Episode 276 – Matt Theriault

Richard Matthews: Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews and today I have the pleasure of having Matt Theriault on the line. Matt, are you there?

Matt Theriault: I am Richard.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. Glad to have you here for those of you who are following our podcast along regularly probably notice, I’m in a new studio. We’re visiting friends over in the Tampa area for the holidays and so we’re in Florida enjoying the warm weather.

Richard Matthews: Where are you calling in from?

Matt Theriault: I’m in Las Vegas right now and it’s nice outside.

Richard Matthews: Las Vegas. Yeah. Wintertime in Vegas is the best time to be there. You get the nice weather and it’s nice to go for walks out there. I like Vegas this time of

Matt Theriault: Yeah, I know it’s amazing the fall and the spring, but the fall’s a little extra special. Yep.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. It’s really nice. If you’ve got a chance to go up to a, I’m going to forget the name of the mountain. That’s right over there. Mount Charles.

Matt Theriault: Oh, Charleston. Yep. It is pretty up there for sure.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So, what I always like to do at the beginning of these interviews for our audience who may or may not know who you are is just go through a brief bio and then we’ll dive into your story.

Richard Matthews: So first off, Matt is the CEO of Epic Real Estate and a Desert Storm veteran. Since 2003, he’s built a thriving real estate portfolio using creative strategies [00:01:00] without his own money or credit. Known for simplifying complex concepts, Matt’s helped countless people achieve financial freedom through cash flow strategies.

Richard Matthews: He’s also the author of Escape Crushing Conventional Wisdom with real estate investing, empowering readers to transform their financial futures. I’m not teaching Matt enjoys golfing with his son and relaxing with his family in Las Vegas.

Richard Matthews: So today we’re enjoying Matt, as he shares proven methods to break free from traditional financial wisdom.

Richard Matthews: So what I always like to do, Matt, at the beginning of these is start off with who you are now, right? So, what’s your business? I mean, who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Matt Theriault: Sure. Well, our business is kind of twofold. We show people how to invest in real estate so they can either supplement their retirement or supplement their income or totally replace their income and put them in a position so they can retire early. That is the primary thing that we do.

Matt Theriault: But my wife, she handles the side of the business where those that don’t have the time or don’t have really the desire to do all that heavy lifting, she’ll just flat out do it for them. So we have a done with your service and a done for you.

Richard Matthews: So down for you service actually [00:02:00] help someone do the investing on their behalf.

Matt Theriault: Correct. Basically, the customer calls the shots and we do all the work.

Richard Matthews: That’s pretty amazing. I didn’t know you could do something like that with real estate investing. Talk a little bit more about that. Does that mean you can like say it was me, for instance, you know, we could take the revenue from our company and just be like, Hey can you guys can just take that and like run the investing

Matt Theriault: Sort of, it’s not like a fund or a REIT or anything like that. You would actually be the owner of real estate. So we’ll go out and we’ll find the property for you. We’ll fix it up. We’ll put a tenant in place. We’ll coordinate the property management. We’ll coordinate the financing. We’ll take care of the whole transaction.

Matt Theriault: Just hand it to our customers on a silver platter as a cash-flowing asset.

Richard Matthews: That’s insane.

Matt Theriault: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Like, that’s insanely cool. So, how does that differ from like teaching and having them do it themselves? Like, can you talk a little bit about like the differences and like why you might choose one versus the other?

Matt Theriault: I think one is a little bit more where someone might be happy with what they’re doing for a living or they’ve got a good income and they’ve got other things that are important to them.

Matt Theriault: So they’ll delegate that to us to do for him. And then there’s [00:03:00] another portion where people are looking for something new to do.

Matt Theriault: We have a lot of people that have been at their job for 10 or so years and kind of feel like they might have made a mistake and now they want to go do something different, be a little bit more in control of their own financial future and be their own boss.

Matt Theriault: So, those are kind of the two prototypes, I guess, the prototypes was the word I’m looking for, avatar is a very technical term. But those are like the two types of people that come to us for help.

Matt Theriault: And I guess there would be one more like those that get up there like 50 55 years old and realize they’re not quite on track to hit their retirement and they need to speed things up a little bit.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. We call that the four-quarters of money. Right? So, you know, first quarter is 20 to 30 and then 30 to 40, 40 to 50 to 60 is the fourth quarter. And you’re like, you got to win the game of money before the end of the fourth quarter.

Matt Theriault: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: Everything happens just for pregame. You want to have it in place by the time get to the which is funny for me, cause like I’m coming up on the third quarter here shortly. So we’re going to get things in line.

Richard Matthews: So I guess my next question for you on that is, what if someone is looking [00:04:00] at wanting to start investing in real estate? What are sort of like some of the triggers in their own life for, you know, I know you mentioned some things like maybe there’s something changed or they’re getting close to retirement, but like, do they have to have a certain amount of money in the bank or do they have to have a certain set of skills already in place?

Richard Matthews: Or what would be an indication that maybe they should be looking at real estate at this point in their life?

Matt Theriault: I think if you’re looking at your financial plan, if you’re happy with where you are financially, then I’m not going to even try to interrupt. Right?

Matt Theriault: But if you’re not getting to the place that you think you want to be in the time that you want to be there, real estate is really the final frontier where the average person has a legitimate shot at creating real wealth.

Matt Theriault: And it works in so many different ways. And, you know, if we look at traditional planning for the future, you know, the financial planner might really promote the idea of compound interest, right? The eighth wonder of the world, and you just let it go there and, you know, spike up at the end and it’ll be amazing.

Matt Theriault: But there’s a few things that are really wrong with that. The primary one though, is most people just don’t make enough [00:05:00] to save enough for the magic to really ever happen.

Matt Theriault: The second part is they typically don’t start early enough to ever make that happen. Did I say that already? Start early enough, long enough, and they don’t make enough.

Matt Theriault: And then the other thing would be when you invest in like a mutual fund or the traditional retirement vehicle, like you’ll see, like there’s a 1% fee and logically you’re sitting down across the desk from the financial planner, like, oh, it’s 1%.

Matt Theriault: The guy deserves 1% if they’re going to manage my money and get me to my retirement goal, like it doesn’t seem like that big of a deal, but when you extrapolate that over time, just the way your interest compounds, so do those fees.

Matt Theriault: So does that 1%? And when you put them side by side, your compounding investments with no fees and you’re compounding investment with just that 1% fee, you’re going to lose about 30 to 35% of your money by the end of retirement is how much it adds up to. It’s a huge number and it’s a real eye-opener for people.

Matt Theriault: So, [00:06:00] rather than compounding interest, I recommend compounding assets, income-producing assets specifically. You know, the ultimate goal for somebody in retirement that the traditional way is just that we want to get this giant mountain of money in the bank somewhere so we can park it and it spits off a residual income that provides for us for the rest of our life.

Matt Theriault: And that’s a 40-year plan for most people if they make it at all per the Department of Health and Human Services, 95% of the people don’t, but, if that residual income is the goal, then why not just pursue that first?

Matt Theriault: And so by investing in income-producing properties or any income-producing asset, but there is something, a few things that are unique about real estate that make it faster.

Matt Theriault: But you can get there in 10 times faster to that retirement goal. And then just let that, now that you’ve hit your retirement goal with that income coming in, now you let the income go create the mountain. The stream of money now creates the mountain rather than the mountain creating the stream. And that’s a 10x difference.

Matt Theriault: And so that’s [00:07:00] kind of what my, I don’t know if it’s a mission might be too strong of a word, but that is my predominant message about what we do here.

Richard Matthews: So my other question, cause I know this, I’ve been asked this before, cause we’ve had other real estate trainers on. We’ve helped build some real estate training companies in the past.

