Today, we’re diving deep into a topic that touches so many lives but is often overlooked in the world of real estate and finance: the intersection of divorce and mortgages. Whether you’ve experienced divorce personally, are currently supporting a friend or client through it, or work as a realtor or attorney, today’s episode is packed with practical advice and crucial pitfalls to avoid.

We’re thrilled to be joined by Amy Malamut, a longtime friend, former divorce attorney, and now a mortgage loan officer at one of New Jersey’s top teams. Amy’s rare combination of legal and mortgage expertise gives her a unique perspective, one that less than 1% of loan officers can claim. We talk candidly about what commonly gets missed in property settlement agreements, the consequences of boilerplate legal language, and why timing and communication make all the difference between a successful refinance and a last-minute scramble.

We explore the emotional, financial, and logistical hurdles people face when separating property during a divorce, and Amy shares real-life scenarios from both sides: those who planned ahead and those caught off guard. Plus, we outline actionable advice for both attorneys and realtors and wrap up with essential reminders for anyone navigating this challenging process.

Key takeaways:

Mortgage Considerations Should Come First Not Last

Too often, the fate of the marital home is an afterthought in divorce proceedings. We learned that boilerplate timelines (like requiring the buyout or refinance of a home in 60 to 90 days) often set people up for failure especially when lending rules require at least six months of alimony payment history to qualify for a new mortgage. Early consultation with a mortgage expert helps avoid heartache and last-minute surprises (01:15–04:39).

Credit Can Make or Break Your Next Steps

Divorce is an emotional rollercoaster, and it’s easy for credit to take a hit sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. We unpacked how a single missed payment or unwatched account can tank someone’s score, and why proactive credit monitoring (often long before the ink is dry) is so important for anyone trying to keep or buy a home (06:26–10:21).

Not All Pre-Qualifications Are Created Equal

Relying on a bank’s basic pre-qualification can be misleading and devastating. A full pre-approval from a mortgage specialist, one that factors in your legal agreements, timelines, and income sources is the only way to be confident about what you can afford, especially when alimony and child support are part of the equation (10:45–12:52).

Attorneys, Realtors, and Lenders Must Collaborate

The divorce process is layered and technical, and each professional brings their own expertise. Realtors and attorneys don’t have to be mortgage experts; instead, connecting early with a specialist like Amy helps clarify what’s truly possible and can cut out wasted time, unnecessary legal fees, and dashed expectations (13:36–16:19).

Specific Questions Matter Especially in Divorce-Focused Transactions

Realtors and attorneys should ask questions that go beyond the usual: Where are clients in their divorce? What’s their alimony/support situation? How is their credit and employment status? Are there outstanding liens? These details often determine whether clients can keep or purchase property and addressing them upfront means fewer surprises and a smoother transition for all involved (16:19–20:06).

If you, a friend, or a client are navigating separation and real estate decisions, please listen and share. Amy’s contact information is linked in the show notes don’t wait until the ink is dry to get the support and expertise you need.

Rach & Rin

Hey everybody. Welcome back to Lending Leadership. We are talking today with a good friend of mine and co worker Amy Malamut about divorce, mortgages and maybe some missteps, things that you don't always think about. I think everyone knows someone who's gone through a divorce. Maybe you're going through one yourself. Maybe you're a realtor or attorney who you're helping clients through this stressful time in life and you want to be a resource. So this is an episode you are going to want to tune into. Amy has a really unique perspective that I would venture to say probably only actually maybe less than 1% of mortgage loan officers have this skill set of being a divorce attorney.

Amy was a divorce attorney for over 10 years, has that unique background and then she's also a mortgage loan officer with one of the top teams in New Jersey at HMA Mortgage. So am. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for having me, Rachael. I'm excited to be here. So. All right.

I want to dive into. Maybe one of the first things that really get overlooked is that the mortgage normally comes last. When someone's going through a divorce process, it's like, oh yeah, what are we going to do with the house? Is just give me some perspective on that because I, I would have thought that I've never been through a divorce.

