Gerard is certainly not alone in his feelings about the 24/7 grind, but almost overnight, he has become a reluctant folk hero among LOs. “The Cajun Mortgage Guy” on Facebook, he’s a bundle of contradictions: professional yet goofy, assertive but approachable, with a rapid way of speaking that undermines his smooth bayou drawl. 

“I understand I'm going to do some things that might not be what I want to do,” he says, acknowledging the realities of the business. “But it shouldn’t be like the whole relationship I worked for, everything that I had built with you was gone because I didn't respond to a rush on a Friday night.”

Gerard’s frustration resonates far beyond his own experience, part of a larger reckoning with the modern workplace. Grind culture isn’t a new phenomenon (think yuppies, American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, or Michael Douglas in Wall Street — all decades old now) but the stakes among LOs feel especially high. Step back and risk losing business; push too hard and jeopardize your well-being. 

And while some loan officers are calling for an end to these purportedly unhealthy work practices, there are some — such as NEXA Mortgage founder and self-professed “greatest mortgage broker of all time,” Mike Kortas — who take the opposite approach: You snooze, you lose. Sucker. 

Is there a line? Or rather, should there be? Like Gerard, some LOs are trying to draw one.

The Loan-22

Work-life balance is a tricky problem in any industry, no doubt, but for mortgage professionals, it can be almost impossible to achieve. In a 2023 MGIC Mortgage Insurance survey, results showed that 91% of respondents view availability and service as their most valuable assets when working with referral partners, highlighting the ingrained perception that in order to compete, they must stay tapped in all the time, phone to the ear, ready to go. 

While some strive to draw clear boundaries between their work and personal lives, others argue that true balance is an illusion — Gerard among them. He describes work-life balance as an ebb and flow, a happiness metric as opposed to a consistent balancing of priorities.

“You can't say, my life over here sucks, but this life's great,” he explains. “No, your life either is good, it's working, it's flowing together, you're happy — or you're not. I think that's what a lot of people don't understand. They're like, ‘You need a work-life balance.’ No, you don't. You need a good life.”

In order to live a good life, however, one needs to pay the bills, and when there is always someone around the corner ready to poach clients, anxiety looms. 

Indeed a sort of Catch-22 — or Loan-22 — exists within the mortgage game; forget doctors and firefighters, LOs might just be the most on-call professionals out there. A pre-approval at 2 AM? No problem. A client who “just had a feeling” about a house and needs to act immediately? Better materialize like a genie with a calculator. And if you don’t? Pfft. Good luck sleeping soundly while another LO swoops in.

But data suggests that the body keeps score of all those late nights. In a 2014 study published by The Lancet, researchers from University College London found that participants who reported working 55 or more hours a week had 13% greater risk of heart attack, and 33% higher chance of stroke when compared to those working 40 hours.  

A 2014 Stanford study, as well, found that productivity in fact drastically decreases after working 50 hours a week, so much so that a person who’s clocked in 70 hours is only completing, on average, 55. Losing three hours of time for each hour of work is no way to build a business — or live a life.

Ryan Grant, co-creator of Neo Home Loans by Better, has built a personal platform speaking on the dangers and drawbacks of the constant hustle. Guiding mortgage lenders (“mortgage advisors” as they’re called at Neo) through the do’s and don’ts of a sustainable professional life is his passion. He’s even built a consulting business around his philosophy: Loan Atlas. 

“As an industry, we have made a mistake in making [working crazy hours] the thing we put people on a pedestal for,” he says. “I don't want to be rude or insensitive, but you’ll see someone win an award for doing all this volume but then they’re walking up to the stage to get their award and they’re tired and they’re out of shape, and you’re just like, ‘Is that what it takes?’ ”

Grant adds that this pressure to produce volume can destroy parent-child relationships and marriages, as well. It’s like that old Harry Chapin song, “Cat's in the Cradle.” In case you don’t know it, the basic premise is this: the dad’s never around and it creates a cycle of unhappiness and loneliness and deep regret for everyone involved. Total bummer. 