Richard Matthews: The common, I don’t know how you call it. Like the thing that people always ask is like, but I don’t want to fix toilets and door locks in retirement.

Richard Matthews: And I know there’s probably a great answer for that. How do you answer that? That objection.

Matt Theriault: Well, there’s two ways. There’s two ways to do it. And I hear that all the time, particularly in the comments below my youtube videos. But yeah, but you got to deal with the tenants and blow up. First of all, there’s so many places I could go with this, but I’ll just start rattling them off. First of all, I’ve owned up to 350 units over the last 18 years and never once have I got to call at midnight to fix the toilet. Okay, so there’s the first thing.

Matt Theriault: Second, and so I think that’s just this myth out there. It might have happened once and now everyone talks about it. So there’s that, but the other [00:08:00] part is, alright, you don’t want to take a few hours a month to manage tenants, but you’ll commit 40 hours a week to having to be somewhere when you, being forced to be somewhere working for somebody else for the next 40 years.

Matt Theriault: So there’s, that’s a decision you get to make. So, and then if you get really good at managing property managers, which is what we teach here as well, then maybe that few hours a month is down to maybe one hour a month. So it’s not passive income. Most people confuse passive income with uninvolved income, right?

Matt Theriault: So you gotta be involved a little bit, but I’d rather have a few tenant issues a month and have the rest of my month off than being committed to 40 hours a week somewhere and not have any time off.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. So, it’s learning to choose your time. Like, how am I going to spend my time? I’m going to spend my time working for a job to get a guaranteed paycheck, or am I going to choose to spend some of my time dealing with whatever the tenant’s issues are? Or maybe it’s dealing with your property management, so they’re dealing with tenant issues.

Matt Theriault: Yeah.

Richard Matthews: And that’s the choice you’re making.

Matt Theriault: It’s a kind of a pick, [00:09:00] choose your poison thing. Do you want to get punched in the gut once a month or do you want to get irritated for the whole month? Right?

Matt Theriault: So, that’s kind of harsh. I’ve never said that before, but that was the metaphor that just came to me. Like in a, maybe punching the guy once a quarter is maybe what it would it be.

Richard Matthews: But then you get to choose what to do with the rest of your time, and also you’ve got cash flow producing assets that allow you to deal with that gut much.

Matt Theriault: For sure. Got cash, you’ve got the cash flow and producing assets. You’ve got the wealth building up underneath. Because, I mean, buying real estate, at this day and point that we’re having this conversation, has never been bad advice to buy real estate. And I don’t care where you go back in time, pick the day.

Matt Theriault: Because right now, today, that real estate would be worth more than it was then. The only bad advice out there was when you were told to sell it.

Matt Theriault: So that wealth gets created for you. And when it comes to an income-producing property, something that no other asset does for you is it buys itself.

Matt Theriault: You put 20% down and then the property pays [00:10:00] for the rest, right? The tenant gives you the money each month, you go ahead and you pay all the bills. You get to keep a little bit that’s left over. You get to live on that, but it’s buying your asset for you.

Matt Theriault: So where can you put 20% down and get a hundred percent of an asset? There’s no other place for us, for people like us.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, so for those of us that are living in expensive markets, like South Florida or Southern California, and we look at the price of homes and it’s like, you know, to buy a postage stamp, it costs a million dollars. Is that the case all across the market that you have to have three, 400, 000 just to cover the 20% down?

Richard Matthews: Or are there other markets where you can actually get into real estate for, you know, I don’t want to say reasonable sums, but for sums that would be more accessible to more people?

Matt Theriault: Sure, yeah. The purchase price or the price of a property, it’s relative. And just like the interest rates are relative. People think, oh, I can’t buy now. The interest rates are so high. Well, you just need to make sure that you’re making more money on the property to cover the interest rate, than not, right?

Matt Theriault: So, [00:11:00] you know, if you go and bought a million dollar house in Florida somewhere and that mortgage, I don’t know, wasn’t going to be, 500 or excuse me, 5,600 bucks a month, maybe.

Matt Theriault: So you have to make sure that property generates more than 6, 000 bucks. So maybe it might not be a traditional rental. It could be an assisted living facility. It could be a short-term rental. It could be a midterm rental that would cover it.

Matt Theriault: Then, or you can go to the Midwest where they’ve got houses for 125, $150,000 total, and they rent for 12 $1,300 a month.

Matt Theriault: So it’s just relative wherever you go. So that’s the first part. Location does matter, but it doesn’t mean it’s a bad investment just because it’s expensive.

Matt Theriault: That’s a real big myth. It just means you have to get it to produce more money is all. The other part would be I lost my train of thought there.

Matt Theriault: The other part would be the income, the price. I’ll get back to it. It’ll come back to I was good.

Richard Matthews: I was just thinking for people who are looking to get into real estate, a lot of people assume, yeah, I was gonna say they need to have a certain amount of money in the bank so they [00:12:00] can cover that 20 percent down. That’s just like, it’s free money. Like it’s, what do they call it? Discretionary income to put into something like an investment.

Richard Matthews: And so if they’re looking at their houses around Florida or California or some of the other expensive markets, they might be like, okay, I, there’s a long way off for me to be able to buy a property. Whereas maybe, like, Hey, you can actually look in other markets and maybe be able to get something today.

Matt Theriault: For sure. And that’s really what we do over here with my wife’s company. Cash flow savvy is that we’re in 10 different markets in the United States.

Matt Theriault: So we’re all through the Midwest and the South, where this is actually very accessible and doable. And, you know, half of our properties I’ve never even seen before in person. Most of our clients have never seen their properties in person.

Matt Theriault: So you don’t really need to be there to have it managed and have it perform. We’ve kind of figured that part out. But the other part of that was that I had a memory loss there for a second. The other part of you don’t necessarily always need 20% down either.

Matt Theriault: If to get into the game and take that first step, there’s an FHA loan out there for three and a half percent down. That’s pretty much 10 grand in [00:13:00] most parts of the country at a max. Now there’s a stipulation where you’d have to live in it for a second, but if you’re just getting started and you’re considering that a stepping stone, it’s not your forever home.

Matt Theriault: And that’s a really easy way for everybody to get in. And, you know, there’s countless down payment grants. I mean, you can get in for zero down on those FHA loans. So if someone really wants to buy a house, they can.

Richard Matthews: So I want to get into sort of the theme of our show here, which is your origin story, right? Every good comic book hero has an origin story. It’s the thing that made you into the hero you are today.

Richard Matthews: And we want to hear that story. You know, were you born a hero or were you bit by a radioactive spider that made you want to get into real estate investing?

Richard Matthews: Or did you start a job and eventually switch to becoming an entrepreneur? Basically, where did you come from that you ended up here doing real estate investing and training other people?

Matt Theriault: It’s a weird thing because I come from a family of civil servants. There’s a lot of police officers in my family, a lot of fire department people might. My cousin just retired as the youngest chief of the Santa Ana Fire Department. Aerospace engineers that work for the government.

Matt Theriault: So I’ve had a lot of real civil servants, just very traditionally minded people in my family, not a single entrepreneur in the [00:14:00] bunch.

Matt Theriault: So I don’t know where I got it because I would always have the paper route. I always had the lemonade stand. I was selling magazines door to door. I just wanted to work and I wanted money because I wanted to buy things, right?

Matt Theriault: And so that’s where that started. And I noticed when I started working at places, my first job was washing golf carts at a golf course.

Matt Theriault: And then I was a cook at a, in a dishwasher, part-time dishwasher, part-time cook at a Chinese takeout restaurant. And then I changed the light bulbs at Nordstrom. And then I was, you know, I did all these weird little jobs. And I just noticed like when I was a terrible employee. Cause I would just look around and like, I would look for the angle here.