Sure. And it's crazy because it's like one of the biggest assets that most people have is the marital residence or any other properties they may have that may be at issue. And it's like it's so important and it's usually being left till the very end of a divorce or after. And a lot of times people are putting just very boilerplate language into their property settlement agreements or a judge is putting very boilerplate language into the final judgment of divorce if it goes to court all the way and a judge is making the decisions. And it's really a shame because just like divorce how it's very fact sensitive. Mortgages are very fact sensitive. And if you're not taking care and giving and really taking your time to look at the circumstances of each case, you really could be doing a disservice to yourself if you're the litigant or your clients, if you're an attorney or a realtor. And some of that boilerplate language, just as an example, would be putting in an agreement that the person who wants to keep them out of residence has 60 to 90 days to buy out their spouse and get title in their name.

And then the house is theirs oftentimes, 60 to 90 days is not enough. Quick tip is that if you're getting a conventional loan, we need to see six months of a consistent payment of alimony under a court order, if you need that alimony to count as your income. So if you're the one receiving alimony, you're the one keeping the house. 60 to 90 days is not enough time. And now you're either going back to the attorneys to try to renegotiate, or you might have a former spouse who's saying, too bad, can't do it in 90 days. Then you need to list the house for sale. And wow, that's so devastating if you really want to keep the house, especially if there's children involved or if the house was the main issue in the divorce and you really just wanted to keep it. So really speaking to someone like me during the divorce is just so important.

So that that language seems like it sets people up. I mean, not intentionally, I think it's

just they just know.

But that language almost sets people up for failure from the beginning if they say 16 to 90 days. But you need six, six months of income verification of some kind. I mean, that's a really. That's a really tough position to be in.

Yeah. And I will say, just because, you know, it's. It's certainly worth mentioning because of. Interest rates are relatively high right now compared to where they were during COVID So people don't want to get rid of their low interest rate by refinancing at a higher rate. So I will say that there are some times that people are getting more time to refinance in light of that. But. But even then, people still aren't talking to us until they're at, you know, two months left on their timeline to refinance. So time is really of the essence.

Why not take care of this as soon as possible? And even if you want to buy a house after a divorce, start talking to somebody during the divorce process as early on as possible. These things are very time sensitive when you time a refinance, when you time a purchase.

So I'm sure you've been on both sides of the equation where someone has come to you early, has kind of gone through the checklist, done the right things, and then on the flip side, where, where you get something and it's at the tail end and there's not much you can do. Can you provide? You know, I'd love to hear examples of both and how they worked out

a good example of someone doing the right Thing is, they came to me, they probably several months out from actually obtaining their divorce and the it was the husband who wants to keep the house and he makes a decent income but his credit was not so great. So we are working with him to improve his credit and also it would be much easier for him to also have a co signer. So he's going to have his parents co sign. And this is great because now he's got months to make sure he got his parents on board to follow the steps that we have provided him to get his credit where it needs to be be. And he should be in a great position to be able to refinance by his soon to be ex wife out of the her share of equity in the marital residence and he'll be good to go. If he had come to us at the 11th hour, I might be telling you a different story. So that's a good example of like the, and these are just simple things that you can do and talk to us. Another thing is, you know, sometimes people fight about a house for two years, who's going to keep it? And perhaps if they just talk to us, we might be able to tell them, I don't think anyone's going to be able to keep the house like under any circumstance or maybe only if they got a co signer and they're like, we don't have anyone that's going to co sign.

Like we could have cut out that acrimony at the beginning and just said, you know what, it looks like this house is going to have to be sold and you're going to have to either rent or buy something smaller or whatever the case may be. But that could happen too. And you just, you just won't know it unless you talk to me and my team.

Well, and that's, that's got to be so tough because in the meantime they're accruing all of these, these lawyer fees.

Absolutely.

For over a year or maybe longer in your experience. And that stinks. Only to not come to the conclusion that they were hoping for.

Right.

Yeah.

And they could have just stopped, you know, some of the acrimony during the divorce in the beginning. So that's another positive of speaking to a mortgage professional asap.

