About
who i am
I’m Raphael Freeman and my goal is to add more value to you life than you ever dreamed possible by showing you the clearest path to sustainable homeownership and giving you all the tools to build and maintain generational wealth. I want everybody to win because I know in my heart that there’s enough for all of us.
West Philadelphia born-n-raised, I went from not knowing a single homeowner growing up (or even what a mortgage was!) to helping hundreds of families fix their credit and get into their first home.
As a licensed Mortgage Loan Originator and experienced Homeownership Advisor, I’ve had thousands of people attend my financial literacy and homebuyer workshops in New York, Newark, Trenton, Philly, Wilmington, and Baltimore. My primary objective has always been to not just get you in a home, but to make sure you stay in the home. The mission of the Foundational Wealth Project is to help you see the full picture and provide you with a clear roadmap by understanding and building credit, learning reliable strategies for increasing income, and knowing the inside secrets of the homeownership journey that real estate agents hate to reveal.
If you’ve ever wanted some to put you on, here’s the key to conquering all your financial goals and establishing generational wealth and a long-lasting financial legacy for your family. Welcome!
Photo credit Bayeté Ross Smith
Photo credit Raphael Freeman
why i care
Growing up in the projects in West Philly, I always assumed that the ‘hood looked like the ‘hood because that’s just the way it was, organically. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was by design and they made it that way–that they wanted us to live like that!
There’s this entire history of how banks, real estate brokers, and mortgage lenders worked tirelessly to prevent Blacks from owning homes and sabotage those who managed to do so. If buying a home feels harder than it should be, it’s NOT your imagination. The underwriting policies were literally written to keep you out.
The more I learned about the history, the more I realized how much I didn’t know. Not only did I not know what a mortgage was, I literally did not understand what equity was before I became a mortgage lender. I knew that I couldn’t be the only one and that people in- and from communities like mine were missing vital the information necessary to escape poverty and create wealth for their families.
Thankfully, social media has brought a wealth of information to anyone with a phone, but unfortunately that information tends to be tightly controlled. If people are learning about homeownership on socials it is almost 100% from real estate agents hungry for clients or real estate investors eager to convince you that you can become a millionaire by flipping or landlording.
Whether you end up loving or hating your house; or loving or hating your mortgage, your agent or loan officer got paid either way. NO ONE is giving out this information that doesn’t have a financial stake in the matter and that fact is skewing the decisions of first time homebuyers.
No one wants to be house rich, cash poor—or even worse foreclosure. Yet, so often I’ve seen homebuyers sow the seeds of these devastating but avoidable outcomes at the outset of their homebuyer journey. And every time it breaks my heart.
We’re sold homeownership as a fix for the wealth gap—a keystone to generational wealth. However, many of our grandparents and great grand parents already owned homes. The entire story of gentrification is written on the deed of grandmom’s house. And yet the generational wealth isn’t manifest.
That’s because homeownership is really just once piece to a complex puzzle. Without all the pieces, we’re really just repeating the mistakes of our grandparents. The Foundational Wealth Project is designed to make sure that you get all the pieces.