American General Finance – “Grinding away at my will to live...”

Pros

Pay is okay when you consider how easy this job is (mostly). A solid 40 hours a week, monday through friday is good, although later hours on tuesdays was annoying. Benefits are decent. You learn about (but don't master) a lot of the various aspects of the lending industry.

Cons

Collecting on folks that don't have any money or recourse is hard. Doing it several times a day is harder. Selling loans to people at 30% APR sucks too. I've seen some shady things go on at this company, and they weren't hard to spot, but as long as the numbers looked good, management would look the other way. If you honestly care about people, and want to help them, this isn't the job for you. I'm not saying nothing I did while I worked there was helpful to people. But I know that for every person I helped, another 20 were getting hosed by high rates, bad terms, and in the case of many of our used car referral dealers, bad merchandise. In most branches, if you want to excel, you need to put your conscience on hold.

It was a grind, and it wore me down to the point that my wife wanted me to quit, even though I didn't have another job lined up, and I was the only one of us working. My district manager was an automoton who was addicted to the company punch, wouldn't give you a straight answer, and would do anything to avoid rocking the boat. This company is NOT profitable right now, don't let anybody fool you. They are borrowing money at a high rate, and therefore need to lend it out to their customers at an astronomical rate in order to break even (which isn't happening).

Up until a few months ago, we were expected to close 2+ real estate loans a month, but rates and ltv's were RIDICULOUS. While the rest of the mortgage industry was offering under 5%, the best rate AGF would do is about 8% (that's for people with PERFECT credit). This went on for about a year. Seriously. That's how long it took before they realized that what they were asking for was unreasonable. Before I left, I was told that anybody who missed 3 or more days due to illness over the course of the YEAR had to write a note explaining the reason. Unreasonable... that's a great word to use when describing this company.

The worst part for me though, was that I just felt like I was going through the motions. I was not appreciated, I was not rewarded for going beyond my regular duties, and I was powerless to change anything (it's a big company). They recognize numbers only. That means the people who are your superiors were the ones that were shady enough to make bad loans 5-10 years ago, and who were promoted before all their bad real estate deals fell apart. Up the chain of command, every single person was well known -- not for their hard work or intelligence, but for making shady deals, selling insurance without full disclosure, etc. THAT is was the company will reward. Not competance, not inginuity, not even dedication.

Advice to Senior Management

My advice to the management of AGFS: Retire.
Seriously though, what this company needs to see is that you can't reward employees based solely on loan production and insurance sales. The top producer in our branch when I left was also the person responsible for closing about 50% of our collection accounts. So, the entire branch spent several hours every morning trying to collect on those bad loans, when they could have been trying to drum up more good, sustainable business. That's at least 1 hour each day for EACH employee that's thrown out the window. As a manager, does that seem smart? The good loans, the ones that you WANT, will get done regardless of whether the FR doing them is shady or not. Find a way to make employees accountable for their bad loans, then you'll see who your smartest, hardest working employees are. Promote THEM. Put THEM in charge. You'll change your whole company around (if it isn't already too late).