Food For Thought: Stop taking orders. Start giving advice.

In this edition of Food For Thought, Christina Harmes, CRMP — reverse mortgage educator and Reverse Mortgage Division Director at Barrett Financial Group — challenges reverse mortgage professionals to rethink the way they approach prospective borrowers. Too often, the process becomes transactional: collect the home value, mortgage balance and dates of birth, run the numbers and send the PDF. Christina argues that this is exactly how professionals risk commoditizing themselves — especially in an age where calculators, software and AI can increasingly generate and compare the numbers. The real value lies in understanding the person behind them. In this episode, Christina explores: Why better discovery can lead to better reverse mortgage recommendations How two homeowners with identical numbers can need completely different loan structures Why sending jargon-heavy proposals without context creates a poor client experience The danger of giving borrowers exactly what they ask for without understanding why Why advisers sometimes need to recommend a different structure — or even say a reverse mortgage is not the right fit How deeper advice can improve client relationships, conversion and the reputation of the reverse mortgage industry Why human judgment and understanding may become even more valuable as AI advances As Christina puts it: if all you do is send numbers, you risk reducing yourself to a PDF. Read the full article here: https://hecmworld.com/2026/08/19/food-for-thought-reverse-mortgage-professionals-advice/ Subscribe and get more insights at hecmworld.com