Matt Theriault: Like, where are they, how would I do this better? And I was just like a natural thing. And I always went out and then whatever job I had, it inspired me to start a business of my own that was similar or a competitor.

Matt Theriault: And so it was just kind of, like I said, I don’t know where it came from, but I eventually got into the music business.

Matt Theriault: I really fell in love with music and I was born and raised in the hip hop era, the birth of hip hop in the late eighties. I became a music producer. I [00:15:00] became a DJ and I got a nice global distribution deal with a major label with EMI. I did really well and made my millions before I was 30.

Matt Theriault: And then thought life was set. And then this thing called the digital download came along, this little company called Napster. Do you remember this company?

Richard Matthews: I do. I remember actually downloading things from Napster before it was illegal.

Matt Theriault: Yes. So, that’s really what put us out of business and it put us out of business really fast because we had this small little independent hip-hop label and it didn’t matter if it was independent hip-hop or independent rock or independent dance music, that independent audience really embraced that digital download first.

Matt Theriault: Like they’re the ones who sought it out. They were the ones who figured out how to get free music and they’d have to walk into the music stores anymore.

Matt Theriault: So we were out of business before iTunes was even a formation. And so, that was at age 34. And so I wasn’t prepared for anything. I had no college credentials or I didn’t know how to do anything else.

Matt Theriault: So I had to go out there and see what the job world offered me. And it didn’t offer a whole lot. [00:16:00] You know, I went through car insurance, tried to sell cars, and then tried to sell insurance. I went to a bunch of multilevel marketing-type companies and ended up bagging groceries at the age of 34 and was sat there for about six months just with the world’s biggest pity party.

Matt Theriault: And maybe this was where the atomic spider or the radioactive spider bit me because it was the grocery store manager that had said to me when he was 34 also. And he had said something because he’d been able to acquire a few properties along the way while he was working there because they’re 18 years or so already at that time.

Matt Theriault: He started when he was in high school. And he said, you know, Matt, if you want your money back because that’s what I really wanted. I really missed my money from the music business. He had said, you know, real estate, it’s the final frontier where the average person has this legitimate shot at creating real wealth.

Matt Theriault: I’ve said it a million times since, and I’ll never forget it. And at the time I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I didn’t know, I didn’t have any other options. I felt I’d tried everything.

Matt Theriault: And so that night I went and became or went to started Googling everything real estate and found out that I had an aunt that lived a couple of cities over who was the number one real estate agent and had been [00:17:00] for 20 or some odd years.

Matt Theriault: I hadn’t seen her in 15 years and so I was kind of shy, but I was filled with liquid courage that night, if you know what I mean, and I fired off an email and in the morning she answered, we had lunch and then I, within 24 hours I was in real estate agent school.

Matt Theriault: So it started as a real estate agent and I did that for about three or four years. And I just kind of realized, you know what if real estate is where the money’s at, I’m sitting on the wrong side of the desk. Cause I had a couple of clients that were investors and I started looking at their profits versus my commissions.

Matt Theriault: And I was like, I want that. And so I made a huge investment myself and became a real estate investor and took on that whole education and trained myself and just worked my butt off.

Matt Theriault: And within I don’t know if you’ve heard of this book, it’s a, it’s kind of a rare book. It’s hard to find this book called Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Have you heard of this book? Okay.

Richard Matthews: I read that.

Matt Theriault: Highly recommend everybody write that down if you haven’t read it. But that taught me two amazing things and that could have been like another pivotal moment like it has been for so many entrepreneurs.

Matt Theriault: One was just the concept of passive income. Like, [00:18:00] know, I speak English. I can take the words passive and income, put them together and kind of figure out what it means. But at that moment in my life, I had no clue. And then actually to be taught at this new definition of wealth to where it’s not how much money you have in the bank.

Matt Theriault: It’s how much money do you have in coming in monthly. So you don’t have that covers your bills. And how much of that do you have left over? Like, so that’s that residual income thing. And actually being taught from that book to pursue passive income as an intention. Not just by chance. Right? And so I did that.

Matt Theriault: So it was all about increasing your passive income, decreasing your monthly expenses, and exit the rat race. That was the formula. And I did that in about three and a half years and I wasn’t wealthy, but I didn’t have to work. And having experienced a big bank account, having to work in a small bank account, and not having to work, I liked the not having to work part better.

Matt Theriault: And you know, my wife had just gotten pregnant. And like nobody ever taught that to me. I learned this on my own. I think I was 40 at the time, 39 or 40 years old.

Matt Theriault: And I was like you know what? I wasn’t [00:19:00] blessed with the family that could have taught me this. I want to make sure that my son doesn’t have that same experience.

Matt Theriault: I want him to be blessed. I want him to have this knowledge, this information choosing, he can do what to do with it, what he wants, but I want him to have that advantage.

Matt Theriault: So I just started documenting everything. And I started a podcast. And I started a YouTube channel, and then that started to bring in clients like people asking me for help and wanting to give me money.

Matt Theriault: And it turned into this education coaching business totally organically. And so that’s where we are today.

Richard Matthews: That’s an incredible story. And so you went from nothing to on top of the world to losing everything and having to start over and rebuild your life, which is you know, an incredible sort of hero’s arc in its own right. But having to reinvent yourself, especially in your thirties, right? you know, you’re halfway through the second quarter already and you have.

Matt Theriault: I’m 55 years old right now, and I remember how old I felt at 34, which I just laugh at now.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, it’s a really inspiring story. And to know that, you know, it doesn’t really matter where you’re at in your life. Real estate is like, as you said, it’s something that you can get into anywhere that the average person can [00:20:00] start. And there’s a lot of, you know, we’ve had a lot of real estate investors on this podcast to talk about it.

Richard Matthews: And I think it’s a fascinating space to be in because it’s one of the few that you can leverage, you know, and she used rich dad, poor dad’s terms, opium, right? Other people’s money to help leverage your growth. And that’s where, like we mentioned just a few minutes ago, right?

Richard Matthews: Using an FHA loan or you know, you put the 20% down, right? The other 80% is not your money. It’s someone else’s money. Buying the asset for you. And then the tenant is the one who’s going to be paying the act of paying for the asset over the course of time.

Richard Matthews: You know, if you can do that once, you can do it a hundred times, you can do a hundred times, you can do, you went to 300 plus doors that you wanted given.

Matt Theriault: You know, if people just did that, they took like a new young couple in their early twenties, bought the house, their house together, and then in two years moved up and turned that previous house into a rental. And then two years stayed in that one for two years. The reason for two years is because you can avoid all the taxes when you sell.

Matt Theriault: And then every two years you just did that for [00:21:00] five or six years, you’d be set for life. That you’d be done. Like once you hit retirement, you’d be so much further along than if you’ve gone the traditional route working for corporate America.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I look back at that and wish, you know, maybe I had, wish I’d done that, but I’ll make sure my son and my daughters.

Matt Theriault: It’s not too late, Richard. You can still. Here’s another startling fact of what the sign of the times are right now. People are hemming and hawing about housing affordability and how it’s like we’re at all-time highs right now.

Matt Theriault: Think right now houses are as affordable as they’re ever going to be. I don’t think it’s ever gonna become easier. There’s just too much demand. We have too many people than we have houses.

Matt Theriault: I mean, in order for a bubble to burst, you have to have too many houses. We’re in a massive decades worth of building shortage of houses. And the immigration that’s coming through is a whole new demand aspect that we weren’t anticipating. And now you have corporate America, you have that demand coming through.

