Start your week with intention.
For the last few years I have written an email to my team every Monday morning. Somebody told me recently that she saves all of them, which still surprises me.
This newsletter grew out of that habit, but it is not the same email. These are the stories I have never told anywhere else, and this is the only place I will tell them. I am going to use it to share what 30 years in this business have taught me about growing, selling, keeping good people, and building a life next to the work. I am also going to credit the people I learned it from, because none of it was my idea first.
It is called the Monday Reset, so we are starting with mine.
Earlier this year, Melissa Landon asked me to speak at the women's event she is putting on, The Legacy of Her, and that talk is this Thursday. Preparing for it made me sit down and write out how I got my start in this business, which I had never done from start to finish. It seemed like the right place to begin with you, because you should know who is writing to you, and because anyone who has lived on commission will recognize parts of it.
The phone call
I was a sophomore at BYU Idaho when my dad called to tell me my mom had gone into rehab for an addiction to prescription painkillers. I grew up in a devout LDS family, and I did not have a category for that news. I was confused and sad and I could not stay on top of my schoolwork, so at the end of the semester I left. The plan was to go home, earn some money, and eventually transfer to BYU Hawaii (which is what every Mormon girl I knew wanted to do, lol).
I took a temp job as the receptionist in U.S. Bank's mortgage department. I was 19. Rates had dropped, they got busy, they needed a processor, and I took the job because it paid a little more and I was saving for school.
"I think you're in the wrong job"
The loan officer I was processing for invited me to a realtor event, and I got to chatting with a woman named Wray Burch, who ran retail lending for Eastern Washington for Pacific First Bank. She told me, "I think you're in the wrong job. I think you should be a loan officer." My first question was, "How much does it pay?" She said she would call me, and she did. They offered me a small salary plus commission, and that is how I got into the mortgage business.
1993 was a very good year to be a loan officer. I remember walking a $4,500 commission check into the bank, and to me it felt like $45,000. I was 21 years old and I was not mature enough for that kind of income. I went out a lot, I was the life of the party, I bought nice clothes, and I spent every dollar I made. I was having a lot of fun!
Nobody told me rates go up
Then 1994 happened. I was 22 years old, and nobody had told me that interest rates go up. By then I was 100 percent commission with no commissions coming in. I lived on credit cards and whatever cash I had left. When a friend offered me a salaried job at an insurance agency, I got my insurance license and took it, and I hated it. No offense to my insurance friends.
Underneath the money, I was partying too much and making poor choices, and all of it was a way to avoid feeling what I was carrying. A friend saw I was struggling and told me about a three day personal development training. They put us in a room together, we said our deepest fears out loud to strangers, we did a ropes course, and we walked on hot coals. Somewhere in those three days I forgave myself, and once I had done that I was able to forgive my mother. I went home, asked her to sit down with me, told her I loved her, and released her from the anger I had been carrying around. It healed something in both of us.
The $300
Not long after, I met Ryan. I told him my whole story and he asked, "Why don't you go back into mortgage?" I had an offer. A friend named Dawn Meigs was the broker at a real estate company in Vancouver, Washington, and she wanted me as her in-house lender, small salary to start and 100 percent commission after two months. I gave Ryan all my reasons why I couldn't, and the biggest one was that I did not have enough money to move.
He loaned me $300 for an apartment deposit. My parents drove down that first week and took me to the grocery store.
That was the reset. Three hundred dollars and a person who believed in me before I believed in myself.
Dawn was the other one. She passed away from cancer several years ago, and I will never forget her kindness. She threw me a life preserver when she did not have to, and it changed the whole direction of my life.
Ryan moved down a month later. I told him I believed I could make $100,000 a year, and he chuckled and said, "Okay, let's do it." When my first $10,000 check came in, I looked at him and said, "See, I knew I could do it." We have been married 28 years. He is a teacher, he is fiscally frugal (words nobody has ever used to describe me), and he is my biggest supporter and cheerleader. The stability and freedom we have today came from his discipline as much as my drive.
What I took from it
Broke is not broken. Broke was a fact about my checking account in 1994. It was never a fact about me, even though I believed it was for a while. The money was never the real problem either. I made plenty at 21 and it just paid for the party.
