Kayla Barnes

I attribute my success to my mom. She is my biggest hero and my biggest critic. I love her more than anybody else in the world, and my goal in life - I think I was probably 10 or 11 when I realized I wanted to be the complete opposite of her. And it wasn't a bad thing, it was just that she had kids young, had children with different fathers who unfortunately none of our fathers wanted to be in our life. I couldn't imagine being under 30 with three children under the age of 10. I respect her so much because she worked so hard to make sure we had opportunities, but it was also a thing for me of, I don't want to be in this situation, Kayla, so we have to get educated. I started applying for scholarships, figuring out how not to be in this situation. And now that I've somewhat figured it out, my goal is to spread that knowledge because you don't have to be in this situation, and there's organizations out there that's willing to help, and people just don't know.

The best career advice I ever received was from an accounting teacher at MTSU. She was talking about something, and she said, 'just remember that you've worked a lot harder for a lot less.' Every time I'm at work and I think about it, I remind myself that I worked at McDonald's for 10 years and had people throw food in my face. Mortgage is not hard. You just gotta find the people who need the help and then you help them. It's not hard. I've worked a lot harder for a lot less, and that's one thing I always gotta remember, because every time I get frustrated with interest rates or I lose out to another bank, I remind myself that I straight up hustled McDonald's for 10 years, and that is a hard job.

I would definitely tell women entering this field that the confidence is built by the knowledge. Know what you are doing. Know what you're selling, know your products, because the confidence will come later, because this field is majority men anyway. Know your guidelines, you will always outbeat any other loan officer. Know what you're doing, always have something valuable to give anytime you're at a meeting. Always make sure you bring something valuable that the other person can take with them. If that's knowledge, something tangible, always have to give them something valuable to make them remember who you are. Do your research, learn your products, know your guidelines, because that's really all it is - knowing those guidelines. The confidence one was the hardest one I struggled with, and it was an image thing. I was like 360 pounds, and I decided I'm gonna get my health straight. I got weight loss surgery probably 3 or 4 years ago. I'm down 120 pounds. I ran a half marathon last weekend. I'm trying to just mentally get there, physically get there, and the rest will come with it.

The biggest challenges in my field are definitely the market I'm going for - affordable housing. It's always complicated to penetrate that market because nobody can afford to live in Nashville right now, so that is definitely the hardest part. We just gotta figure out how to make it more affordable. The prices are dropping, but we're still in those 6%, 6.5% interest rates. For example, today I'm looking at a house where the purchase price is $350,000, and with the mortgage, your monthly payment would be $3,600. Who can afford that? Nobody's affording this. So right now, my biggest hurdles are the affordability and the interest rate. My biggest opportunities are getting involved with our local communities. The more community that we penetrate, the more that we're in the community, the more opportunity people will see and realize there are options for them, because you just don't know what you don't know. If you don't know there's a bank out there that's willing to do 100% financing for a house, you don't know.

My morals are absolutely the most important thing to me. Definitely with the politics in the world today, and me being a biracial woman, not all money is good money. If you're a person who don't think women can have their body rights, unfortunately I don't think we're working together. There's someone out there for you, it's just not me. My morals are important. If you don't like someone because of the color of their skin, we have nothing in common, I promise you. I am not your mortgage person. I just can't do it anymore with people pretending to be Christians and whatever. It's too important to me to be in circles with people with the same goals and values. For mortgage in general, I love the idea of the rules. I like the rules sometimes because I feel like a lot of people sometimes get past the rules because of their status, but if you want a conventional loan, you have to follow the guidelines. There's no under-the-table deals. I like the rules of mortgage.