The Life I Thought I Was Building

THE OBSERVATION — SEPTEMBER 2026

In April 2023, I was looking at houses in Birmingham, Michigan.

I was sending the boys videos of homes in the million- and two-million-dollar range. My mortgage company was recovering. I was restructuring things financially, raising capital again, and Michigan was already part of the plan.

If you had asked me then what the next two years of my life would look like, I could have painted you a picture I completely believed.

The mortgage company keeps growing. The money gets stronger. The boys and I move to Birmingham. Dylan is doing well. Destin is building a life of his own. I buy the house, and we keep moving forward.

Two months later, Dylan died.

My ability to work changed. My priorities changed. Things I probably could have recovered from quickly before became much harder while I was grieving my child.

Eventually, I closed the mortgage company. I spent a long time trying to understand how to live inside a life I had not planned for.

Then I moved to Michigan anyway.

I arrived through a completely different door, as a completely different woman.

Sometimes I think about the life I expected to have. Dylan and I continue building the consulting company we had already started. Paradise Mortgage stays open. I move to Michigan that summer. The business recovers. Maybe I buy the house.

It is possible that all of that would have happened.

It is also possible that it would not have.

This is where our imagined versions of life become unreliable. We remove the event we would do anything to change, but we keep everything we like about the life that came afterward.

I keep the friends I met here. I keep the quieter life Destin and I have built. I keep the writing, speaking, consulting, newsletters, and podcast. I keep the time I now have to think, study companies, create, and do work I genuinely enjoy.

But I have no way of knowing which of those things would have existed in the other life.

Maybe I would have been running a much larger mortgage company with Dylan beside me. Maybe I would have been so busy running it that The Observation Room never happened. Maybe Destin would have chosen a different job. Maybe I would know different people, live in a different house, and spend my days differently.

We never get to see that version.

I know I love parts of the life I have built in Michigan. I love watching Destin grow. I love our friends, our routines, the Michigan summers, the real fall, the snow, and the ridiculous amount of wildlife that still makes me feel like I live in a Disney movie.

I also know exactly who is missing from it.

I do not need those two truths to resolve into one neat lesson. They live beside each other every day.

Business is obviously not grief. But the habit of looking backward with information we only learned later shows up there too.

A company makes a decision based on the business it sees at the time. The customers behave a certain way. The team has a certain amount of capacity. The technology has certain limits. The cost of capital makes a project possible. A product, message, or sales process works because it fits that particular moment.

Then the picture changes.

Customers start buying differently. Technology changes the amount of work required. A key person leaves. The company grows, but its operating structure does not grow with it. The offer still makes sense internally, yet customers no longer understand why they need it. A leader who once had enough time to personally oversee everything becomes the person every decision is waiting on.

This is where companies get into trouble. They continue operating from an old picture of the business because that picture was once accurate.

The answer is not to spend months arguing about whether the original decision was right or wrong. Leadership still has to account for what happened, especially when a decision caused damage. But the immediate work is understanding what the business looks like now.

Those questions are practical. They lead to changes in strategy, communication, responsibility, positioning, and how decisions move through the company.

This is the work I do with business owners, executives, and leadership teams.

Sometimes I come in as a consultant or advisor to help a leader work through an important decision, offer, message, or operating problem. Sometimes I facilitate the conversation a leadership team has been circling without resolving. Sometimes the right format is corporate training or a keynote that gives the entire room a clearer way to understand what is happening.

My work is especially useful when the visible problem is not the real problem, when leaders are too close to the situation to see the pattern, or when everyone knows something has changed but the company has not found the

language or direction to respond to it.

Housing is another place where people can remain attached to an earlier version of the plan.

Someone may have decided in 2024 that they would buy when rates returned to a particular number. Someone else may still be using the salary, debt, savings, or family plan they had when they first started thinking about moving.

A household can spend years saying it is still working toward the same goal without stopping to ask whether the goal, the math, or the life around it has changed.

Here is what the current national housing picture looks like as we enter September.

Freddie Mac reported that the average 30-year fixed mortgage rate was 6.66% on August 27. The average 15-year rate was 5.98%. Those rates have moved within a relatively narrow range through much of the summer.

The Mortgage Bankers Association reported a 6.78% average contract rate for conforming 30-year fixed applications during the week ending August 21. Freddie Mac and MBA use different application data, which is why their averages are not identical. Both show that borrowing costs remain in the mid-to-upper sixes.

Total mortgage applications fell 1% that week. Purchase applications were 5% below the same week last year, while refinance applications were 17% lower.

Existing-home sales fell 1.7% in July to an annual pace of 4.06 million, although sales were still 0.7% higher than a year earlier. The national median existing-home price was $434,100, up 2% from July 2025.

There were 1.54 million existing homes available for sale, equal to a 4.6-month supply. Buyers have more choices than they had during the most restricted inventory years, but national prices have not suddenly become inexpensive.

The Midwest continues to look different from the national picture. July sales were 2.1% higher than a year earlier, and the regional median price was $342,900. That price was up 2.8% year over year.

MBA’s affordability data showed the median principal-and-interest payment requested by purchase applicants falling slightly, from $2,191 in June to $2,175 in July. That was a monthly improvement of $16, but the payment was still $48 higher than it had been a year earlier.

