Joe Murin has worn two very different uniforms. The first was Army green during the Vietnam era. The second was a suit in Washington when the country’s housing system was under extreme stress. In both roles, he carried the same view of leadership: understand your people, take responsibility when the pressure is highest, and keep the mission in focus.

For veterans and military families trying to make sense of today’s housing market, his story is not biography for its own sake. It is a roadmap for how to think clearly about risk, opportunity, and the decisions in front of you now.

Lessons in Uniform

Joe grew up in a working family in Pittsburgh. Service, discipline, and loyalty were not topics for speeches around the dinner table. They were assumed.

“Well, honestly, what shapes you is your family,” he told me. “I grew up in an Italian family. My dad and my grandfather built bridges, dams and roads. And when you have an Italian mother, that sets everything off, because that’s where your discipline and everything is learned, as we say, at the kitchen table.”

By 1970, with his draft number sitting at 96, he knew the odds. “They were drafting about 50,000 men a month,” he recalled. “I felt that I had to make a choice before someone made a choice for me.” So he enlisted.

He entered an Army filled with 17- and 18-year-olds from every background imaginable. Some had come into the service through courtrooms. Some had arrived from Puerto Rico without English. Many had never been away from home. “You’re there with the good, the bad and the ugly,” he said. “You’ve got a dichotomy of personnel you have to adjust with.”

He learned quickly that a platoon is not a single type of person. It is a mix of histories, fears, and strengths.

“Everybody’s different,” Joe said. “One size doesn’t fit all. You have to really get to know everybody. Why they’re there, what’s going through their head, what their fears are, what their expectations are. And then you learn that this carries on forever.”

That early insight shaped everything that followed: leaders who do not know their people do not lead for long.

Carrying the Army Forward into Business

When Joe left the Army, the habits stayed with him: mission first, solve the problem in front of you, answer for results, and recognize that your own success rests on the success of your team.

“Whether you’re in the military or whether you’re in business, there’s that objective,” he said. “What are those objectives? How are you going to meet those objectives? What’s the mission?”

He entered banking at a time when there were no dashboards and no real-time analytics to lean on. If you wanted to know how a business was running, you walked the floors and listened. So he did.

“When I ran the company early on, they had 1,200 people,” Joe told me. “Every day, the first thing I did, for an hour and a half, I’d get a cup of coffee and I’d walk and I’d talk to people.”

At first, staff were cautious. Over time, they opened up. “What I found out was the problems that existed that I didn’t understand or even know of,” he said. “They told you because they were doing it every day. It kind of took the blinders off.”

He did not leave those voices on the floor. “A lot of times I would bring them up to a senior staff meeting and say, ‘Listen to what’s going on.’ They thought the world of that because you listened to them.”

For Joe, this was not a management trick. It was the core of the job. “Listening has become such an important part of leadership,” he said. “It was the greatest exercise I’ve ever been involved in, just walking around listening to people.”

He also carried forward one rule from the Army into every boardroom he entered. “I learned very early on that it’s not about me. It’s about them,” he said. “If you focus 100 percent of your attention on their success within the mission, you’ll be fine. As soon as you start focusing on what’s in it for you, it’s not going to work.”

Answering the Call in a Crisis

Years later, the phone rang. The caller said she was from the White House. The President wanted to speak with him.

“I was sitting one day and my phone rang,” Joe recalled. “This woman says, ‘I’m calling on behalf of the President of the United States,’ and you’re going, ‘Yeah, right.’” She gave him a Washington number. He recognized the area code. “I said, no, no, I believe you,” he laughed.

Her message was direct. His name had come up as a possible nominee to run Ginnie Mae. If he was interested, they would be in touch.

“When she hung up, I’m thinking, what just happened, and no one’s ever going to get back to me,” Joe said. He was not a major donor. He did not have a political operation behind him. Yet a few weeks later, the White House called him to Washington.

He interviewed at HUD and in the West Wing. “You walk out of there and go, I hit the ball out of the park, because I know the business,” he said. “But they’re never going to call. I’m a nobody.”

On July 5, while driving home, his cell phone rang again. “It was the secretary,” Joe said. “He said, ‘Joe, the job’s yours if you want it.’ All I could think about was, how did you get my cell phone?” He accepted.

The full weight of the moment was not yet clear. “Little did I know what I was stepping into,” he said.

The Crisis Years at Ginnie Mae

Joe arrived at Ginnie Mae in 2007. There was already “vibration,” as he put it, in the housing market, but the full impact had not yet hit.

In plain terms, Ginnie Mae guarantees certain government-backed mortgage securities so that investors know they will not lose principal or interest. “Fundamentally, Ginnie Mae has an explicit guarantee from the federal government,” Joe explained. “Any investor who buys Ginnie bonds will not lose any principal and interest.”

