Never do Business with a JW. I have been burned before, but this one threatened my living situation.

When I was PIMI, I decided to buy a house. At that time I was about 43, and a single parent of two who had somehow managed to build a professional career despite not having a degree.

For my house loan, I initially used a JW mortgage broker who was recommended to me by my friend's son, who was also JW and a real estate agent. This turned out to be a disaster!

I had good credit and expected everything to go smoothly in the pre-approval process. I signed up for a credit monitoring service where I could pull my own credit rating at any time. Before approaching the broker, I knew exactly where I stood with the credit agencies.

As a happenstance of bad timing, a mistake appeared on my credit report just as the broker pulled my credit for the first time. I was shocked that he came back with a credit rating that was MUCH lower than I expected. Upon further inspection, I saw that the error had NOTHING to do with me or my finances.

I contacted the credit agencies directly and had the error removed. It was removed very quickly, perhaps even on the same day, and my credit rating bounced back up.

However, I couldn't convince the JW mortgage broker to re-run my credit. I sent him screenshots of my credit rating and proof that the error was removed from the report. But he wouldn't budge. He kept insisting on waiting for an indeterminate amount of time. This made no sense to me, and I was really frustrated, but this was my first time buying a home, and I was new to the process so I didn't know how to proceed.

The thing is, a pre-approval letter is important if you are going to be taken seriously when putting in an offer on a house. My home search was time sensitive as my lease was expiring on my duplex in a few months, and I wanted to secure a home before I needed to renew it.

Because I was confident in my ability to be approved, I moved forward with my home search and toured homes with my very kind (not a JW) real estate agent. But without a pre-approval in hand, as I was told that this could be gotten very quickly when needed.

After a couple of weeks of looking, the JW broker was, astonishingly, still unwilling to run my credit. In addition, he took things a step further and contacted my real estate agent and told him that he doubted my creditworthiness.

I. Was. Livid.

I called up the JW broker and gave him a piece of my mind. Why are you trying to prevent me from buying a home? You are putting me in limbo by purposely stalling the process and telling my agent things that are not true.

His patronizing response made it clear that this was all about JW misogyny. "I know better than you." "I am protecting you." "I am doing the honorable thing by informing your agent." "You are not ready to search for homes."

Despite the evidence in front of him, he couldn't believe that a single sister (and single parent) could make a professional salary and qualify to buy a nice home. He felt the need to control me despite the fact that it ultimately went against his business interests.

He also talked about me to other witnesses. I trusted him to give him private financial information, and he gossiped about me with one other family, giving them inaccurate information.

In the end, I worked with my real estate agent to get another broker, and the process was smooth from then on out. I have been in my home for 12 years, and still love it!