to help somebody, we can’t do that. That’s another reason we saw attorneys because there is a little bit of gamesmanship that it makes more sense to pay a little bit more upfront and have it done the right way and have good legal counsel when you need it. Things don’t happen further down the line and you end up making a mistake in this world and then have a big setback on it.

Sadly, the world works that way, but they know every trick in the book. This is the other thing that drives me a little crazy as what we’re seeing too. It’s not the majority, but it happens enough where you can see where they get an authorized third party to talk on their behalf and that authorized third party isn’t working for free. Your monthly payment is going to a third party to fight you on making that payment. What can you do at that point but say, “Communication is done at this point?” Once you’re paying somebody else instead of paying the contract we have, that’s it.

If you’re a new audience to the show, this is something I want to do. Let me assure you, these are all little things in the business that we have to be aware of. If you compare this to real estate, it’s going through the same thing. This is a part of real estate and how you buy the auctions, how you paper up deals and what type of contracts, how judges are reacting. This is a part of real estate in general as well. Don’t think, “I can go back to buying properties. This sounds more complicated.” It’s not. It’s along the same vein of this. It’s just that we’re on the debt side of things. Our upside is don’t forget we’re buying these at a much better value.

For somebody who may be new to the industry, this is why you want to outsource. All of these problems we’ve been talking about go away or be limited if it’s done properly. It comes back to what we were saying there. Please don’t get discouraged to think, “The walls are crumbling,” because it’s not the case. If you look at your growth from $8 billion to $12 billion, which is an incredible amount of growth. I interviewed Will over at FNAC and they set record years as well. This industry is flourishing. It’s doing better than ever. It’s just we have to tweak and make a little adjustment. A lot of that can be in technology and if it’s too early to announce this, you guys have a new technology that you’re going to be putting out. Is it okay to talk about that or we have to wait on that?

Once you have processes in place, you don't have to do too much thinking anymore. Click To Tweet

We can talk about it and I came from a meeting on it, probably 3 to 5 months or something around there. We’re launching APIs. I work on special projects at FCI. I get these projects started, but I’m more from an ideal point of view. What I was saying is we need a way to connect the FCI system to all our customer’s systems because I use other programs that are doing APIs and it’s a life-changer. It does all of this stuff that I used to have to do manually and it does it automatically and I see a need for that in loan servicing. The people that I’ve told about it are excited. When we get in, my depth on the technological aspect of it. That’s where I have to pass it over to our technical director. There are all these technical aspects and we were on a call where someone was asking those things and I had nothing for it. I had to pass everything to the technology director because they’re asking about rest APIs and tokens being passed back and forth and that’s out of my depth.

I stepped a bit when you were announcing it there to make that little joke. What is it going to be called? Give us another little summary there of what it’s going to do and how it’s going to benefit people.

We’re referring it to as FCI API. It doesn’t have a big fancy name or anything like that because everyone’s going to call it the API anyways. What it will do is instead of going into that LIRS system that I talked about, to see your information, you can connect that information directly to a third-party program. There are a bunch of ways you could do it. If you use something like Salesforce or I use Copper to track my loans, I like to make sure they go through a certain pipeline so I can see how long has this been sitting in bankruptcy, did it go to foreclosure? However, it’s going through. That’s what I like to do.

I know other people use Google Sheets or Excel or whatever, but whenever you get a payment or something changed, you have to make those things match manually. You could pull a document and upload it I suppose. What this will do is it will be a live connection, you could make your UPB change every time a payment is in. We’ve had this request for a payoff report where you can do your whole portfolio and show the actual payoff amount of everything and how it changes day-to-day and that’ll be done automatically as it changes. For the people with 1, 3, 5 loans, there may be some use for it. You could hook it to your Salesforce, your Excel or whatever you want.

It might not be that big of a game-changer, but then we have clients with hundreds or thousands of loans. That 10, 15 minutes to do of work. That’s a full-time job for people that maybe we can send right to their system. It keeps stacking from there. We’re going to get to the point where the idea is eventually is that an app is going to come out on your phone and when I talked about those forks in the road, do you want to accept or not accept? That’ll be a yes or no button on your phone. You don’t have to pick up email, do anything and the whole thing will track. I don’t know when that’ll be done. It’s all in the planning phases but that’s the evolution of where APIs go.

Literally, on a spreadsheet on your computer, it will change when it updates.

You could track, what’s my UPB? How much money do I have in this? What’s my investment to property value or what’s my investment? You might be able to do that to Zillow now and see the property values change. I don’t know how much that would benefit you but that’s something you could. You could do investments, unpaid balance, to value, to pay off. You could do all those things and instead of changing them one by one, you could have the paid to date switch so then you don’t have this legacy data stuck in time. It will keep going and sort however you want. The applications are endless. You could cut it up. That’s what I love about the API is we dipped our toe in the software world for a little bit, the servicing software. What we quickly found is when you give it to ten people, everyone wants to do it their way and almost nothing went across the board as well. “Why isn’t this button here or why doesn’t it do this?” It was a nightmare to change. The thing about the API is you can hook it however you want. It’s agile. That won’t be an issue on this one and that’s what I’m excited for.

That’s next-generation stuff. That’s awesome. You get a gut feeling for things as I’m out there talking with people and teaching this and putting the pieces together, but then to talk with someone like yourself and have that confirmed, the industry is growing. It’s going into different directions and it’s all good. It’s going to get better and it’s going to attract all these other little issues but these will be ironed out. It will get more streamlined and before you know it, we’ll be buying these things right on our phones. It’s incredible to think of, but I don’t think we’re that far away. With Paperstac, you can do everything on your phone there as far as getting up to the point of buying a note, why not? When servicing comes along, it does the same thing. That’s incredible.