Yeah. And I want to back up on something that you just said and touched on with credit not being so great. I think this applies to really anyone too, but definitely somebody who is in this kind of a situation where people don't realize credit is something that can be if there's a plan in place, it can be turned around relatively quickly depending on the situation you're in, I'm sure. Yeah, but talk about that a little bit.

Well, I think also during a divorce, I mean, not to mention, like, the emotional toll it takes on you that some things may. Bills may go unpaid. You know, whether intentional or unintentional, these are the types of things that happen. So we do find that when people are going through a divorce, that is a, that is a major milestone in life where your credit may slip. You may have a spouse who used to pay the credit card bills that just stops paying the credit card bills. I mean, I can't tell you how many times that would happen when I was an attorney. And that's, that's the. I would say probably the most common cause of someone's credit tanking is going late on credit cards, not paying them, running up balances, super duper high.

So these are things to watch out for that like, you know, wife may not be thinking about that the. Her credit is going down, down, down because husband is doing something nefarious behind the scenes. It also might be not nefarious, but either way, that's something you should really start monitoring during a divorce. Also, someone may just have not checked their credit report in, you know, decades. They just might not know. Don't wait until after the divorce to find out. Do it now.

Yeah, I'm sure that the credit reporting agencies, they. They don't really care, unfortunately. If yes, you know, you call up and say, hey, this is the situation. I mean, sure.

And that's something really important. Like family court is a court of equity. They try to do the right thing. So a family court judge may be able to hold a party responsible for, you know, credit card debt and things like that. But just like you said, the credit bureaus don't care. They don't care. So in an unpaid mortgage, they. A judge might say husband has to bring the mortgage current, but a judge can't order a credit bureau to fix somebody's credit because of the unpaid mortgage.

So I think that a lot of litigants don't understand the difference. Those are two totally separate entities that exist separate and apart from each other. So it's so super important to look out for that. It's also why refinancing is so important too. The longer you stay on a mortgage with somebody who's supposed to be paying it, the more risk you run that it might affect your credit if they don't pay it.

Yeah, these are all really good points, and absolutely to Just I'm sure a very emotional situation to go through and you're not really thinking about all of these nuances. But to be an advocate for yourself if you maybe you haven't had the need to have your credit checked very long time, but really important to have that in, in the forefront of your mind of okay, these are the things I need to get to get in, in line here. You know, I want to, I want to dive into the, you know, I don't want to throw our banks under the bus. That's not, that's not the purpose of this. But a lot of times people I'm sure will say, oh well you know my bank that I've been dealing with with number of years, you know, I have a pre qualification from them. So I'm good.

Sure.

Can you just talk to a little bit to that aspect? Because I think that's something a lot of people fall into.

We actually had someone reach out to us and said they got a pre qualification from their bank and they were actually under contract to buy a house and this was somebody going through a divorce and they wanted to move out and buy a house and they were actually had a closing date and. But they didn't have a actual mortgage pre approval which is really a step after the pre qualification and requires us to look at all your documents and things like that. So when we talked to this person further, we learned that they hadn't even started receiving alimony and child support yet which was going to be integral for this person to qualify for a mortgage. So it's like they basically got this pre qualification maybe just typing in some numbers on a website. But it's. It really they were never going to be able to obtain a mortgage. Now if again if they had talked to us months in advance, we may be able to talk to their attorney, say you need to get an order in place because, and I don't want to get too complicated with this, but we can count pendente lite orders which are, it means pending the litigation in, in Latin. So if they had had an order about alimony and child support already, we may have been able to actually get them to that point, but they didn't have one.

So you know, you don't want to also fall into the trap of these like let's call it bad pre quals. You have to actually talk to someone like me and get a real mortgage pre approval. And you know, if you got a pre approval that we looked at your documents, that we ran your credit, that we looked at your Divorce agreement. So those are all the things that are, are super important to do.

And I love that your, your lawyer is showing aim, you know, like that. But that's really important, especially a mortgage loan officer dealing with attorneys that you speak their language.