Matt Theriault: So, the demand is so huge and so massive that we can’t, I don’t think we’ll ever [00:22:00] be able to build them fast enough. People gonna have to seriously change the way that they live. And I think a single-family house is gonna have a tremendous amount of value within 10 years.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And I know with the shift in the economy from, you know, COVID a few years ago, massive amounts of corporate America went from working at You know, in big cities at big buildings to working from home, has changed the demand for single-family homes and changed where the demand for homes is all over the country.

Richard Matthews: And I said, it’s not going to reverse any time soon.

Matt Theriault: Yeah, no, I don’t see. I mean, if it happens, I’ll be right here, be happy to say, Hey, I was wrong, but I just don’t see that happening.

Richard Matthews: Well, let’s talk a little bit about your superpowers then, right? Every guy or hero has a superpower, whether that’s a fancy flying suit made by the genius intellect, or it may be your ability to call down thunder from the sky.

Richard Matthews: In the real world, girls have what I call a zone of genius, which is either A skill or a set of skills that you were born with or that you developed over the course of your career that really energize everything else that you do.

Richard Matthews: And so the way I like to frame it for my guests is if you look at all the skills you developed over the course of your career, everything from in your DJ [00:23:00] world to maybe working at the grocery store all the way up to building your real estate career and then building a coaching company.

Richard Matthews: What’s that common thread that’s sort of tying all of your skills together? And that common thread is probably where your superpower is.

Richard Matthews: So with that framing, what do you think your superpower is?

Matt Theriault: There’s a couple of things in the one that I’m, that I would call out first is I just have an awareness that no one’s going to do it for me. So I don’t sit around and wait for things to happen. I just go do things. I just because it ain’t gonna happen any other way. And that’s just something I’ve kind of in hindsight, like I wasn’t an intention.

Matt Theriault: That wasn’t something I was always conscious of, but I would look in my rearview mirror. I see that constant theme going through my life.

Matt Theriault: If I were to say what my outside environment tells me all the time, it’s two things have an amazing neck to solve problems to take complicated things and reduce them to the simple, and to teach people how to do it, how to duplicate, how to repeat a process.

Matt Theriault: One of our most [00:24:00] common types of people that come here to learn how to invest in real estate are engineers. And I would, I mean, I could have never predicted this, it wasn’t an intention but they tell me when they come to our office for our training sessions that they just like the way that I lay things out.

Matt Theriault: And so based off the podcast and based off the YouTube channel, apparently that’s what I do. And that’s totally subconscious unknowingly, and I wouldn’t even have known it unless I had that feedback. So I think that would be it taking complicated things and breaking them down to simple forms.

Matt Theriault: So they’re easy to understand.

Richard Matthews: I always called that putting the cookies on the lower shelf. They’re up here, and you know, if you put them on the lower shelf, then everyone’s gonna.

Matt Theriault: There you go. I like that. That’s a good metaphor.

Richard Matthews: You’re not sure why, but that just always popped into my head anytime.

Matt Theriault: Can’t reach the cookies, right? We’ll put them on the lower shelf. I like it.

Richard Matthews: Put them on the lower shelf for yeah, and it’s a unique superpower that everyone sort of needs in their lives, depending on what you’re trying to learn, trying to get into, you need to have that person who knows how to take those concepts and put them in a place that you can understand them and act on them and then move forward.

Richard Matthews: And it’s one of the [00:25:00] things that I think is fascinating about just the human species in general is you always have the storytellers for that industry. Right?

Richard Matthews: For that skill or for that concept. And it’s people like you that can make, you know, something like real estate accessible to people who aren’t real estate investors or in my world, it’s podcasting, right?

Richard Matthews: We talk about how to put those cookies on the lower shelf for people who aren’t podcasters, but they want to leverage that skill in their life.

Richard Matthews: And yeah, It’s a potent skill that I think everyone really needs to have in their lifespan and what it is they’re trying to pick up or learn or add to their lives.

Matt Theriault: For sure. Because we have problems all the time. I think it’s Tony Robbins who says it’s you know what determines your success is not going to be so much your resources, but your resourcefulness.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. What is it the who not how book pops into mind whenever I think about that too is like hey, there’s someone somewhere who has the results that you want and they can help you do that, they can help put the cookies on the lower shelf for you and help you get that same result.

Matt Theriault: Yeah. And it’s child’s play to them and it’s difficult for you at the moment, right?

Richard Matthews: Yeah. It reminds me [00:26:00] of my wife, she does 3d cake designs you know, for my nephew once when he was like 10 years ago, but she wanted a T Rex. And like, she made a three-dimensional T Rex with like fangs and like, you know, eating a raptor and like, you know, there’s a volcano and all this stuff on there and like, we have a picture of him, he like lost his mind when he saw the thing and my wife is like, you know, I was like, why don’t you do this professionally?

Richard Matthews: And she’s like, I couldn’t charge for that. You know, it’s too easy. And I’m like, listen, woman. I was like, well, you think is easy. Everyone else thinks is a magical feat.

Matt Theriault: Yep.

Richard Matthews: They don’t understand how you even did it, let alone, right? And so like it’s in those areas where you’re like, no, this is easy to me, that’s where you generally find your superpowers.

Matt Theriault: That’s funny because my wife, she gives me a big elbow in the gut all the time when I say, Oh, don’t worry. I’ll take care of that for you. She’s like, no, you can get paid for that.

Richard Matthews: Oh man. So let’s talk about the flip side. Right? So, if you know, on one side, you have a superpower, which is that ability to help people solve problems and understand what’s going on.

Richard Matthews: The real flaw is, you know, just like every Superman has his kryptonite or Wonder Woman can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad.

Richard Matthews: You probably had a flaw that’s held you [00:27:00] back in your business, something you struggled with. For me, it was things like perfectionism that kept me from actually shipping the product because I could always make it a little bit better before I put it in the marketplace. I just learned from that and realized you have to put it in the marketplace.

Richard Matthews: You can get that feedback like you were talking about earlier. Or self-care. I had a really hard time with self-care as a young entrepreneur where I didn’t have good boundaries with my time. I did have good boundaries with my clients, let them walk all over me. And that really held me back, held back my income, held back a lot of things in my business.

Richard Matthews: But I think more important than what the flaw is, is how have you worked to overcome it so you could continue to grow your business and to, you know, get into new markets, like real estate training as well.

Matt Theriault: Yeah, this is like the second time this has come up here this month for me. And the last time was the first time that I ever really had to like, look inside to see what that was. And the instinct was just the thing.

Matt Theriault: First thing that came to mind was, I care too much about people, right? And most people say it has a good thing and might be think that’s a humble brag of some sort.

Matt Theriault: But it’s really like, if I look at my, in the rearview mirror kind of made what you’re just talking about with self-care. It’s really been to the detriment, though, of my own [00:28:00] well-being, right? And I think that’s a biggie. Like, there’s not a lot of time for me because it’s always allocated to everybody else and helping them do what they want to do and what they want to get.

Matt Theriault: And so, I mean, I look at people that say cut in line, right? With no awareness or care about anyone that’s around them, you know, and I’m like, jerk, get to the end of the line. But then at the same time, I’m also kind of like, God, I wish I could do that.

Matt Theriault: I wish I could just cut in the line and not care about what anyone thought. And I think that’s an extreme, but there is a line in there that I could certainly afford to go a little bit more in that direction with how I act.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I think it’s a really important discussion. Maybe we can dive into a little bit cause you know, I struggled with that for a long time too. And this idea that like, Oh, you know, I care too much. And I almost feel like that’s the wrong framing.

Matt Theriault: Right? It sounds to say. Yep.

Richard Matthews: Weird to say, cause you’re like, it’s not that you care too much about people is that you’re not caring enough about yourself.

