DENNY ANDREWS: Absolutely. That’s a great issue, and I’m sure there are lots of people that are probably in that same boat right now.

DR. SIEGEL: All right, so let’s go to the first step. The first step in this reflective thinking process is the formulation of the problem as a question. Now, that means it cannot be answered yes or no; it must be simply phrased so that people understand it, and it’s open-ended. So, give us, in your mind, what an open-ended, simply phrased question would be about the topic that we’re talking about.

DENNY ANDREWS: I think the open-ended question would probably be something along the line of how can I qualify for a mortgage loan now that a loan I had has been turned down?

DR. SIEGEL: Okay, so in this environment, though, we could maybe even simplify that.

DENNY ANDREWS: Yeah, sure, in this environment, how can I qualify for a mortgage loan in this changing environment?

DR. SIEGEL: Perfect. Okay, so, how do I qualify for a mortgage loan in this changing environment? Now, the second step is a definition of the problem, so we’re all on the same page. Define that problem for us from which that question emanates.

DENNY ANDREWS: The problem would be the fact that we no longer have a stable mortgage industry. You may be approved today, and five days from now, either the lender you were approved with is out of business, the program you were approved on has been canceled, or the guidelines have changed such that you no longer fit the guidelines anymore. So, things are changing so fast and furiously that you don’t have a single target anymore; it’s a moving target, and once you get a loan approval, you have to try to stay within that target, so that would be the issues.

DR. SIEGEL: Okay, well done. Now, let’s get to the third step: History of the problem, which means, how did this historically evolve as a problem in the way it is today within the mortgage industry? What happened in the mortgage industry to cause this historically… and I’m not talking, by the way, about 100 years ago. When we say History of the Problem as the third step in this outline, we’re simply talking about how this problem evolved, and the history of that evolution of the problem.

DENNY ANDREWS: Yeah, the history of this problem actually goes back less than a year. It was just last summer, the summer of 2007, that all of these loan programs that were once available: Zero down, stated income, negative amortization, no income, no asset, all of these very aggressive loan programs, within a two-month period vanished. So, all of a sudden, at one point you had a borrower who could literally borrow $2 million to buy a home, and one month later couldn’t get a loan for $50,000.