Alexander Jawny enlisted in 1942 and was wounded at the Battle of the Bulge. He came home with a Purple Heart and injuries he lived with for the next fifty years. What his grandson remembers is not the war. It is the waiting rooms, and the distance between what his grandfather had earned and what he could actually reach.
Phil started as a bank teller at sixteen, walking to work after school. He became a loan officer at eighteen, working on commission, taking the loans other officers turned down. Most of them were for families in low and moderate income households, and a lot of them were military.
From 1998 onward he watched the same VA loans fail for reasons that had nothing to do with whether the family could afford the house. A co-borrower's income that could not be counted. A discharge date nobody asked about. Rules specific to VA lending that standard applications are not built to catch, discovered in the final week before closing when there was no time left to fix them.
One of those failures put a military family close to homelessness after a PCS move fell apart. Phil bought the house himself, let them move in, and sold it to them at what he paid once they qualified.
That is not a business model. It is what you do when you are standing there and someone has to.
The pattern was the problem. Families were not failing because the benefit was not there. They were failing because nobody explained how it worked until it was too late to act on it. Fixing that inside the lending process turned out to be nearly impossible. Fixing it before anyone applied turned out to be straightforward.
That is what GoVA does. We are not a lender and we do not sell financial products. We build the technology that puts financial education in front of military families early enough to matter, funded through community development programs that banks already run.
As seen in Yahoo! Finance: GoVA has been featured discussing military car insurance tips and strategies for service members.