Richard Matthews: And it’s that whole idea of like, you know if you’re going to help someone else put the oxygen mask on, you have to put yours on first. You have to take care of yourself. You have to take care of your health. You have to take care of your fitness. You have [00:29:00] to take care of your family. Like your own house has to be in order before you can help someone else put their house in order.

Richard Matthews: And so if you don’t have your stuff in place the way that it needs to be, you’re not actually going to be able to serve the people that you want to serve the way that you want to serve them or at the level that you want to serve them.

Richard Matthews: And so it’s actually a detriment to them and a detriment to the people that you care about if you’re not putting yourself and your family and your health and your fitness and your relationship with God and all that stuff ahead of the people that you’re serving in your business or in your community.

Matt Theriault: For sure. And, I think we all know that, right? Logically, like you didn’t say any nonsense just now. You didn’t say anything that I disagree with, but when it comes to actual practical application and implementation in your life, it’s hard, right? You have to be like aware of it at all times.

Matt Theriault: It’s something that you have to think about. And.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. It was like one of the stories that popped into mind for me was you know, I mentioned, you know, lack of self-care was with clients walking over me and with my time, and for the time was a big one for me because I thought earlier on as a younger entrepreneur that if I wanted to be more successful, I had to work more hours, right?

Richard Matthews: Like more hours [00:30:00] was the lever that I knew how to pull, right?

Matt Theriault: Right.

Richard Matthews: And the realization that I had that it wasn’t about the hours, it was about other things. And so I started putting restrictions on my business. Right?

Richard Matthews: And it was like, you’re allowed to have, instead of six days a week, 12 hours a day, you’re allowed to have six days a week, eight hours a day, and maybe, you know, five days a week, 12 hours a day, maybe it’s five days a, you know, eight hours a day.

Richard Matthews: And I realized when I started putting restrictions on my business on what it was allowed to have from me, that it changed the kind of things that I focused on in my business on unlocking other people or on building systems to accomplish certain things.

Richard Matthews: And what that really did is it opened me up to have more, a better handle on my own self-care, which meant, you know, being able to have the time to focus on my health or have the time to hang out with my kids or have the time to do the things that I want to do outside of business.

Richard Matthews: But it also made my business grow because I built better systems and I empowered more people and now, you know, I said, we were at a mastermind a few weeks ago, right? And I mentioned, you know, I average like four hours a day, four days a week. And my business is 15 times the size it [00:31:00] was when I was working 12 hours a day, six a week.

Richard Matthews: And so we’re serving significantly more people at a much higher level because I did the work to make sure I was putting myself in my life and my family and getting my own house in order purposely.

Matt Theriault: Nice. You should create a course on that. I think there’s a lot of people listening who would be like, yeah, I could use that course.

Richard Matthews: I can use that course, I guess maybe I could, I don’t know what I would say in it other than like, you know, restrictions on what you’re allowing yourself to do and then focus on these things instead. It was basically.

Matt Theriault: I was just listening to a podcast on the way over here before we started recording, and it was, what’s it called? The Millionaire Something podcast or something like that. But he’s interviewing a billionaire about what he’s excited about for AI.

Matt Theriault: And so I said, let’s talk about AI, everything that doesn’t involve chat GPT, what are you most excited about?

Matt Theriault: And he’s talking about the AI agents, they’re like, they’re here and they’re here to stay and they’re better than humans. And so he started running down all these different applications of AI, of these AI agents, how they can just do everything for you. It’s really remarkable, I mean, they think and they act [00:32:00] and you know, he’s got a structure now to where he’s built an AI agent who’s actually the CEO of the business.

Matt Theriault: The AI agent has its own crypto account, so it can buy things and spend things. And it has transactions in place, so it can actually make money. And he just kind of sent this AI agent out on Twitter. It’s got its own Twitter account and it’s making money for him. He says it’s just a little bit right now, but I’ve got one little AI agent out there just going and making money and it was just like, wow, that was like so different than I didn’t even think about that, ah, so yeah, there you go as far as getting all your time back.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, I’ve been really fascinated about where the AI stuff is going as well. I actually just, wrote like 28,000 words over the weekend on this exact topic.

Matt Theriault: Did you write it or did AI write it?

Richard Matthews: I wrote a significant portion of it and then was leveraging AI to play with it and to turn it into more finalized pieces using it as an editor. Is that the right way to describe it?

Matt Theriault: Yeah, it was using AI as a feedback loop.

Richard Matthews: As a feedback loop. So, I do a lot of transcripts where I’ll talk into something and then like, okay, take all my [00:33:00] ideas and let’s turn this into, you know, a particular segment of a piece of writing.

Richard Matthews: So anyways, leveraging it that way. But one of the things that I think is interesting, the whole AI agent thing, we’re not that far away from being able to take all of the things that you’ve ever written or all the things that you’ve ever said on podcasts or all your things, all your facial experiences, all that kind of stuff and create an AI agent version of yourself that looks like you and sounds like you and talks like you and responds like you.

Richard Matthews: And when I say not that far away, I mean like all of the technology exists right now for that to happen. It just hasn’t been put together that way.

Matt Theriault: Hmm. Mm hmm.

Richard Matthews: And with that sort of on the forefront of like stuff that’s going to be happening over the next couple of years you have to really think like, where does our value come from as humans in this equation?

Richard Matthews: And that’s where we started talking about like the value of mastery and the value of being the original, right? What does it mean to be the original you know, of Matt? The creativity and the culture and the willingness to experience life or the ability to experience life is all going to come from you, right?

Richard Matthews: It’s never going to happen with AI agents because [00:34:00] it’s just not part of their DNA.

Richard Matthews: So anyways, that’s it’s a fascinating discussion.

Matt Theriault: I think one thing that AI will never be able to replace, and maybe I’m wrong, but like taste, you know, like discretion, like, will it really be able to read a room and know what to say and what not to say type thing?

Matt Theriault: You know, those types of things you know, I have a few editors for my YouTube channel and they do a fantastic job is their technical skill and everything is far superior to mine, but, You know, and they might use a little B roll clip, and I’m like, that wasn’t quite right. I would have used this one, right?

Matt Theriault: So I think AI like won’t be able to have that, like those nuances, but we’ll see.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I think we’ll be surprised by what it’s capable of AI. But yeah, it’s there’s a whole future and I’m to the point of this discussion realizing. It’s going to be more important than ever to have your own house in order if you have the ability to have, you know, robotics and AI tools that do a lot of your thinking and working for you as their machines, and they’ll just do exactly what you tell them to do.

Richard Matthews: And the output is not going to be determined by what the inputs you give it. [00:35:00] Inputs, you’re going to get bad outputs.

Matt Theriault: Yep. You know, when AI was first launched, was it almost two years ago now, I guess November we had, we were on a two-year anniversary, I think, right?

Matt Theriault: And you know, I started looking at it and playing with a little bit and I was like, Oh, that’s cute. Whatever. You know, I asked it. How do you make a martini?

Matt Theriault: Big deal. Right? It was like, okay, it’s just another search engine for me. But then the more I got into it, the more I was like, Oh, well, what have I asked a little different? Like, how do you make a martini with a Christmas theme? Right.?

Matt Theriault: And then I was like, well, how do you make a martini if you are a world-class mixologist and you just got back from a world tour, having swept all of the awards? Right?

Matt Theriault: And then how would you make that martini even better so it would make James Bond blush type thing? Right? And so, it started to really click for me.

Matt Theriault: Another reference back to Tony Robbins. You know, he has this thing saying that like your brain is the most powerful computer in the world and it will answer whatever question you ask of it.

Matt Theriault: And, you know, logically you’re kind of, okay, that makes sense. But it is, there’s a lot of intangible [00:36:00] there, right? There’s still a lot of intangible aspects of that logic. But now with AI, now it’s tangible.