Divorce. Supervised visitations. A stark white apartment with brutalist furniture and a big stainless steel fridge stocked with nothing but Muscle Milk. Maybe a pair of dumbbells in the corner: a memento of a dream deferred. That’s the (albeit extreme) trajectory for many LOs if things don’t change.

Top To Bottom Burnout

The cycle of 24/7 hustle is a top-down system, beginning with management. How often has your manager projected a frantic energy? Or admitted, “This job is why I drink?” A stressed-out, red-faced, chainsmoking kind of paranoia that permeates everything and everyone it touches. 

No one ever instructed you to be stressed to the max, but as a subordinate, maybe you modeled that behavior. Grant calls it an “unspoken expectation.”

“They're not saying I need you to work, you know, 15 hours today. But they're watching that person work 15 hours and they're watching everyone around them work 15 hours and they're thinking, well I guess I gotta do that. I guess that's what it takes to be successful.”

Both Gerard and Grant acknowledge that early on in one's career it may be tempting to proactively grind at all hours just to make a name. Ultimately, though, this is a crash and burn model that will not take a budding LO very far, long-term. 

Grant admits that as a young LO starting out, it was common for him to work 14-hour days. “I was 20 years old and, you know, it was not that hard for me,” he says. But as he expanded his business, got married, and began to take on more personal responsibilities, that schedule wasn’t something he could juggle on top of everything else. 

Nor should the juggle be the objective of a career. An LO might be running around frantically, trying to complete a million little tasks, but all of those tasks are getting done worse. Multitasking, actually, has the potential to impair brain function and reduce memory, according to a 2018 Stanford study. 

Gerard says he avoids that scenario by communicating, taking time to explain his system of handling business early on, so any Realtors he works with know what to expect from him off the bat. 

“If we're going to have anybody shopping on the weekend, let's at least get them in by Thursday so I can do my presentation on Friday to make sure they're fully prepared to shop,” he says. 

And if there’s a crisis? “A one-off emergency showing, we can do a quick phone call, but more than likely, I'm not going to be in a position to do a full pre-approval and give your clients the attention they need. So, if we ever do have an emergency, I'll be willing to jump in. But let's always make sure our clients are going through the system.”

Gerard recognizes that emergencies can happen, but notes that there shouldn’t typically be a reason a loan needs to be turned around right now.

“Nobody decides on a Sunday that they're going to buy a house and expects to have it under contract that Sunday. Nobody,” he says. “My best agents that I work with, they'll never even call me for a pre-approval on a Monday because they know it can wait.”

The Always LinkedIn Experience

Technology, in many regards, has helped alleviate some of the pressure to be locked in all the time. Grant describes a program they use in his business which can field customer inquiries all hours of the day. 

“We have a generative chat called Betsy, and she can answer the phone at any [time] — twenty-four seven. She can answer a hundred phone calls at one time; she can make outbound calls too, at any point, right? She can answer questions about files.”

And although he recognizes these systems might be out of reach for smaller brokerages (they’re often pricey), he believes harnessing automated tools is an important step in defining a boundary between profession and play. 

“We could be with our families at, you know, eight o'clock or seven at night, or we can be having dinner and enjoying our actual life as opposed to our work, knowing that we have automation to answer calls or answer questions. We solve both problems at once, right? We show that we can be there for people when they need us, but we can also be there for our family or for ourselves when we need us.”

Gerard, however, is arguably more skeptical about technological advancements, as he feels they’ve made clients and partners potentially more demanding of an LO’s time. He recalls the early days, pre-computers, when the expectations were vastly different.

“I think technology has helped us in a lot of ways but it's also given the idea that we owe [clients] money,” he says. “In the ’80s you had to schedule an appointment and go to the bank and then you had to make your case to them because they didn't have credit reports … you had to explain to them why I should let you borrow money. People feel like if you don't give me money now, I'll call somebody else who does. The whole dynamic has changed because of technology.”

