Becoming a Mortgage Advisor - Any advice?

shameless-about-money

Mr_helpful wrote: »

Shameless
I am one of the nice guys who has never charged a fee in his life

I am not sure whether I agree with not charging a fee. Yes you get paid by the Lender. What about all the time that you have spent on that one client? We live in a world where people want everything for nothing - and then sue on top of that. The MA fee is a one-off payment for the work done and it would be put onto the mortgage. It isn't as if you were asking for a cheque to be written there and then!

I worked as a Podiatrist in private practice for over 23 years and it was a nightmare trying to get people to pay a proper fee for the work. My fees ended up at £20 - £25 for a home visit but had a lot of abuse about it. It should have been around £30. Those same folks, mostly women, would gladly pay £45 to the hairdresser and not think twice about it.

I shall have to see what my Company say about the charging a fee issue.

shameless-about-money

toonfish wrote: »

don't normally want any

Oh really? I thought that they would want some proof!

toonfish

shameless-about-money wrote: »

Oh really? I thought that they would want some proof!

the only reason for going self cert is that you can't prove the income. As the others have said we rarely do them now unless there are perhaps a lot of maintainace or benefits payments, or irregular bonuses and commissions that a lot of lenders won't consider.

MortgageMamma

jamesd wrote: »

When it comes to altering documents there is a well accepted way of preventing it: include a cryptographic hash. Change even one letter and the hash won't match the document, proving that it has been altered. Since it's readily doable to feed a page or three through a printer a second or third time such signing can be helpful. Not really easy to retype the whole thing to prove it on the paper version but if you keep digital originals it's easy enough. It's unlikely to be difficult for networks to do this, since the technical tools are readily available.

James, if I'm being thick I apologise but I've no idea what you are talking about. Could you please explain as I'm interested in this

Thanks

MM

jamesd

MortgageMamma, it's a bit like a check digit, except more sensitive. For one product description see the Adobe Certified Document Services product from Verisign, though it doesn't need a third party really.

For more detailed descriptions see How digital signatures work, cryptographic hash functions and digital signature.

This sort of thing is really commonly available technically, for example, here's a log of a quick demonstration using the MySQL database server:

mysql> select MD5("I'm a mortgage adviser");
+----------------------------------+
| MD5("I'm a mortgage adviser")    |
+----------------------------------+
| cef2fb5dc8ba28c118dce55b5ecdc404 |
+----------------------------------+

mysql> select MD5("I am a mortgage adviser");
+----------------------------------+
| MD5("I am a mortgage adviser")   |
+----------------------------------+
| 3bf86a4886c8de89772290b611fd201c |
+----------------------------------+

You can see how dramatically different the MD5 code beginning cef is to the one beginning 3bf when the only change was "I'm" to "I am".

If you rely on email from addresses as virtual signatures, you might like to see Pereira v. Fernandes., a UK decision which correctly says that you can't. Technically you can't even trust that the from address is really who it was from, depending on the configuration of the receiving mail server it can be completely trivial (just typing your choice of address) to pretend to be from any address you like, as is routinely done by spammers. The same can apply to the sending server if you have access to that at a fairly low level. Many major servers block this capability to some degree, as an anti-spam measure. Proving this sort of forgery carried out at the receiving end can sometimes be done by detailed analysis of all of the mail headers but without some skill and experience it's possible to falsify this information and confuse people about the true origin.

MortgageMamma

Well I've got to say I am impressed but I cant see how this technology could be implemented into my business to help me? how much does it cost?

Having an internet company I give a lot of advice on email/the phone so I'm particularly interested in anything that can make me bulletproof

JoeK_3

Timeforachange wrote: »

Hello Skippd00

I was going to sign up with Herne Group aswell. But as Shameless rightly said, it seems as if you also have to pay IFS for study material aswell which seemed a bit pointless to me.

I'm dithering on making a decision. But I think I'm going to sign directly with IFS.

Maybe I can help here.

I am the owner of a CeMAP training company called Money Marketing Limited and we offer CeMAP training courses on a national basis for budding mortgage advisers. Our training courses are built for people that are new to the mortgage industry and as a consequence, we teach both the course content and the exam technique.

Our courses for CeMAP 1 last five days and CeMAP 2 & 3 combined lasts five days.

Your greatest challenge after successfully passing a mortgage advice qualification is to be signed off a competent adviser.

You might find the following website of help http://www.cemap-training.org.uk and http://www.mortgage-broker-franchise.co.uk in your quest.

JoeK

shameless-about-money

JoeK

I can vouch for Money Marketing!! I did the CeMap 2 & 3 course with Brendan three weeks ago and am doing the CeMap 1 course next week - also with Brendan. He is a brilliant tutor!

The courses are worth every penny - I have mentioned them on the Forum before.

JoeK_3

shameless-about-money wrote: »

JoeK

I can vouch for Money Marketing!! I did the CeMap 2 & 3 course with Brendan three weeks ago and am doing the CeMap 1 course next week - also with Brendan. He is a brilliant tutor!

The courses are worth every penny - I have mentioned them on the Forum before.

I have followed the thread with interest.

The advice that you are offering is extremely helpful to a budding mortgage adviser.

Regards
JoeK

jamesd

MortgageMamma, do you currently digitally sign your emails in some way? Other documents?

One of the easiest ways might be to sell your network on the idea of eliminating options for consumer or adviser document changing and have them implement it in whatever document generation system they have, if any.

I can't tell you about pricing for the Verisign product - I've never investigated purchasing it.