When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken into conservatorship in 2008, Ginnie Mae suddenly became the only fully functioning liquidity channel in American housing finance.

“We were looking at seven, eight, nine billion a month in Ginnie Mae securities,” he said. “The next moment, we’re at 35, 40, 50, 70 billion.” Housing finance in the United States depended on whether that pipeline stayed open.

Inside the agency, there were 69 federal employees. That was the entire staff.

“We were doing 50, 60, 70 billion dollars a month and we had 69 federal union people,” he said. “To get that much work done, to fulfill the everyday need for the industry, to deal with folks overseas on the domestic and foreign side, you had to have a group of people that wanted to do the work and were willing to do the work.”

They also had a problem: there were not enough domestic buyers to absorb that volume. The answer was to go abroad.

In his words, he became “suddenly a diplomat,” selling the strength of the explicit U.S. guarantee to central banks and funds across Asia. Their confidence in that guarantee kept American mortgage credit available when it could easily have seized.

Looking back, he does not describe it as his personal triumph. He points to the staff. “My proudest moment was that they all came together and worked very, very well,” Joe said. “They had every reason to disengage. Instead, they rose to the moment and kept the system alive.”

Housing as Strategic Ground

Joe watches housing the way a commander watches terrain. He looks beyond home prices and rates to what housing represents inside the broader economy.

“If you go back to 2007, 2008, GDP was around 14 trillion,” he said. “Housing, and when I say housing I mean everything that goes with it, was about 17 or 18 percent of GDP.” That translated into roughly two to two and a half trillion dollars.

“Fast forward to 2024,” he continued. “GDP was about 24 trillion. Housing had dropped to about 12 percent.” The share fell even as the total economy grew.

For Joe, that gap represents more than fewer home sales. It represents lost trades, closed manufacturing lines, and the collateral industries that depend on housing: appliances, carpeting, furniture, local services.

He is blunt about one driver of cost. “Twenty to twenty-five percent of the cost of a home is regulatory cost,” he said. “And it’s not at the federal government level. It’s down here at the local level.” He points to long delays for approvals, layers of permitting, and local infrastructure demands placed on builders. “You’ve got people waiting a year to get a permit, then they want $25,000 for that permit,” he said. “Where do you think that cost goes? It goes on the cost of the unit that you’re buying.”

Those burdens land hardest on first-time buyers and on veterans trying to enter the market with modest savings. For Joe, this is not a policy talking point. It is part of the reality veterans need to understand when they weigh rent versus ownership.

The Veteran’s Question: Buy or Wait

Joe is direct about today’s interest rate environment and the temptation to sit on the sidelines.

“If you’re waiting for a two and a half or three percent mortgage, you’re going to be waiting for a long time,” he said. Rates may move, but the era of extraordinarily cheap money is not his baseline expectation.

He tells veterans to start with what they can control.

First is cash flow. A payment you can make consistently is more important than a theoretical lower rate that may never appear.

Second is the difference between want and need. “Is it something that we need to do or is it something we want to do,” he said. “You may want this house, but do you need this house at that price, in that neighborhood, with that many bedrooms and baths?” A sound home that fits your budget is an asset. A perfect home that stretches every dollar can become a burden.

Third is the structure of the VA home loan. For eligible veterans, it remains one of the strongest tools in the market: zero down in many cases, no private mortgage insurance, competitive fixed rates, and the ability to use the benefit more than once for primary residences.

Joe’s view is steady. Veterans who can buy responsibly, in stable communities, with room in their budget, should examine the opportunity instead of assuming that waiting is always safer.

Clearing Up Persistent VA Loan Misunderstandings

In his work across the industry, Joe keeps hearing the same misunderstandings about VA loans. They do real damage to veterans’ prospects.

“The VA is probably one of the most misunderstood programs in America,” he said. For years, many lenders avoided it, not because the benefit was weak, but because they did not want the responsibility that came with it.

“Lenders used to think, I don’t want to do the dirty, complicated loans,” Joe recalled. “What’s complicated about the VA is your commitment as a lender if there’s a foreclosure and a loss. With other programs, that’s not there. With VA, you have to stand behind it.” In his view, that commitment is a strength, not a flaw.

He wants several myths retired for good.

One is that the VA benefit can only be used once. That is wrong. As long as you have entitlement available and the property is a primary residence, you can use it multiple times.

Another is that VA loans are slow or difficult to close. Joe is clear that this is a lender problem, not a VA problem. “It’s only harder for lenders who don’t specialize in them,” he said. Institutions that handle VA lending at scale know how to close them on normal timelines.

A third is that VA appraisals “kill deals.” Joe sees it differently. The VA standard is designed to keep veterans out of unsafe or severely distressed properties. That protects the borrower and the system.