Applications for newly built homes were down 5.7% from a year earlier. MBA estimated that new-home sales were running at an annual pace of 647,000 units in July, 3% below June.

There is no single instruction hiding inside those numbers.

Rates are still elevated. Prices are still rising nationally. Inventory has improved from the tightest years. Buyers are moving more carefully, and many refinances do not yet produce enough savings to make sense.

The useful question is what has changed in your own plan.

If you already own a home, what are you trying to accomplish by refinancing? A lower rate is one reason to look. Monthly cash flow, debt structure, loan term, and the time required to recover closing costs matter too.

The market does not know what your family needs. A national average cannot tell you whether a particular home, payment, refinance, or timeline works for you.

That requires current numbers and an honest conversation about the life the decision has to support.

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Current sources: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, MBA Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey, MBA Purchase Applications Payment Index, NAR July Existing-Home Sales Report, and MBA New-Home Purchase Applications Report.

The company I am building now is different from the mortgage company I imagined rebuilding in 2023.

I advise companies and leaders. I speak, train, and facilitate. I am a paid AI consultant, bringing real business, financial, mortgage, leadership, and customer experience into work that requires more than technical knowledge. I write, publish, and host The Observation Room.

These are not random projects I collected after closing a company. They use the experience I spent more than twenty-five years building.

Running a mortgage company taught me about operations, sales, regulation, risk, money, customer behavior, leadership, and the difference between a process that looks good internally and one a customer can actually navigate.

That experience now shows up in different rooms.

A business owner may need help seeing why the company is working harder without making more progress. A leadership team may need someone outside the organization to facilitate a decision people inside it cannot discuss clearly. A company may need training that helps leaders communicate change without leaving everyone to create a different interpretation. An AI company may need an experienced consultant who can recognize when an answer sounds polished but does not reflect how the business or industry really works.

A conference, corporate meeting, leadership retreat, training program, or podcast may need someone who can connect business strategy with the human reality of leading and making decisions.

That is the work.

If you need an advisor who can get to the real issue, bring me the situation.

If you are planning a conference, corporate training, leadership meeting, facilitated working session, or podcast conversation, bring me into the room.

The Dylan Foundation was not the life I had planned. Dylan was.

After he died, I still had all this love for my son and no physical place for it to go. The Foundation became one place where I could continue putting his name, his story, and the love connected to him into the world.

I do not talk about the Foundation because I believe Dylan had to die for something else to be created. I talk about it because Dylan lived. He was my son. He was funny, creative, loving, and a whole person long before his name appeared on a Foundation.

That is what I want the work to protect.

Some of it already exists. Love Doesn’t End is part of it. Dweewoo is part of it. The writing, products, remembrance, and acts of generosity connected to his name are part of it.

Other parts are still being built, and I am allowing that work to grow carefully. I do not need to create programs simply to make the Foundation appear bigger or more established. Anything carrying Dylan’s name should feel honest and worthy of him.

The life I thought I was building had Dylan in it.

The Foundation is one of the things I am building because his life still matters and because my love for him did not end when his life did.

“We never get to see the other movie, do we?”

That is how Episode 5 of The Observation Room begins.

In the episode, I talk about the way we judge old decisions after we already know what happened. An outcome looks inevitable from the end of the story, even when the person making the decision could not have known what was coming.

I begin with a current business example involving UWM and Two Harbors, then move into politics, conspiracy theories, business risk, and some of the decisions in my own life.

The part that connects most directly to this newsletter is the alternate movie we create for ourselves.

I can imagine the life where Dylan did not die, Paradise Mortgage remained open, and I moved to Birmingham exactly when I expected to. But I cannot honestly claim to know everything else about that life.

I do not know what work I would be doing. I do not know which people I would know. I do not know what Destin’s life would look like. I do not know which decisions I would have made after that.

The imagined life can feel completely real because nothing ever happens inside it to prove us wrong.

The life we are living is more complicated. It contains the decisions, losses, relationships, mistakes, work, money, and ordinary Tuesdays that actually happened.

Episode 5 is about looking at that honestly. It is also about giving ourselves and other people a little more fairness when we evaluate a decision made before the ending was known.

What part of your life or work are you still planning from an older version of the picture?

Maybe it is a business strategy created for customers who have changed.

Maybe it is a home plan based on a salary, rate, location, or family situation that is no longer current.

Maybe it is an expectation you created for yourself years ago and never reconsidered.

You do not have to call the old plan a mistake.

Look at why it made sense. Look at what has happened since. Then decide whether it still belongs in the life or business you are actually living.

That may mean continuing with more confidence. It may mean changing the timing, the structure, or the destination. It may mean finally letting yourself want something different.

I moved to Michigan, just as I had planned.

Almost nothing else happened the way I expected.

The plan changed. I changed. The story is still being written.

MICHELLE VAUGHN CO.

Thank you for reading The Observation. It arrives once a month and gives me room to connect business, leadership, money, home, technology, grief, and the things I keep noticing in ordinary life.

If this issue brought someone to mind, forward it to them.

With gratitude,

Michelle Vaughn
Consultant | Speaker | Facilitator | Author

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