I'm Matt Dickens, a licensed Mortgage Loan Officer in Missouri and Illinois. After graduating Cum Laude from the University of Missouri with a degree in Finance & Real Estate, I started my career in commercial real estate managing landlord-tenant relationships. Spoiler alert: running reports and reading leases all day wasn't exactly my calling.

Everything changed when I convinced my wife Rachel to take a leap with me and purchase a duplex in South St. Louis at the age of 23. We turned our primary residence into our first investment property through the 'house hacking' method, and that experience opened my eyes to the power of early real estate ownership.

It took all of 24 hours of being a homeowner for me to put my two weeks' notice in at the corporate job and dive headfirst into the mortgage industry. A few months into my career, I noticed something troubling: I was answering the same basic questions over and over from people of all backgrounds and upbringings. That's when it hit me – we spend 12-16 years in school, but nobody teaches us how to make the most important financial decision of our lives. While the average American builds 70% of their net worth through real estate, we're leaving an entire generation in the dark about how to get started.

This mission has fueled me to help over 150 first-time buyers achieve homeownership, funding more than $25 million in loans in just my first 3.5 years as a loan officer. But what really drives me isn't the numbers – it's showing young adults and recent graduates that real estate ownership isn't some far-off dream. It's possible now, and I'm here to prove it with the tools, knowledge, and support to make it happen.