When a seller or agent resists a VA offer based on misinformation, Joe recommends treating that as a warning sign about the counterparties involved, not as a judgment on the veteran.

What Joe Saw at NewDay USA

Joe has seen most of the models that exist in mortgage lending. He has watched lenders grow quickly on loose standards and watched them fail the moment the cycle turned.

When he looked at NewDay USA, several things stood out.

“I really respect NewDay for their incredible credit underwriting discipline,” he said. “They do it the old-fashioned way.” Files are built to hold up under stress, not just to meet the minimum. “They’re not letting people who can’t afford a house into a home,” he added. “Don’t make a loan for the sake of making a loan. Make the loan because it works for the veteran.”

Second, the business model leans toward long-term relationships. “You want a customer for life,” Joe said, recalling what he learned in banking. “To me, that’s what NewDay does. They want a veteran for life. They want to be able to take care of that veteran for life and be there for that veteran whatever they need.”

Third, he saw a culture that matched the mission. “It’s just the love that NewDay has for the veteran,” he said. “It’s an honest love. They transition their people to respect the veteran community. To you and me as veterans, there’s nothing more important.”

He also took a close look at the Advantage Loan, NewDay’s offering that can cover closing costs and preserve a veteran’s cash at the time of purchase, with an interest-free payoff window when handled on schedule.

“When I first saw the Advantage program, I thought, if the veteran has the cash flow, why not do the Advantage program to keep money in the bank,” Joe said. “Why spend all your money on down payment and closing costs? Why give it all up and start at zero again?” In his view, for veterans who are strong on income and credit but short on liquidity at closing, it is a smart way to step into ownership without stripping reserves.

For Joe, those elements taken together made NewDay stand out in a crowded field.

Practical Guidance for the Year Ahead

Joe’s advice for veterans looking to buy in the next year is straightforward.

“Study the market,” he said. Not in the abstract, but in the neighborhoods where you plan to live. Look at what is available, what is selling, and how stable prices have been over time.

He tells veterans to pay attention to interest rates, but not to chase perfect numbers. “If the average acquisition is three hundred thousand and you say the rate is six or seven percent, how much does another half point really change the payment,” he asked. His point is not to ignore costs. It is to recognize that small rate shifts should not drive the entire decision.

“Get comfortable with a rate of interest,” he said. “Get comfortable with the payment at that level. If a hundred dollars makes a big difference, then you shouldn’t be buying the house.”

He also urges veterans to build a team early: a VA-smart lender, a real estate agent who understands veterans, and a spouse or partner who is fully part of the planning. “It’s a team effort,” Joe said. “There’s nothing more important than your finances. The last thing you want to do is get into a house you love and three months later you can’t enjoy it.”

He encourages veterans to do their own homework. “People have to start learning to do their own research,” he said. Not just relying on headlines, but reading, asking questions, and understanding local conditions. “Be a student of the business when you get into the business.”

Even if the immediate answer is “not yet,” he believes that a candid discussion with the right professionals can turn that into a concrete plan: what to pay down, what to save, and what timeline is realistic.

Leadership, Character, and Money

Near the end of our conversation, Joe returned to a line he heard as a young man.

“My mother once told me that people might remember you for what you did,” he said, “but everyone will remember you for your character.”

He has carried that sentence through Army service, private-sector roles, a federal appointment, and advisory work with NewDay USA.

“Your word is your word,” he said. “Back in the day when a handshake meant something, that was your character. Only you can give that away.” In his mind, nothing is more important in business or in life.

He believes the same standard applies in financial services. Title, market cycle, and product line all change. Character does not. Veterans have the right to expect that anyone they work with on a mortgage decision meets that standard.

Today, Joe has largely dedicated his time to NewDay and its broader mission. “I’ve gotten just about everything I’m doing dedicated to NewDay,” he said. “I’m so committed to this organization and what it stands for and what it’s become.” He points to scholarships at Georgia Military College and the work of the NewDay USA Foundation. “It’s not just taking. It gives,” he said. “That tells you a lot about the organization.”

A Word to Veterans and Their Families

Joe has seen the system from the inside during the worst housing downturn in modern history. He has watched veterans get hurt by poor advice and by indifference. He has also watched disciplined lending and clear guidance keep families on track through rough periods.

His core message is plain.

Veterans deserve a path to homeownership that is safe and sustainable, built on real numbers and honest counsel. The VA home loan is a powerful benefit. Used well, it can anchor a family’s future rather than endanger it.

Financial readiness after service is not a separate chapter from what came before. It is the continuation of the same duty, this time to your own household and to the people who depend on you.

Joe’s work, and NewDay USA’s mission, are centered on that responsibility.