Yeah, sure.

There are, there are ways that I would have phrased that. I, I would never have used those.

Yeah, we, unless we call it a temporary, a temporary order, or we now are Pl. Order pendente leite or it's all the same. It's a type of order that exists before the final order in a divorce.

In your experience, how, how important has that been when, when attorneys realize, wow, okay, you were an attorney, you speak our language. We can, we can speak freely like this or I mean, that has to really sure their position and make their jobs a lot.

Yeah, I, I, I think that, I think especially when it comes to figuring out where people are at in the divorce process itself, speaking the language is important. You know, I'm not just saying like, when are you getting divorced? It's like, well, have you been to like, in New Jersey, there's something called the early settlement panel. That's usually a pretty good indicator that we're getting closer and closer to getting a real trial date. Have you been to the early settlement panel yet? Have you gone to a mediator? If so, who was your mediator? I might know how good they are. Are there any Pendant Elite orders? Are there any issues that have already been settled? Did you already settle custody? Did you already settle child support? Did you already settle who's going to get the house? What are the issues that are out there? So there's just certain questions that I kind of know to ask to get an idea of. I mean, are we two and a half months, two and a half years away, or are we like weeks away? And that's very important for our job is to know where you're at in the process.

Yeah, that's, that's so important. I mean, honestly, you don't know what you don't know. So it's not a realtor's fault or an attorney's fault because they're staying in their lane. And this, these are the things and they're, they're working within their wheelhouse. But when you've been on both sides of the fence, I mean, I imagine that you just add such a wealth of information and have helped people through probably navigating some landmines, some further landmines. No one needs more, more mess when going.

Exactly. And I know, I know more than anyone how busy lawyers are it sometimes you can only put out the fire that's right in front of you because that's how busy you are. So when it comes to something like a house, just have your client pick up the phone and call me and I will tell you where we're going with this. You know, you don't have to be an expert on everything and nobody is so really using someone like me. Just like you would use a forensic accountant. If there is a business to be evaluated and divided between the parties, we can be a similar type of tool.

That's a really great analogy. I love that you said that. And you know, obviously we don't want to take away from our other mortgage professionals out there. But again, the same thing if you don't know what you don't know. So you know everyone as you're listening to this, and we all know someone who's gone through the situation, who will go through the situation. Just remember Amy and her team because they really do hold a unique set of. Of qualifications that I'd be curious to know how many other people there are in your position. Name.

I feel like it is such a unique skill set. You know, I want to flip the script a little bit and focus on maybe things that the realtors should be asking. Should they be ask asking a different set of questions than. Than the attorneys? I imagine for in the most case, in this kind of a situation, divorce situation, people are probably meeting with their attorney first, then the realtor and then the mortgage professional last. We need to flip that completely. But what are some things that. That maybe the realtor.

There's definitely some. I would say there's a set of questions that are a little unique to a divorce situation. You know, rather not just like, what's your name, date of birth? You know, there's other. Like when we kind of talked about already, like, where are we in the divorce process? Because that's very important, especially for a realtor. You don't want to start showing people houses if they don't have the money they need to buy the house yet. You know, there's. There's almost no point. We know how.

How quickly houses, you know, fly off the shelves nowadays. So really seeing where they're at in the process is very important. You know, obviously asking what child support and alimony is or what they anticipate it's going to be. It's also very important to understand how long the alimony and child support is going to be paid for. There's very specific rules in the mortgage world. Like for example, any child support and alimony has to be received for at least three years after the date of closing on a loan. So if you're only getting two years of alimony, we can't count it. This also goes for if you've already gone through a divorce and you want to refi or buy a house.

