What is the Loan Officer Job Description?

The term Loan Officer refers to someone who is engaged in the business of selling mortgage loans, usually to homeowners or real estate investors. A Loan Officer traditionally works for either a Mortgage Broker or brokerage, a bank that lends money, or some other type of lending institution. A Loan Officer has many jobs and responsibilities and a great deal of training and experience are requirements to a successful career as a Loan Officer.

No Loan Officer job description would be complete without first discussing licensing and training. In California, as in most states, the license required to conduct business is a valid Real Estate Salespersons license, though most Loan Officers dont engage actively in selling properties. To become licensed in California you need to submit an application to the Department of Real Estate in Sacramento. You will need to pass a background examination and complete the required principles course and two other courses first before being allowed to take the Real Estate Salespersons license examination.

It is highly recommended that any applicant take a two day weekend crash course before taking their examination. This will definitely help you to pass the first time you take the test. There are many good schools online, including First Tuesday and several others you can Google.

Once they get their license, a new Loan Officer may find it hard to adapt right away to a commission only environment at a top mortgage brokerage. When you first start out it could take three months or more to see your first commission check.

A good alternative is to work at a bank as a loan officer in their lending department or get a job at a higher volume broker. Countrywide Home Loans had a great sales training program and many top loan officers began their careers there, even though it was basically a sweatshop.

Once they start working at a mortgage brokerage, they will be assigned to a desk and hopefully given some training, but that is not always the case. To learn the complete Loan Officer job description would take a long time. Training should include learning loan tracking software such as Calyx Point or Encompass. They should also receive top notch sales training to show rookies how to go about getting leads and closing deals.

Once a Loan Officer gets used to making those big commission checks, they usually dont go to other professions. The last few years have changed what a Loan Officer job description looks like and todays thriving professionals are in constant touch with their clients and live mainly off referral business.

When you do a great job for a client by giving them a choice of the best rates and mortgage products that will fill their needs, customers will refer their friends and family to you. This is the best way to get new business and customers. You become a trusted financial advisor and that is another big part of a Loan Officer job description.

When a client entrusts you with the job of finding them the best mortgage and helping them make one of the biggest decisions of their life, the Loan Officer job description goes from mundane to life-changing.

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Fad Diets - Skinny Celebrities Can Afford the Health Costs.

Fad Diets - Skinny Celebrities Can Afford the Health Costs. Can You?

One of the issues we face dieting is learning how to manage hunger. Whether its that mid afternoon slump, or mid morning cravings, being hungry for too long is a fast way to derail all our good intentions to turn over a new lettuce leaf.

Different strategies have in the past been proposed to deal with hunger. Some people find drinking a glass of water every time they are hungry helps. The model Gisele Bundchen is a real advocate of this approach. And judging by her stunning figure, she's a good poster girl for increasing your fluid intake. Water has many benefits for the body, and people often simply don't drink enough. There's even a book on the subject that presents the view that many diseases in old age are related to a kind of entrenched state of dehydration (Your Body's Many Cries for Water by F.Batmanghelid,MD).

Whilst diets composed mainly of soups are fairly common (think the Cabbage Soup diet and Liz Hurley's favorite, the Watercress Soup Diet), this is not the healthiest way to approach soup. Nor is it likely to lead to long tern success. Diets that focus on just one vegetable or type of food are not only very boring to go on, they do not provide the range of nutrients that the body needs to function well. Could hunger actually be the body's way of saying, 'I need some nutrients'. Sustainable weight loss is not achieved by setting up an unrealistic eating plan that is painful to follow for more than a week and leaves you fantasizing about food all the time. Unless of course you don't mind going to bed hungry for two years like Liz did after her son was born.

Starvation and nutrient restriction lead to loss of muscle mass and bone density. Not to mention fatigue and other possible health problems if followed long term.

The irony is that soups, including cabbage soup and watercress soup, are really good for you. They are easy to digest, and can be prepared ahead and frozen. That way you have a low kilojoule snack that is often high in fiber ready at the helm as a quick pick-me-up when hunger strikes between meals.