Forgive yourself first, then forgive them. Forgiveness did not change what happened. It changed what I was carrying. It also gave me almost three decades of a beautiful relationship with my mother, who went on to fully embrace Ryan, who was not part of our faith, and who adored my daughters. She passed away three years ago. I am grateful every day that I had that conversation with her when I did.
Borrow someone's belief until you grow your own, then lend yours. I did not believe in myself at 23. Other people did it for me until I could, and I have spent the 30 years since trying to do the same for the people I work with.
Somebody reading this is in their own 1994 right now. You are broke, or worn out, or sitting in the wrong job because it felt safe. I am not going to tell you that you are not broken. You have heard that before, and it does not do much when your account is overdrawn on the first.
What worked for me was other people. Wray saw a loan officer when I saw a temp saving for school. Dawn saw an in-house lender. Ryan saw someone who was good at this business and loaned me $300 to prove it. I could not do it for myself at 23, so they did it for me until I could. That is most of what I know about leadership, 30 years later.
Hit reply and tell me who lent you their belief before you had your own. If nobody has yet, I'd be glad to lend you mine.
Make it a great week!
MY LINKEDIN FEED
Today is my daughter Lynsey's first day of her senior year of college and I have spent the morning thinking about what the last three years have looked like for her.
Rich Swerbinsky's ten things he'd tell a young person getting into mortgage
Ten things I'd tell a young person getting into the mortgage industry. If young people ever got into the mortgage industry. We all know they don't.
Dave Savage on the buyer who says "I'll wait"
Rates crossed 7%, and thousands of open houses this weekend will lose the buyer who says, "I'll wait." That buyer isn't gone. They are confused. And the agent hosting the open house doesn't have a great answer.
CHART OF THE WEEK
Home insurance is up 47 percent nationally since 2020, and not one state went down. Colorado more than doubled. Utah and Arizona are up over 70 percent, and even Hawaii, the cheapest state in the country, is up a third. Insurance premiums once represented a comparatively trifling portion of the monthly cost of a home. But in recent years, premiums have outpaced both household income growth and the nation's punishing inflation rate.
What to tell a borrower or agent: if a payment that looked fine two years ago feels high today, insurance is usually the reason, not the rate. Get a real insurance quote before the offer is written, and shop it at every renewal. On a $400,000 loan, a $100 a month difference in premium moves the payment about as much as a third of a point in rate.
Source: LendingTree, State of Home Insurance 2026. Rate changes from S&P Global RateWatch, 2020 through 2025; premiums from Quadrant Information Services.
PODCAST OF THE WEEK
The message: Stop chasing agents one at a time. Teach them something useful in a room, then earn the one-on-one from there.
Glenda lays out her whole process, from teaching a Google Business Profile class to booking 15-minute audits with the agents in the room to a six-week follow-up that turns a classroom into referral partners. It is a system, not a pitch, and it is the kind of thing you could start next week.
LINKS WORTH YOUR TIME
WHERE TO FIND ME
Sept 24: Speaking at The Legacy of Her, Northern Virginia
Sept 25: Madison Square Garden with my daughter to see Harry Styles, New York, NY
Oct 1 to 2: CMG NW Division California Top Producer and Managers Meeting, Healdsburg, CA
Oct 6 to 8: Momentum Builder, Dallas, TX
Oct 10: mPower, Chicago, IL
If you want time on the books, grab a spot on my calendar here.
ON THE CALENDAR
Sept 22: First day of fall
Sept 23 to 26: AIME Fuse 2026
Sept 27 to 29: MBA Compliance and Risk Management Conference, Washington, DC
Sept 29: National Coffee Day
Sept 30 to Oct 1: New York MBA Annual Convention, Saratoga Springs
Oct 1: HousingWire Mortgage Banking Summit, Dallas
Oct 2: September jobs report
Oct 6 to 8: Momentum Builder Live 2026, Dallas
Oct 10: mPowering You, MBA's summit for women in real estate finance, Chicago
Oct 11 to 14: MBA Annual Convention and Expo, Chicago
Oct 14: September CPI inflation reading, and MBA Tech Exchange, Chicago
Oct 16: National Boss's Day
Oct 16 to 19: NAMB National 2026, Las Vegas
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
"The most effective way to do it, is to do it." Amelia Earhart
PASS IT ON
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Natalie Overturf
Cell: 360-606-7947