I need to know is that alimony ending anytime soon? So that's another. So how much longer is your alimony going to be received? It also may affect the person paying the support too. Not just receive, are you paying alimony or paying child support? How much longer are you paying that for credit? Very important, especially for someone going through a divorce. What is your credit like? If you have a feeling that it's not great, please talk to somebody as soon as possible to get it where it needs to be. Another thing is what's your job situation like? Much like credit, jobs change a lot during a divorce. You might have someone who is a stay at home parent who's going back to work or someone who is a part time worker going back to work full time. It's very important to us to know how long have they been at this job or are they going to be switching soon from part time to full time. And there's very fact specific questions that we have to ask in order to be able to count as much income as we can so that they can qualify for a mortgage.

And the last thing I would ask is do you think there may be some sort of a lien against your house? You do not want to go through the whole refinance process only for the title company to find some sort of lien that you may be responsible for. And you already agreed that you're going to be the one to refinance. The divorce is already done this, you'll be responsible for paying that if you want to complete the refinance. So that's certainly something that you know, a litigant should be thinking about, an attorney should be thinking about, a realtor should be thinking about during a divorce so that we can have a title company maybe run a lien and judgment search and find out before you agree to XYZ what whether there is something there. Especially if you think you may have been married to some sort of a bad actor who may have some, you know, unpaid debts, unpaid child support, things like that that have now become a judgment against the house. So I'd say those are like five questions that are very specific to a divorce circumstance.

Now do you find that the realtors that you deal with are these questions that might put them in an uncomfortable situation. Do they. Do they oftentimes just. Maybe they're not asking those questions or. Or do they just refer to you in. In that.

Right. I think a lot of them are asking the questions, but maybe not getting as specific. So I would say if they're uncomfortable, have them talk to me. Because anytime I talk to anyone and I say, listen, I was a divorce attorney too, it kind of makes them feel better and say, oh, okay, I can tell you all these things. I can divulge this. It's almost like talking to a therapist, I think. I think divorce attorneys should automatically get some sort of therapy license. Sorry.

To any therapists out there, but it lets their guard down and it tells them, like, oh, I can talk to Amy about these things, so just defer to me about them, and I will talk to them about any sensitive topics.

Yeah. Because a lot of times, I would imagine, you know, for realtors, it's. It's a friend of the family. It's, you know, a friend of a friend, someone you're close with, and that might be just a little bit. I don't know.

Sure.

The whole thing's touchy. The whole thing is very exposing. And so, you know, to deal with somebody who is a professional, who knows the right way to ask certain things that doesn't feel uncomfortable, you know, asking hard questions that's. They're needed, they're important, and, you know, takes. Takes the pressure off the realtor, I would imagine.

Yeah. And nobody, you know, nobody wants to feel like they're offending anybody by asking certain questions. And I would like to think I asked these questions in a way that people feel like, no, Amy's asking them because she has to, because she's trying to help me and get to the bottom of something rather than, you know, like insulting me by asking certain things.

This is all great information. I mean, I know this is going to touch someone out there. And again, if you know someone going through this situation, unfortunately, you know, I think we all do. Please share this. We'll have Amy's contact information linked to the podcast so you can connect with her directly. In closing, is there any last bit of information or anything you'd like people to have as a last.

Absolutely. I'll say two things. Number one, going through a divorce is tough and stressful and hard. The marital residence or any properties you own are usually a huge part of a divorce. Don't make this already not such a great situation. Even worse, by not talking to me as early as possible. You're just causing more stress by doing that. So talk to a mortgage professional as soon as possible.

Number two, you all know you can't go look at a house without a mortgage pre approval. You should not be able to represent that. You can keep a house or tell someone that they should keep a house without a mortgage pre approval. So get the mortgage pre approval during the divorce. It will just help everybody out, will streamline the divorce process and make it less stressful for everybody.

That's great aim. Thank you. Yeah, everyone, don't wait until the ink is dry. And if you are listening to this podcast and need to send it to a friend, please do. We will. We will connect Amy's information down below. And again, if you're not connected with her on social and we'll have her website, please make sure that you connect with her. Thanks for your time, Amy.

I think this.

Thank you so much. This is very fun. Thank you. I hope that we can help just some people out there going through a tough situation.

Absolutely. All right, everybody, we'll catch you next time.

Thanks.

Thank you. Bye.

Bye.