And some soups have surprising health benefits. For example, the Japanese Miso soup has been linked with preventing liver cancer, breast cancer and skin cancer, with theories also proposed about a benefit to skin due to linoleic acid. Whether this is found to be true, it is a delicious base for your favorite vegetables, and very easy to prepare from scratch. It takes only about ten minutes to prepare, and when garnished with grated ginger is a fantastic energizing soup when you are tired.

Neither soup nor water alone will lead to weight loss, and neither should these strategies be used to extremes and become a substitute for following a healthy, balanced diet. But they provide a way to minimize excursions into old habits we are trying to change as we address the lifestyle choices that led to gaining excess weight in the first place. And by providing the nutrients your body actually needs, you'll be creating a change in the quality of life experienced day to day.

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Diabetes And Weight Loss

Did you know that you can be 'just a little bit diabetic'? The condition is technically called 'pre-diabetes', and it is characterized by persistent high blood sugar levels. Pre-diabetes is a serious condition, though its symptoms may be so subtle that you don't notice them affecting your life. More importantly, it's an indicator that there is something seriously wrong with your body. Left untreated, over 50% of those diagnosed with pre-diabetes will develop Type 2 diabetes within ten years.

If your doctor has told you that you are one of the more than 16 million Americans who has pre-diabetes, the American Diabetes Association has some very good news for you. In March 2005, the ADA released the results of the multi-year Diabetes Prevention Project. In a study that followed thousands of patients across the nation who had been diagnosed with pre-diabetes, the Diabetes Prevention Project found that patients who lost a 'moderate' amount of weight reduced their risk of developing full-blown diabetes by over 58%. Even more encouraging, many of those patients had managed to reverse their condition, and their blood sugar levels were well within normal ranges.

This was a result that the researchers had not expected. Diabetes (and pre-diabetes) is the result of changes to cells in the pancreas that reduce the amount of insulin that they can produce. Doctors have always believed that those changes are irreversible. Now however, the research seems to suggest that losing weight with a healthy balance of exercise and diet can actually heal those early damages caused by diabetes.

Here's the even better news. Those results were achieved by people who lost 'moderate' amounts of weight - from 5-7% of their total body mass. In other words, if you weigh 200 pounds and have been diagnosed as pre-diabetic, losing just 10-15 pounds can more than halve the risk of developing full-blown diabetes, and may reverse your condition entirely.

Here are some healthy weight loss tips from the American Diabetes Association:

1. Keep your diet balanced. Eat a variety of foods in all food groups, with an emphasis on grains, starches and fresh vegetables and fruit.

2. Learn to eyeball portions. Portion control is far more important than restricting what foods you eat. A 'portion' of raw vegetables may be considerably larger than a portion of the same vegetables cooked. There are some handy reference guides on their web site at http://www.diabetes.org

3. Add one half hour daily of moderate exercise to your daily routine five days a week. This one single lifestyle change seemed to be the key to both weight loss and the beneficial effects derived from it. It was the single significant difference between the two groups in the study.

The results of the Diabetes Prevention Project only confirm what has been the best advice in dieting circles for years - losing weight with a balanced diet and exercise is the healthiest way there is. For more information on the diet recommended by the American Diabetes Association, visit their web site at http://www.diabetes.org

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The Most Effective Weight Loss Tips

The most effective method for weight loss is reducing the number of calories you consume - through eating, while increasing the number of calories you burn - through physical activity. As an example, to lose one pound, you will need to undertake physical expenditure of approximately 3,500 calories. You can achieve this either by cutting back on what you eat, changing what you eat, or by increasing physical activity, or ideally, by doing a combination of all three.

Take this situation as an example. If you consume 500 extra calories per day for one week without changing your activity level, you will gain one pound in weight (7 days multiplied by 500 calories equals 3500 calories, or the number of calories resulting in a one-pound weight gain). Conversely, if you eat 500 fewer calories each day for a week or burn 500 calories per day through exercise for one week, then you will lose one pound over the course of that week. Which would you choose?

