June’s uncommon client — Matt Joens

We are so grateful to be able to work with so many uncommon people. That was why we started the podcast and why we love to highlight people at our holiday party by handing out our Uncommon Life Seals.

We’d like to start introducing you to some of them.  Please meet Matt Joens.

Matt was born and raised in Ankeny, IA and graduated from Iowa State University in 2008. He loves all things outdoors: biking, hiking, water skiing, wakeboarding, snowboarding, hunting, etc. He has been married to his beautiful wife, Katie, for 9 years. They have two kids; Skylar (7) and Nolan (4). Matt and Katie are also very involved with their local church.

Shortly after graduating from ISU, Matt had a group of friends moving to Iowa City to be a part of a church planting project. Matt had the thought that he could buy a house over there for them to live in and they would pay him rent. That’s when the power of leverage became real in his mind and what really got him interested in real estate. That plan didn’t work out, but it did launch him into real estate investing.

Graduating in the height of a recession and entering the job market at that time gave him an interesting perspective. It made him start questioning the plan for his life that college sold him. He saw the stock market crash and realized how little control over the market anyone really has and decided that he wanted to be more in control. It also really made him question everything he had been told regarding retirement and how to plan for that. The idea of saving all of his hard-earned money so that he could “enjoy” eventually enjoy his life at age 65 didn’t seem to make sense anymore.

His wife, Katie has been awesome through all of it. She isn’t really actively involved in the business today, though there have been thoughts of becoming a team someday, but she has always been supportive, even when there have been late nights working on rehabbing properties.

Matt want to continue to grow his business. He started with a group of 3 friends that each contributed $3,000 to buy their first house. They bought it for $30,000 in SW Ankeny and gutted the entire thing. We’ll spare you the details, but because of the work they put in on that house, they have grown their small real estate investing company to about $500,000 worth of assets and they have contributed no additional capital. They have grown by leveraging equity and maximizing cashflows.