That’s a thing for another time but it’s all happening quickly. What I want to say about the overarching message of this is exactly what you said. We talked about some negative stuff, but every business across the country, regardless of what you’re in, they have that 5% and that’s what happens. That’s what this is going through but overall, we’re growing. I tend to think that people are good overall and most people aren’t going to play those games. Are there going to be some bad apples that do? Of course. There’s a chance in everything. There’s a low chance that’ll happen. To focus more on the positives, things that I love to do are buy a loan, transfer it to FCI, the letter goes out to the borrower saying, “You have a new lender.” What I tend to think that says is, “Let me see if I can get a new deal with this person.” Since I bought it low, I’ve got all this window to do things. What I love to do as if they’re 3 or 4 months behind or even more and they make a couple of trial payments, I’ll push their paid to date. They’re not getting late fees anymore because they proved they worked with me a little bit. I’ll work with them.

There’s as many, if not more good stories for all the negative stories. That’s what I love about this more than going to the foreclosure auctions. There are only a couple of things you can do with an REO. Fix it up, sell it, flip it those things. With loans, you’ve got 25, 30 things you can do and if your worst-case scenario is last resort and you have twenty things on top of it, that’s the real magic of loans to me is you’ve got all of these cool ways to make money and help people too. Those win-win scenarios, there are a lot more.

 

The market is right for those types of deals, which I like also. I’m repeating myself a little bit here, but more people want to stay in their homes. Rents are through the roof. Their payments are typically much lower than the rent. That’s one incentive. They’ve probably lived in that area for a while. Their kids go to school there, they have friends there and their homes have gone up in value and they’ve got some potential equity. They can see the light at the end of the tunnel. For a lender like us to come in and give that personalized attention and give them a hand up, if you will, it’s a great thing and that trend is going to continue to grow. Less and less, I’m hearing people have to take things through foreclosures.

There’s something about if you work with somebody, they won’t forget that. There’s a human element to it all.

The social aspect and even everybody reading know I’m a part of MWMfund, which we can raise $50 million. It’s called MWM, Money With Meaning. The Money With Meaning part of it is our goal. We want to buy nonperforming notes that we feel have a high probability of getting them reperforming because there are many different ways to do that and we can keep a family in their home. A lot of times, not to get too dramatic here, but that even means the family intact and that’s important.

Not to sound cold-blooded, but I feel like sometimes we go to these conventions and people make it sound like we’re running a charity and we’re not doing that. It’s got to make sense both ways. I feel like that’s the ultimate goal is, “If I’m making my returns that I projected and doing all these things, what can be better than that?”

There are lots of good ways to end this. I know I could go on with more questions and everything. Maybe we’ll have you back on because I know you could share a lot with us on partials and the power of that and what you got and have done with that.

Partials changed my life for sure. That’s such a nest egg. It’s been fantastic.

That would be a memory lane with you and your father at the event. I remember that class in San Francisco.

That was my first class that you taught. It’s funny because I had my ninth anniversary at FCI full-time. I’ve worked here since I was filing papers and I don’t count that but full-time. That was my overall goal. I started an eBay business when I was young, selling collectibles and making a little bit of money. I took that class that you taught and I’m like, “This seems like the next level of that something cool to get into.” Several years down the road, I can’t even believe the partials. It sounds fictional when I start talking about how big the loans have got from me. From someone coming in to like, “I’ll never figure this out. It’s too scary. It’s not worth it. I don’t want to do this.” to where I am now. It’s changed my life.

You make me think about getting a group together and doing a class for younger people like yourself and having you come in as a guest and talk a little bit. I might hit you up for that down the road here a little bit. Where can people go? Is it at TrustFCI.com?

That’s it and my email is TGriffith@TrustFCI.com. That’s the place to go.

That’s where you can find out more information, check out their services. They’re leading the pack here. They’re the biggest in our industry for investors that are in our category and keeping up with the technology and the laws and everything is becoming much more important. You’ll enjoy your experience. Thank you much, once again, for being on.

I feel like when people hear that we’re the biggest, they tend to think, “I only have one loan, am I going to get lost in the shuffle?” The thing I want to say to people is our whole software that was custom built for this company was built that even if you have a thousand loans or one loan, they all go through the same pipeline. We put this person’s $500 in front of you and they all go one at a time. That’s another one of the secret sauces of FCI. Everything is treated, it’s all chopped up into one loan regardless of who owns it. That’s the power. If you only have one loan, you can still come in. There are no minimums at FCI.

Everyone wants to go about their loans in their own way, and not a lot goes across the board. Click To Tweet

Thanks for pointing that out. That’s important. I’m sure there was that lingering thought, “I’m a small one and they’re not going to pay much attention to me.” That’s great to know. Thank you once again and thank you, everybody, for reading the blog. If you’re a part of a Meetup group, if you’re a part of a real estate investment club or talking to investors in general, I’d love it if you share the show. That way, we can continue to grow and bring you great content as we did. Thanks, everybody. I look forward to being with you in another episode.

Important Links:

• iTunes – The Kevin Shortle Show
• YouTube – Kevin Shortle
• NuView Trust
• IMN
• FCI
• Will Henning – past episode
• Salesforce
• Copper
• MWMfund
• TGriffith@TrustFCI.com
• www.TrustFCI.com

About Tim Griffith

Tim Griffith, President ExchangeLoans: Tim has 10 years’ experience in loan servicing as he started at a young age working at the family business, FCI Lender Services. After working in many departments within FCI, Tim found his passion within FCI’s “special projects”, which includes updating and developing new technology for the company. In addition to working at FCI, Tim also founded ExchangeLoans which a loan trading platform that trades, 1sts, 2nds, and Land Contracts. Tim is also President of PLS Specialty Investments who focuses on the purchase of 1sts across the country.

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