Ask “do you have any other debts?” and most clients will mentally run through their loan and credit card statements — the debts that show up on a monthly bill. What they usually won't include, unless you ask more specifically, is the $6,000 they owe a sibling, the buy-now-pay-later balance on a phone they financed, or the line of credit they haven't touched in a year but still technically owe against. None of those clients are lying. They answered the question as they understood it, and “debt” meant something narrower to them than it does on a lender's application.
This is the single most useful thing to internalize in this module: a vague or incomplete answer is almost never deception. It's a mismatch between the plain-language question you asked and the specific financial category the lender actually needs information about. The fix isn't to distrust the client — it's to ask the follow-up question that closes that gap, in language a non-specialist will actually understand as applying to their situation.
When a client says “it's complicated” about their income, or “we're still working that out” about the down payment source, the instinct is to treat that as a placeholder to fill in later. Don't. A vague answer is telling you something specific: either the client doesn't fully understand their own situation yet, or there's a detail they're not ready to share, or the honest answer genuinely is unresolved. Each of those calls for a different response.
If the client doesn't understand their own situation — common with variable commission income, or a recent job change — the right move is to slow down and walk through it together rather than accepting a rough estimate. If there's something they're not ready to share, pushing immediately tends to backfire; it's often more productive to note it, move on, and return to it once trust has built a little further in the conversation. If it's genuinely unresolved, that's a real timeline risk worth flagging now rather than discovering later.
Hesitation before an answer and over-explanation after one are both signals worth noticing, even though they look opposite on the surface. A pause before answering “any other properties?” often means the client is deciding whether something counts — a cottage still in a parent's name that they contribute to, say — rather than genuinely having nothing to report. Over-explanation, where a simple question gets a long, unprompted justification, often means the client anticipates that the honest answer will be seen as a problem, and they're pre-emptively making their case.
Neither signal tells you exactly what's underneath it, but both are a cue to slow down and ask one more specific question rather than accepting the first answer and moving to the next item on your sequence. The goal isn't to catch anyone out — it's to make sure the file reflects reality before a lender finds the gap for you.
Individual answers can each sound complete and still not add up together. A client who says their only debt is a car loan, but whose stated monthly expenses leave no reasonable room for their stated rent, is telling you there's a debt or obligation missing from the first answer. A client who mentions in passing that their ex-partner still lives in a property they co-own, after having already said “no other properties,” has just revealed something the direct question didn't surface.
Building the habit of holding the whole conversation in your head, rather than treating each question as a closed transaction, is what catches these mismatches. It's also why a rigid, box-ticking intake script tends to underperform a broker who's actually listening — the script gets every individual answer, but misses the ones that only show up in the gaps between them.
Not every hesitation needs to be chased down in the first conversation. If a detail doesn't materially change the type of file you're building or the lenders you'd consider, it's often better to note it and confirm it later through documentation rather than making the client feel cross-examined over something minor. But if the hesitation touches one of the categories covered in the next module — support payments, undisclosed debt, other properties, or an employment change — it's worth a direct, gentle follow-up in the moment, because those are exactly the categories that derail a file weeks later if they surface after submission instead of before it.
A client answers “no other debts” but later mentions, almost in passing, that they've been helping cover a sibling's car payment. What does this most likely tell you?
This is the classic mismatch this module covers: “debt” meant something specific and narrow to the client, and an informal family obligation didn't register as fitting it. It's not dishonesty, and it's not confusion that requires pausing the file — it's a normal gap that a follow-up question closes. Whether the payment is relevant depends on whether it's a real, ongoing obligation worth factoring in, which is exactly what the follow-up question is for — dismissing it outright skips the step that would tell you either way.
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