Perhaps before you start thinking about losing weight you should take a moment to examine what you eat. Sometimes it is not just about reducing your calorie intake, but it is also about changing what you eat decrease fatty foods and increase your intake of fresh fruit and vegetables.

Examples of some high calorie popular foods and beverages include:

1 slice original-style crust pepperoni pizza 230 calories
1 glass of dry white wine 160 calories
1 can of cola 150 calories
1 quarter-pound hamburger with cheese 500 calories
1 jumbo banana nut muffin 580 calories

Are any of these in your regular diet? If so, maybe it's time to make some changes!

When it comes to weight loss, crash diets are never a good idea. Most health and well being experts will agree that a safe, healthy rate of losing weight is usually around one to 1 ? pounds per week. Anything more than this means that you are more likely to put your weight back on, down the track. By modifying your eating habits and adding in a little regular exercise, you will be embarking upon the most effective way to lose weight in the long term. It is also the ideal way to ensure that the weight stays off.

Starvation diets may result in rapid weight loss and give you immediate results, but this loss of weight is really hard to maintain over a long period of time. When food intake is severely restricted to something below 1200 calories per day, the body begins to think that it is poor nutrition, so it begins to shut down its metabolic rate. This can make it even more difficult to lose weight in the long run. Candidates who crash diet can also experience hunger pangs, bouts of hypoglycemia, headaches, and mood changes from overly stringent dieting which can all result in binge eating and weight gain.

Since a highly restrictive diet is almost impossible to maintain for a long time, people who attempt to starve themselves thin often start to gain weight again when they stop dieting. Hence, the reason for embarking on a gradual, long term program that increases physical fitness and well being, at the same time.

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Does Weight Loss Hypnosis Work?

The weight loss industry is big business world wide. In recent years in the United States, more than $30 billion dollars was spent by consumers on various weight loss products, gym memberships, exercise machines and food programs.

Choosing a weight loss program is the first step towards staying healthy, if you need to lose weight for the sake of maintaining or improving your health and well being. But staying with a weight loss program can prove to be difficult for so many. That is why, when it comes to weight loss, choosing a support program, checking with your doctor and then adding in some regular exercise is the key to long term success.

What ever you do, dont to be tempted to follow a one food diet program such as the Cabbage Soup diet, or the Grapefruit diet, because your body is just not meant to exist on just one type of food for a sustained period of time. Instead, use your common sense and adopt a program because it works for you, not because it is the latest fad that all of the Hollywood stars have had success with. Remember that at the end of the day, the fad diets come and go, but your body is with you for the duration of your life, so it is important to take care of your body wisely.

People are focused on an easy and quick way to lose weight. But finding a program that will support long term weight loss and maintenance is the key to success.

Your mind is a powerful tool. While many people have yet to understand and harness the power of their minds, plenty of people are trying to do so, on a consistent basis, and this is helping them to reach all manner of success in their personal and professional lives. If you are at the point where nothing is working for you as far as losing weight or dieting, and you want to go a more controversial way, then you might want to consider weight loss hypnosis.

The first thing you need to do is find a qualified behavioral counselor. Many of these gifted individuals are also skilled in the area of self- hypnosis. Set up an appointment and talk with the counselor about your relationship with food. Then question the counselor as to whether or not his or her teaching you self-hypnosis will work to help you lose weight.

Self-hypnosis can be effective, but having the right person teaching you is critical. Beware of practitioners who ask for large sums of money beyond the counseling session to teach you this tool. While weight loss hypnosis can be effective, you should really steer clear of tapes and books that teach you the DIY (do it yourself) technique, as you will probably end up wasting your money. You really need a human guide to be able to be successful and lose weight.

Hypnosis alone will not allow you to lose weight. But if you have found a qualified counselor, you will receive advice about eating sensibly, exercising regularly and drinking more water.

Weight loss hypnosis is not a quick and easy way to cure a weight loss problem, but rather it is a means to an end. The end result is that you will gain control over your life and over what foods you choose to eat.

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