Reply by CJ on 10/21/13 11:22am
Msg #488963
How I got started.
My stepmother had a friend who did this. The friend lived in my area, but my stepmother did not. So my stepmother was doing this for a while. I was divorced and driving a school bus and going to paralegal school at night. My sister was going through a very bad divorce (he put a gun to her head and she ran out of the house. She had to call her ex to pick up the teenage boys and give them to her at the McDonalds, and never go back.) My sister was out of work (since she fled and left her office manager job), so my stepmother taught her and she was doing it. My stepmother gave my sister all the training, all her contacts, and my sister could call if she had questions during a signing. She did it for two years. Then my sister met Mr. Filthy-Rich, who asked her to quit her job notary job so she could stay home and baby him all day.
By this time I had graduated from paralegal school and was hit-and-miss in the job department, mostly getting reception jobs and they would let me go when it was time to give me benefits. Since my sister was going to quit anyway, she trained me: gave me all her contacts, took me on ride-alongs, and I could call her if I had a problem at a job. Then my sister quit her job.
Now I was competing with the woman who trained my stepmom because I was in her area. This was 13 years ago, and interest rates were high, about 9%. I took every job: day, night, weekends, holidays. I regularly worked Christmas Eve, Thanksgiving morning, New Year's day, Valentine's Day, my birthday, my anniversary, etc. I drove anywhere they asked. I never negotiated the fees. I went back for free without question and corrected any mistakes. Over the years, interest rates slowly went down. Every time they went down, everyone in the area refinanced. Slowly, I was able to pay off $20,000 in debt that I co-signed for my old boyfriend. My new boyfriend and I got married and bought a mobile home. We paid it off. We saved up and got a down payment for a "real" house (a double wide on a piece of land).
All my husband and I did (and still do) is work. (He is self-employed too, so the more billable hours he has, the more he gets paid. We both work EVERY federal holiday. We never have a Monday or a Saturday off. We take off Sundays to sleep in.) Interest rates went from I think 9% when I started to 2.75% a few months ago. During that time there were highs and lows. When banks were doing those neg-am loans, that got everyone in trouble, I was paying all the bills and putting $1000 a way into savings. When that first 3-year PPP finished and everyone's mortgage went up, and people were losing their homes across the nation, the jobs came to a screeching halt, we lived on my savings. For three years (as all the PPP came down the pipe), it was touch-and-go. I was doing ONE job a day, and that was JUST enough to pay the expenses. My husband's money goes to his shop expenses, any vacations we take to see family, and any upkeep on the house or other emergencies.
The the mortgage crises brought housing prices down enough that we could finally afford one. And we bought a bank-owned fixer-upper. I was very scared wondering how we were going to be able to pay the space rent on the mobile home AND the new mortgage payment, since work was so slow. The day we signed the mortgage papers, interest rates dropped again, the phone started ringing, and we came out of the housing crises slump.
I worked like a demon and we fixed up the house and moved into it. That took a few months and a few thousand. But then, no one would buy our mobile home, so we poured some more thousands into that and fixed it up. It was on the market for 21 months, and I was working like crazy to pay the mortgage and the space rent on the mobile home, no to mention all the thousands for labor and materials for making them livable. (I don't mean fancy, I mean livable.) It was very hard. I make more than my husband. I felt like, he should just quit his job and I could support us. He is older and I wanted to stop seeing him work so hard.
In the mean time, my sister left Mr. Filthy Rich. He turned out to be a narcissistic, selfish jerk (everyone in the family could see that but her), and she finally got tired of his abuse, so she left. She has no job, and a huge gap in her resume (13 years of not working), and now she is 50. If she had married him, she could have had $1 million in split assets, plus lifetime alimony and lifetime health insurance. (Of course, he was to smart to marry her and jeopardize all that money. He was using her from Day One. He never worked a day in his life because his mommy gave him all his money and mom just passed and left him with another windfall. So even if my sister took HALF of all they had together, he would still have MORE than before she left because of the inheritance from mom.)