Matt Theriault: So it’s not really who has the answers anymore. It’s who has the better questions. And, you know, so as you’re saying, it’s the input, is what’s so important. Like you just have to ask the right questions.

Matt Theriault: And I’m just getting to a place now after two years of obsessive use of AI. Now it’s like it’s everything. You have to remember, you can ask it anything. Like anything like using, okay, write me a viral YouTube script, right? Or write me an SEO blog post, like, or how to, you know, who’s predicted to win the election.

Matt Theriault: Just like all these basic questions that you might normally type into Google, but now it’s like, okay, well, I’m struggling with this and this is our relationship. And if I say this, this is what I’m expecting. If I say this, what am I expecting? What would be the best way to approach this problem? Like a personal issue and like you can ask it anything and it’s pretty remarkable.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. And you want to do something that’s even more fun [00:37:00] is when you start. So there’s a lot of AI tools that’ll let you do this, but I’m going to reference chat GPT cause that’s the one that a lot of people are familiar with. Build bots inside of there. And a bot is just a, it’s a large language model that has access to a knowledge base.

Richard Matthews: And the knowledge base is essentially stuff that you put in it. So like, I’ve got one that has all of my writings in it and I put all of my writings in it and then we analyzed all those writings and put all the analysis of those writings in there.

Richard Matthews: So for style guides and tone and the way that it’s, you know, the way that I think and the way that I write and the way that I structure sentences and like all these different things that are in there.

Richard Matthews: And now when I talked about using it to help write, now I have a spot that when I give it questions or when I give it the inputs of like, Hey, here’s a, you know, an hour and a half long discussion that, you know, I had about such and such topic, let’s write it in this writing style, you know, let’s take these data points and then write it this way.

Richard Matthews: And now it writes like I do which is fascinating, right? It’s fascinating to be able to do that. So, it’s all about the inputs, the better inputs give it, the better outputs you get. And so like, [00:38:00] that’s a very specific writing example, but it’s that same idea that like, Hey, your inputs are going to be what matters the most.

Richard Matthews: And which means that you know, right back to the beginning of the discussion is your original thought and your culture and your the things that you have that are unique to you and your perspectives are going to, what’s going to make the AI agents more successful, I think going forward.

Matt Theriault: Mm hmm. Agreed.

Richard Matthews: So I want to talk then about your common enemy, right? Every superhero has an arch nemesis is the thing that they constantly have to fight against in their world and the world of business takes a lot of forms, but I like to put it in the context of your clients, right? And it’s in a mindset or a flaw that they come to you with that you have to fight to overcome so that you can actually get them the result that they came to you for.

Richard Matthews: So in the world of real estate investing, either learning it or maybe doing it for them. What is that common enemy that you regularly have to fight against for in your work?

Matt Theriault: Well, personified it would probably be Dave Ramsey, right? But the reason being is just like the no-debt approach, like being debt-free. And if you strive to be, if debt [00:39:00] free is important to you, that’s your number one driver when it comes to your finances, you’ll probably never be wealthy. Right?

Matt Theriault: I mean, you’re gonna have to have a remarkable, you have to have written an amazing book or that goes, you know, sells millions and millions of copies like a Harry Potter lady, something like that. JK Rowling’s or you have to have an amazing talent as an actor or a singer or as an athlete something or some amazing business idea.

Matt Theriault: If you don’t have that and you’re not blessed with that, then the ability to use debt and get your money to make more money, I think is really the only chance anyone has, unless they’re already born with money, that they’re going to make money.

Matt Theriault: And so, I place a significant emphasis and importance on making money in the world that we live in because it’s really important.

Matt Theriault: There’s nothing that serves us in the way that it serves us. Like it puts the food in our stomachs, the clothes on our backs, and the roof over our heads. It pays for the hospital bills and it allows us to do all of those things for the people that we love. Nothing in our society replaces money in which way it serves us.

Matt Theriault: So if you’re not striving to make as much as you [00:40:00] possibly can to live the most fulfilling life that you can while you’re here, then You know, you’re just like, you’re not going to be able to do that without leveraging other people’s money.

Richard Matthews: A really fascinating conversation for people who aren’t aware. Our economy. And when I say our economy, I mean the entire world at this point is a Fiat-based economy, meaning that we have you know, if you actually look at our dollar notes now, it actually says backed by the good faith and credit of the United States people. What that means is it’s literally debt, right?

Richard Matthews: Our money is debt. It is not, you know, cash is not some, you know, it used to be, you know, backed by gold and all these other things, but we have a debt-based economy, which means the only way to grow your wealth is by leveraging debt, by like growing debt.

Richard Matthews: And so, you know, to your point, you know, there’s two types of debt. There’s good debt and there’s bad debt. And Dave Ramsey talks about bad debt, but it is called all debt. He doesn’t, he makes that right? But that is bad debt. And so we have a lot of people [00:41:00] that have this misunderstanding that there’s two different types of debt.

Richard Matthews: There’s debt that puts money in your pocket and there’s debt that takes money out of your pocket. And so for clarity’s sake, I think what you’re talking about is like, Hey, if you want to leverage debt, you need to learn how to leverage good kind of debt that puts money.

Matt Theriault: Dave Ramsey, it’s all bad. All bad. And yeah, that would be definitely the nemesis. And if you can’t get past that idea, then you know what? It’s going to be a life of mediocrity when it comes to finances. And if you’re okay with that, then I’m okay with it.

Matt Theriault: I’m not saying you have to be rich and you have to strive for more, but don’t think by being debt-free, you’re going to eventually also be financially free because you won’t be.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. All right. Cause it’s the foundation of our system. The rules of our system say, if you want to grow the money side of the equation, that you grow the money side of the equation with debt. That’s how it works.

Matt Theriault: For, is there a perfect example? If you take a look at all the, I just did this, I wrote a report. It was about a month ago and I did the research. So this is relevant or current within 30 days. If you look at all the Fortune 500 companies in [00:42:00] the 500, right? Only two of them are debt-free.

Matt Theriault: So there’s a reason for that, there’s a clue. Now that’s certainly on a big scale, but that’s the, as you, to your point, that’s the economy that we live in. It’s a debt-based economy and debt is what makes the world go round and they understand that.

Matt Theriault: And so that’s why they use that even though they have plenty of money to go ahead and probably accomplish the exact same results, but they choose not to use it because it was a better return by using somebody else’s money.

Richard Matthews: Yeah. I was just having this discussion for our business for the mastermind that you and I are both part of, I was looking at leveraging debt as a way to access that, you know, the tools and resources of that mastermind and was talking to one of my coaches.

Richard Matthews: And taking that next step and growing up in business kind of thing and realizing that, he was like, you need to start looking at debt this way that if you’re going to say, make a $50,000 investment into your business, right? If you can borrow that debt, Right? $50,000.

Richard Matthews: Let’s do you $100,000 just because the math is easier, right? You $100,000 investment in your [00:43:00] business. And let’s say it costs you, it’s expensive, right? It costs you, you know, 16% or something like that. And, you know, just for simple math, it’s 16% simple interest, right? $116,000. It’s very expensive money to access that, but that $100,000 investment over the course of, say, you have to pay it back in 12 months.

Richard Matthews: If you can take that $100,000 and use it to make $250,000, you would do that all day long, right?

Richard Matthews: And that’s how you leverage money, you’re leveraging someone else’s money to do that, right?

Richard Matthews: Cause you know, if you paid cash for it, now you don’t have the $100,000 in your bank account and all you saved was the $16,000.

