Matt Williams

What "Reviewed by Matt Williams" actually means

That byline is not decoration. When you see it on a guide, it means I have personally checked that page's state-specific facts against primary sources — the state insurance department, the current exam vendor's candidate handbook, and the statute or administrative rule itself.

There is a mountain of inaccurate and/or outdated information out there; the internet has become sloppy. Because (In the iconic words of Sweet Brown) "ain't nobody got time for that!" Here are a few rules I hold to:

• Primary sources only. Statute, regulation, the insurance department's own pages, and the current candidate handbook. Never another prep company's website — competitor pages go stale and then everyone copies the stale version.
• A date attached to every claim. Each guide shows when it was last verified. Fees change, vendors change, and statutes change; a fact without a date is a fact you cannot trust.
• No number I cannot source. If a state does not publish something — and some genuinely do not publish exam time limits or fee schedules — the guide says so plainly instead of printing a confident figure copied from somewhere else.
• The byline goes on last. Guides that I have not finished reviewing carry no name at all. If you find a page on this site without my byline, that is deliberate and honest, not an oversight.

Twenty years in the industry, before the classroom

I started at Fidelity Investments before I was old enough to legally buy a beer. I spent the 1990s at Charles Schwab, where I passed the Series 7, 9, 10 and 63. I left to open a branch in Anchorage, Alaska for Scottrade, and added the Series 24 as a principal. From there I became Director of Network Office Supervision at Northwestern Mutual, where I passed the Series 65 and earned Arizona life, health, property and casualty licenses along with the CLU, ChFC and CFP® professional designations.

That background is why the state-law sections of these guides read the way they do. I have sat on the compliance and supervision side of this business, not just the study-guide side.

Twenty-three years teaching it

I began teaching in 2003 for TesTeachers, later acquired by ExamFX. For two years running I was their top-rated instructor across life and health, property and casualty, and the Series 6, 63 and 65. I then opened my own pre-licensing school, LATITUDE Test Prep, in Phoenix, Arizona.

When online courses were still an oddity, I filmed my physical classroom and rebuilt it as a video-based online course — which eventually became TESTivity. I also completed a train-the-trainer program and hold the designation of Certified Trainer in Adult Education, which is the credential most relevant to what I actually do here: not selling insurance, but teaching adults to pass a hard exam.

I also wrote more than ten finance textbooks for my own classroom — the physical books my students learned from back when the classes were taught in person. I no longer publish them; everything is online now. But writing, producing and distributing them is what later convinced me I could run a publishing operation myself.

Outside TESTivity

I am an avid fisherman, outdoorsman and travel enthusiast.

I am the mastermind behind Reach Around Books, a publishing company I started after working out that authors get paid peanuts while the publisher and the distributor keep the money — so I became both. Ten titles so far across two box sets, a third season in production, and an animated series called Beaverton in development. The one that went viral — and carried the rest of the catalogue with it — was Brenda’s Beaver Needs a Barber. They are innocent books built entirely on double entendre, they are not for everyone, and I am proud of them.

I was a castaway on Season 49 of CBS's Survivor, which aired in 2025. I also work part time as a ramp agent at SGU — entirely for the flight benefits, the exercise, and the company of some genuinely great people. If you read my Survivor bio and wondered how a guy who throws bags for a living ends up writing insurance law summaries: TESTivity is the real job, and the ramp is the side hustle.

Corrections

If you find something on this site that is wrong — a fee that has changed, a statute that has been amended, a vendor that has switched — I want to know. State insurance law moves constantly, and the whole point of this site is being right about it. Send it to me and I will check it against the source and correct it.