When everything in the mortgage process is instantaneous, it’s not surprising that loan officers would feel compelled to do the same. But over time, the mask they put on to go to work can begin to look a lot like a face. 

And where the boundary between work and personal life blurs, a question arises: what can be done?

The 24/7 Fix

So what’s the solution to ending the all-hours mortgage grind? If you asked Mike Kortas, he’d tell would-be successes to suck it up. Figure it out. Like the Nike slogan: Just do it. 

“It’s just what we do at the highest level,” he says. He explains that in order to be the best, you have to be willing to give up everything else, but acknowledges that he’s had to sacrifice in order to reach the pinnacle of success — owner of a yacht, ranch, multiple homes, aircrafts. And sure, owning a private jet is probably really cool, but at what cost? The late nights, the missed birthdays and Little League tournaments, the constant pressure to stay ahead — these things pile up.

“I recognize my own son growing — like an uncle, not like a father,” he admits. But it’s a trade-off worth making, at least to him. He’s willingly traded a focus on family for the opportunity to cultivate a reputation he believes will extend far beyond his lifetime. 

“You die twice. The first time you die is when you take your last breath, the second time is the last time they say your name — what’s your legacy?”

And while legacy and name recognition are what some require to feel successful, for those seeking a more modest lifestyle (just “good” and not “the best,” as Kortas frames it), things could be improving. Sensitivities around modern workplace culture are shifting as more people address the effects of working to the extreme. And young people, as you’ve probably heard by now, are leading the charge. 

In a CNBC article about Gen Z’s loud and controversial arrival to the corporate setting, writer Jennifer Liu notes that Gen Z’s concept of hustle is framed by freedom and flexibility. The hustle is not gone, necessarily, just reimagined in a more mindful, self-preserving format.

This shift in mindset coincides with a professional culture rocked by uncertainty; with mass layoffs (1 in 3 workers surveyed claim to experience “layoff anxiety”) and “ghost jobs” (81% of responding recruiters report their companies post fake positions) lurking around every corner, it makes sense that employees would not break their backs for a company that might not have theirs in the end.

But when it comes to the mortgage industry specifically, Gerard notes that he doesn’t think there will suddenly be one mass exodus to a standard 9-5 schedule. For every person who puts their foot down, there’s another right behind, eager to provide the 24/7 attention that others will not. 

“I don't think we can just pass a mass blanket and say everybody's going to conform,” he says. “If 50% of us try to not do certain things, the other 50% is going to use that as marketing for why you should use them. That's just the nature of the beast that we live in.”

Grant, on the other hand, is perhaps more hopeful about the future. He believes that if more LOs begin to rethink their “value proposition” (in other words, defining their business value in something besides availability) things will begin to change. He urges the mortgage industry as a whole to reframe success, to consider themselves as “professionals” with a tangible skill to offer clients. 

“The best attorneys in the world, they're really good at what they do, not because they're available. The best doctors in the world are not doing surgeries at 10 o'clock on a Saturday night,” he explains. “We just have to start teaching the mortgage community and real estate professionals as well. We need to treat ourselves as advisors and professionals and, you know, we need to have normal hours.”

He offers an analogy about airplanes. Everyone’s ridden one, everyone’s sat through the flight safety video where the attendants explain that in case of emergency parents should handle themselves before their children. Grant says that he always wondered why that was, as a kid. Then it clicked. 

“If your mom or dad has passed out, they're not gonna be able to help you, right? And it's the same concept. Like, we have to put our mask on first because we're no good to anybody else if we're sick or dying or have no energy.”

Even still, the “sleep when you’re dead” mindset persists. “My work-life balance — my what?” Mike Kortas laughs. “You should see the balance in my checkbook.”

So, while the 24/7 grind isn’t dead, it seems to be facing a reckoning. As more LOs challenge the norm and redefine success, the industry may finally start valuing sustainability as much as sales. Because at the end of the day, what’s the point of closing deals if you’re too exhausted to enjoy the life you built?