Richard Matthews: And it was like, you spend the $16,000 on the debt. Create the opportunities for an extra $150,000 in your business. And it’s a very different way to look at money. And it’s the same kind of thing that like, what I’ve been looking at is I built my business on shoestring, meaning that we put all of our own cash into it and built it from the revenues that the company produced and realizing that like, Hey, I could save up for, you know, a $50,000 investment.

Richard Matthews: And it might take me two years to do that where we have enough free [00:44:00] cashflow to put a $50,000 investment into something, or leverage debt access at $50,000 now and spend the next two years leveraging the wins that we got from that money now, right?

Richard Matthews: And that will probably result in like millions of dollars in difference in the company.

Matt Theriault: Yeah. I mean, back to Dave Ramsey, I mean up, but he just changed his tune on this a little bit within the last couple of years, but he was very much of the mindset that you should not buy a house until you can afford to pay cash for it.

Matt Theriault: And I’m just like, we go back like most people don’t make enough to save enough for a compound interest to work.

Matt Theriault: How are they going to make enough to keep up with the appreciating real estate? They’ll never be able to afford a house. And you know what, that’s going to cost a person over their lifetime. It’s going to be catastrophic to their finances.

Matt Theriault: You know, the Federal Reserve released a report three years ago, four years ago, saying the average homeowner is 40 times wealthier than the average renter for zero, just by one house, not an investor or anything, just by owning a house.[00:45:00]

Matt Theriault: And it was like by that statistic and you have to wait until you could pay cash for that property, you’ll never get there. So you’re going to be that person. That’s 40 times in the negative.

Richard Matthews: That’s crazy. So I think that makes a good transition to talk about, you know, your driving force, right? So it’s the flip side of your common enemy. Is your driving force, right? So just like Spiderman fights to save New York or Batman fights to save Gotham or Google fights to index and categorize all the world’s information, what is it that you fight for with Epic Real Estate, your mission, so to speak?

Matt Theriault: Fight for? We can go back to our economic conversation, how we live in this debt-based society and it’s really inflation and inflationary economy that we live in.

Matt Theriault: And so you have this force that’s constantly destroying the purchasing power of your money. And so you have to fight against that. And the nice thing of, there’s a saying that you might’ve heard of don’t fight the fed.

Matt Theriault: Have you heard of this expression before?

Richard Matthews: I have heard don’t fight the Fed, but I don’t know what it is.

Matt Theriault: It probably means a bunch of things, but this is one way how that works is that you know, if I put $100,000 under my mattress right [00:46:00] now, right?

Matt Theriault: And then I lent out, let’s see if we go back to the beginning of COVID, this is the example. You have two people, two scenarios, one person, they got 100,000 bucks and they’re concerned about the future, so they put $100,000 under the mattress because they don’t want anything to happen to it.

Matt Theriault: A second person puts, takes a hundred thousand dollars, and uses that as a 20% down, down payment on a $500,000 house, right? So they both have a hundred thousand dollars, one put under the mattress one, put it into a property.

Matt Theriault: You know, you fast forward there two years to the end of Covid and you know, I think it was collectively that inflation was like 13%, 14%. So that hundred dollars that you put on your mattress, it now only has the purchasing power of what 86 or 80? Yeah, 860. Yeah. $860,000. Right?

Matt Theriault: So you’ve lost, you know, 14, 13% of your money that you had in your mattress flat for playing it safe.

Matt Theriault: But if you put it into real estate, so [00:47:00] you put $100,000 down and you borrowed 400, Right? The thing about inflation, forget the appreciation of the real estate ’cause we know it. Boom, that’s not the point. But if the inflation is an equal opportunity money destroyer. So it destroyed the $100,000 on your mattress, the same as it destroyed the bank’s $400,000 that you borrowed.

Matt Theriault: So, inflation, now you take $100,000 times four. So save 15,000 make it easy. So it’s a $60,000 profit you made by borrowing somebody else’s money just because of inflation. Right? So my fight here at Epic is to show people how it’s not just a real estate conversation. It’s a money conversation.

Matt Theriault: It’s an economic conversation in the formula. The perfect formula is to borrow a depreciating asset money to purchase an appreciating asset real estate.

Matt Theriault: That puts you on the right side of the Fed, on the right side of the system. And the system always wins by playing the game of being debt free puts you on the wrong side [00:48:00] of the system, and that’s why they lose.

Matt Theriault: The Department of Health and Human Services just came out and said 95% of all today’s 65-year-olds are not prepared to retire on their own resources. 95% and that’s the masses following the traditional conventional advice.

Matt Theriault: And, but just by buying a couple pieces of borrowing the buying a couple pieces of income property borrowing using somebody else’s money to purchase it.

Matt Theriault: Now you’re on the right side of the system and you’re doing just fine. You’re in that 5% that made it.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, that’s insane. And it’s not even that difficult, right? Like my understanding, I haven’t bought much real estate myself, but my understanding is the formula is not that difficult. It’s not like rocket science. It’s not like going to surgeon school. Right?

Matt Theriault: So, I mean, my explanation there is very detailed and very complicated. That’s what’s happening underneath. You don’t have to worry about any of that. Just go borrow money and buy an income property and done. Like you don’t have to like all the boxes have been checked. Whether you remember what I said today or not, you’re right.

Matt Theriault: It’s that simple.

Richard Matthews: Let’s talk a little about some practical things here for our audience. I call this our hero’s tool belt. Just like every superhero has, you know, their tool [00:49:00] belt with awesome gadgets like their batarangs or their web slingers or their laser eyes. I want to talk about the top one or two tools you couldn’t live without to do the type of investing that you do.

Richard Matthews: Could be anything from your notepad, or your calendar to some marketing tools, something to use for your actual like purchase of property. Something you think is essential to getting your job done on a daily basis.

Matt Theriault: I would say probably the data that I have access to because we purchase properties that are off-market. We purchase properties that are in distress and that’s about 7% of all houses that are out there.

Matt Theriault: So by having access to the data that kind of reveals which 7% of those properties are, it saves me from marketing to all 100 and I just have to market to the seven.

Matt Theriault: That’s a huge advantage. That’s a huge tool. I couldn’t do without it.

Richard Matthews: Is that the kind of thing that you guys leverage in your wife’s business to be able to find property for your client?

Matt Theriault: Both, because if you wouldn’t just hire a real estate agent and went out and purchased real estate, everything I’ve said is going to happen for you. Real estate will keep its promises to you.

Matt Theriault: But if you know how to find them off-market and say, buy them with equity already in [00:50:00] place, meaning buying them at a discount, you know, if I bought a house that was for a $300,000 house for $200,000, that’s a $100,000 I just made by being able to know how to find that property, rather than having to buy that house and wait for five years for it to appreciate a $100,000.

Richard Matthews: Just, you’re building like instant value into the property by knowing how to slice the market.

Matt Theriault: Can really collapse time frames that way. So, that’s one tool that certainly couldn’t do without. Need a phone because it’s a people business and if you can’t talk to people then you’re not gonna do very well. And then.

Richard Matthews: Here’s a follow-up question on that for, you know, cause I run a podcast company, which means talking to people and doing interviews like this is a pretty much standard operating procedure for my life and my client’s lives. Is that a transferable skill set into real estate?

Matt Theriault: Which part they’re talking to people?

Richard Matthews: They’re talking to people for sure.

Matt Theriault: Yeah, and that’s actually a fear a lot of people have as they come into what we do and they think they’re not people, right?

Matt Theriault: I’m not a people person. I’m not good at small talk. I can’t think on my [00:51:00] feet. I’ve never been good at sales and blah, blah, blah.

Matt Theriault: You don’t have to do any of that, you’re going to be 100% yourself the way that we teach it. Because if the motivation is there with it, with the seller, it’s really difficult to say the wrong thing to the right person.