So where do you think my penniless, destitute, unemployed sister is living? In my spare bedroom (it was going to be my "art studio"). She is living in the house that I bought with the job that SHE gave me. We told her that she can live her forever (and we mean it) but I can't give her back her job, or we will lose the house and we will ALL be in the street. I would rather support her than divide my income with her by having her go back to notary work. Not because I'm greedy, but because there is not enough money to pay the bills and give her half. She understands that, (and she she sees how crazy my job is, she said she's not sure she wants it back anyway) so I hooked her up with Field Inspection work. She can't live on Field Inspector work, but it's enough for gas money and mad money until she figures out what she is going to do. It does not cost us anything for us to have her here, and she is a good roommate. (She is still good-looking for her age, so we are hoping a NICE guy comes along, but her "picker" is broken, she won't take advice, and she is attracted to bad boys. Why date a boring engineer when you can have an exciting, over-the-hill surfer? We are glad that she does not smoke, drink or do drugs.)
BUT, the day we FINALLY sold the mobile home, (after 21 months), I said, "At last, we can relax about the money because we don't have to support two houses", THAT very day, interest rates went up, and my phone stopped ringing. I used to do 60 to 90 jobs a month, depending on the time of year. Now I think I have done 10 jobs in October. You know that I have a lot going in my favor: I have many clients. I know how to do the job. I am on good terms with my clients. I say yes to practically everything that comes along, and still, they are not calling me. It is not because of ME, it is because of the economy.
Now I am GLAD that my husband did not quit, because now the only income we have his HIS money. He has to pay his shop expenses AND the mortgage. Now, it is slower than the mortgage crises. I am not even doing one a day, which would be enough. I am trying to figure out other ways to make money, because I am as good as unemployed. Nobody wants to re-finance and get a higher interest rate. The few jobs that come along are sales, purchases and RMs, and things are slow even in those areas. Refinancing has always been the bulk of the work.
If you are starting in this business, this is what you are up against: All mobile notaries in the nation are in the same position I am in: No one is refinancing their home to a higher rate, so the work is super slow. If a job comes in, the SS are going to call their favorite notaries first. All the out of work notaries (like me) are spending their spare time signing up with more Signing Services. The signing services already have a glut of notaries, and no work to give any of them. Banks and title companies are closing down and laying of thousands of workers in the lending field. Many of these people know how to do Mobile Notary work (since they hire the SS who hire us) so they are also flooding the SS with their resumes looking for notary work.
I'm sorry to paint such a bleak picture, but that is what I know. I am setting up my "art studio" in the living room (we never have company anyway - no social life due to working non-stop for the past 13 years), and I am going to try to start selling my art, something I was always too busy to do. I'll bet if I get out my equipment and get up to my elbows in oil paint, the phone is bound to ring with an emergency notary job. If not, at least I'll get to work on my art.
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Reply by CJ on 10/21/13 10:27pm
Msg #489042
Photographing weekend weddings.
The reason I work so many crazy hours (when there IS work) is that you need all owners of the property to sign. Even if one is on the loan, but they both own the property. In MOST couples, both people work during the day, therefore, most people schedule their signings for non-business hours: after work, before work, on the weekends, during the holidays. Sometimes people schedule for their lunch hour, or maybe they are retired so you can sign them during the day. I have signed at 5:00 am, because they are going to catch a flight that morning. I have signed at 11:00 pm because they teach evening classes. The SSs don't ask when it's convenient for you, but they find out when the borrower wants to sign, and they look for a notary that will accommodate that. I have had many days (when it was busy) where I had a morning job, afternoon job, and evening job. That really breaks up your day and you can't get anything else done on those days, except pick up a few groceries. I am lucky that my husband is a good cook, so he does all the cooking and he makes sure that he cooks enough for plenty of leftovers. I'm also lucky that the kids are grown and out of the house. They were teens when I started, so they didn't exactly need sitters. My husband and I have had lots of fights about how I'm never home at night and he feels like a bachelor. I'm home at night now, but the money isn't coming in.
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