American General Finance – “Get ready to throw out your heart...”

Pros

You will get a lot of inside information on how lending works so you can use this on your personal borrowing needs. It will make you think twice about how you borrow money.

Cons

Do not bring morality to this job; the name of the game is profit. Examples: We have something called Customer appreciation days in November. We invite customer to refinance their account to skip their November and December payments. The purpose of this is to restart their account and collect more interest so we will have a nice profit in January. This of course is not disclosed to our customers and we pretend we are doing this as a favor to them. Management will work with partial truths; for example: when a customer wants a due date change we are encouraged to say we need to refinance their loan in order to do so. This is not true. There are many employees (myself excluded) who will not disclose the fact that there is credit insurance included in a loan. Another thing is the high rates that we charge; we are encouraged to always offer the highest rate possible and then negotiate down if we need to. In some states there is also a 5% fee for processing the loan on top of the higher rate. We are encouraged to offer anywhere from 9% to 18% mortgage loans and use the fact that we can cut the customer's term and save them interest as a selling tool. Are you kidding?

To make a long story short; most of the practices are legal, but they are immoral. If you still decide to work for this company then you must throw out your heart because you will be doing a disservice to your customers and your community as a whole. Treat others the way you want to be treated, don't offer them 30%.

Advice to Senior Management

How do you sleep at night?