Stop The Constant Worrying For Good By Saying This To Yourself…

I have this weird habit.

If I meet someone through someone I know already, I add the new person to my contacts with something a little extra…

I include the original friend’s name in the name field.

So when I search for someone in my phone contacts, I end up finding every single person that I have met through them.

This sometimes can be a long ass list of people. 😂

Is it just me that saves contacts like this?

If you are a fellow weirdo, let a girl know!

I wouldn’t mind some company on weirdo island.

Because of this little habit of mine, I accidentally texted my friend’s mom one day.

Thankfully nothing scandalous was sent. 🫣

When she responded and I realized the mistake that I had made, I sent her an apology text.

I explained that it was an accidental text and that I actually meant to text her daughter (my friend).

And her response to me was “There are no mistakes”.

That made me pause…

Take a step back and use the “accidental” text to say hi and check on how she was doing.

How many times has something not gone your way, and you focus on all the negative implications?

You start fussing over how things should have gone.

Or how things could have been better if…

I am VERY guilty of this.

Shoot…

I probably did this 10 times yesterday 😩🤣

I am being mindful about it though and actively working to be better.

But…

if we took a “there are no mistakes” approach to events in our life what would happen?

How do you think it would affect our stress levels? Or our happiness?

I think we would take each event – good or bad – as an opportunity, lesson or a blessing.

This reminds of a time I was mad at myself because I failed.

In August 2020 I talked to 5 different lenders about getting a HELOC.

If you aren’t familiar, HELOC is an acronym for a home equity line of credit.

It’s a loan you can get against the value of your house that is not securing a mortgage.

So if you have a house worth 100K and there is a mortgage for 40K, you have 60K in equity that you can leverage as a HELOC.

The beautiful thing about a HELOC is for some you pay interest only for 10 years.

On most loans you pay principal AND interest. So an interest only payment means your payment on the loan is minuscule in compassion to the amount borrowed.

You girl wanted in on this cheap money. 🤑

My plan was to use the money to buy a rental house in cash that would pay the loan and also generate a profit.

But because of the pandemic, lenders had made access to mortgage loans much tougher.

All of a sudden minimum credit scores to get mortgages changed from 580 to 720.

Banks no longer were doing loans with down payments under 10%.

Some banks completely stopped doing HELOCS altogether.

Fearing that the pandemic would get worse and people would default on their mortgage loans.

My income was in place.

My credit score was in the low seven hundreds.

I had minimal debt.

I thought I was in a great position to get this money. But not under the tightened lending environment during the pandemic.

I failed.

And I immediately went IN on the negative self talk.

I should have been better financially to do this deal I wanted to do.

It was my fault that I wasn’t able to get this HELOC.

How could I let this happen…

But one really interesting thing happened during my HELOC denial saga….

At the time I didn’t think much of it.

One of the lenders I spoke to made a mistake.

She gave me a loan estimate for a cash out refinance instead of a HELOC.

She thought that I wanted a refinance to pay off my second house AND get cash.

The thought of using my equity from my first house to pay off my second house had never even crossed my mind.

I thought it was wild that this was even an option. 🤯

I didn’t pursue it when she presented the option, but 6 months later I spoke to a lender to do just that.

And it honestly was a better move for me compared to my original plan of getting a HELOC.

Moving forward with the “mistake” refinance idea allowed me to eliminate a mortgage payment of $980 from my budget.

The monetary gain was amazing.

But the bigger win is that it gave me freedom.

Freedom to exit a corporate job that was mentally taxing.

Freedom to spend months at a time with my parents.

Freedom be be out of the country for weeks and not have to worry about answering work emails.

Freedom to take back control of my mental health.

And it all stemmed from an idea planted in my head because of a “mistake” that a mortgage loan officer made.

If you are frustrated because you have put in tons of offers on houses and you haven’t had one accepted…

If you applied for a mortgage and you didn’t get approved for the loan amount that you wanted…

If you have been looking for a house in a specific price range and nothing is coming on the market…

If you have been feeling down on yourself because you have been dreaming about getting started with buying a house and just haven’t…

Remember what my friend’s mom said…

“There are no mistakes.”

It is all for a reason.

You are reading this for a reason.

What’s something that you have been thinking is a mistake that could in fact be an opportunity?

DM me on Instagram and tell me the story!