Matt Theriault: If you have this idea that you need to go talk someone out of their house and trick them because you were so slick with your tongue and you had the perfect words to say, then yeah, no, that’s, I don’t even think that’s possible, but a lot of people think that’s what it’s going to be like.

Matt Theriault: No, people are coming to you for help. Right? And if you’ve got a good heart and your morals and ethics are in the right place, you can be very successful in this business, regardless of how well you talk.

Richard Matthews: So let’s talk a little bit more about that particularly, because one of the things that I don’t think a lot of people understand is where the value is that the real estate investor is bringing to the market.

Matt Theriault: Mm hmm.

Richard Matthews: And so, I’ve heard this said, you’ll hear this set in like political things were like, oh, investors are evil and that kind of stuff because they’re preying on the market.

Richard Matthews: And the reality is the furthest from the truth, right? That’s not actually how a capitalist society works. You can’t pray on the market, have a successful [00:52:00] business. It’s just not how capitalism works.

Richard Matthews: So you have to have the value that you’re providing to the market. So what I would love to know from you is where do you see the value that you’re providing both to the people you’re buying property from and the value that you’re providing to the people that you’re providing property to.

Matt Theriault: Sure. So, where that comes from is and I expressed that one statistic, 7% of all the properties that are sold under some sort of level of distress. It could be personal distress, financial distress, or the property itself is in distress, 93% are not.

Matt Theriault: They’re sold through traditional means through a real estate agent at full market value. And so you have these 93% that if any member of that 93% catches wind of what happened to this person at 7%, then all of a sudden they think something evil was happening there. Right?

Matt Theriault: But what they don’t realize is they’re not putting themselves in their shoes. They’re putting the distressed person in their shoes, that’s not distressed.

Matt Theriault: So when people come to us, they’re like something bigger in life happened to them. That’s something that’s much more important than them to trying to sell a house at full price and going [00:53:00] through the traditional means of having to wait for a real estate agent of having to deal with the marketing and deal with buyers and having to deal with the repairs and do all that stuff.

Matt Theriault: I got bigger fish to fry. I need some cash right now. My house is going to be the financial instrument I got to turn to that’s going to solve this bigger problem. And I don’t want to wait for a real estate agent. I don’t want to wait for all this junk.

Matt Theriault: So those are the people that come to us. They’ve got a problem that’s bigger than selling their house at full price and people that 93% they just can’t imagine such a problem that would be so big that I would give my house away quickly at a discount.

Matt Theriault: So that’s the big distinction, that’s the value that we bring to the sellers because someone that’s in foreclosure and they’re going to lose their house at auction in three weeks or they get nothing. Right? That an agent couldn’t act fast enough to save them, then that’s the type of person that might come to us.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, right?

Matt Theriault: So, that’s how we provide the value to the sellers and then to the buyers, obviously, you know, you get all the work done for you and it’s a cash-producing asset.

Richard Matthews: So how about for the people who might be renting from you, what’s the value there?[00:54:00]

Matt Theriault: Well, if they like shelter, I guess. If they want a roof over their head, right? If they find free housing somewhere that they’re happy with then go ahead and take it, but if they want a nice clean place to live and you know in warmth in the winter and they want ac in the summer and they want running water and electricity then I think that’s kind of speaks for itself as regarding the value.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. And then one of those things we’ve talked about this a little bit before, but like the renting a place is a lot of times is either, it just makes sense financially for where someone’s at right now, right?

Richard Matthews: So, it’s a higher value and I know we’ve been in that place a number of times like, Hey, we’re only going to be here for six months or something like that.

Richard Matthews: We’re going to rent a place for this, or we’re doing something for a job, or you know, we’re working on saving for something else over here that like, there’s a lot of times when renting is the more viable option.

Richard Matthews: So there’s value in the marketplace for the investors who are bringing in and providing the housing that way.

Matt Theriault: For sure and there’s a big distinction Richard between the house you live in and then the [00:55:00] house you own as an investment.

Matt Theriault: There’s a huge distinction there because, you know, I’m 55. I just bought my first primary residence about three or four years ago.

Matt Theriault: So I had rented everywhere I was because it was cheaper to rent my home, but I still had all the benefits of real estate because I had a big investment portfolio.

Matt Theriault: And so that made sense to me to never really buy my own home because I’d have to pay double for it to live there. But if I have income from my investments paying for the place that I live and I get to pay half the price of where I live and because of that, I get to live in a much nicer neighborhood.

Matt Theriault: Then, yeah, that totally makes sense to rent in that scenario.

Richard Matthews: Yeah.

Matt Theriault: The only reason I bought now is because we got kicked out of our rental. The owner wanted to move back in and this was right in the middle of COVID at the peak of the housing frenzy. And there was nothing for rent and there was barely anything for sale. So we just had to do something really quickly.

Matt Theriault: So that’s how we ended up there. So we just said, okay, let’s buy a house that we [00:56:00] can envision being a rental one day. And so that’s how we ended up buying it.

Richard Matthews: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m gonna talk about one more thing here and that’s your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code.

Richard Matthews: For instance, Batman never kills his enemies He only ever puts him in Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up the interview and I talk about the top one or two principles that you use regularly in your life. Maybe something that you wish you’d known when you first started out on your own hero’s journey.

Matt Theriault: Hmm. I think, and it’s painful sometimes, but doing the right thing is always the right thing. I guess the word that comes to mind would be integrity. And I just said that and I kind of hesitated to even say it because anytime I hear somebody say the word integrity or they’re honest, I’m like, Oh, got to watch out for this because anyone that talks about how honest they are, but you know, integrity, you don’t really have it.

Matt Theriault: You’re either in it or you’re out of it. And I just find that life works better if you try to stay in it a lot more than you’re out of it. And I just kind of define that as saying what you’re going to do and then doing what you said for no other reason than you said you’re going to do it. Right? [00:57:00] And I think that is that guiding principle.

Matt Theriault: It seems like that’s always the right thing to do. Life just works better when you do that. And sometimes it’s expensive taking the high road. Sometimes, you know, sometimes you have to suffer a little bit by doing it, but you really, you sleep better at night and you don’t have any regrets tonight, right?

Richard Matthews: And sometimes you fuck it up and you have to apologize.

Matt Theriault: All the time. Yeah.

Richard Matthews: It’s one of those things that I think people miss with this discussion of integrity is that like integrity, like, I love the way you put that is sometimes you’re in it, sometimes you’re out of it and you want to spend more time in it out.

Richard Matthews: You’re going to be out of integrity at some point, you’re going to say you’re going to be somewhere at some time and something’s going to happen, you’re not going to be there and to get yourself back in integrity, that’s where the apologies come to be like, you know, I, opted this up and here’s how, and here’s how I’m going to make it out.

Matt Theriault: Here’s the integrity test. All right. Everyone can tell how much integrity they have because people say, well, I have integrity. Well, let’s see.

Matt Theriault: So let’s just imagine that you go home today to your spouse or your partner. And you say, honey, baby, you’ll never have to take out the trash [00:58:00] again because I know how much you hate it.

Matt Theriault: And I hate seeing the look on your face when you do it. Now, if it’s not the trash, it’s something else. So what’s something that they don’t like doing? You’re going to go in and volunteer to do that for the rest of your life, for the rest of your life. So they never have to do it again. So maybe you’ll never have to take out the trash again.

Matt Theriault: So what is their response going to be? Oh, baby, thank you. I love you so much. I knew there was a reason I married you. Or are they going to say, I’ll believe it when I see it. Right?

Matt Theriault: And that response is going to give you a good indicator of what your integrity is like within that relationship. And that’s a real eye-opener for a lot of people because a lot of times it’s going to be, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Matt Theriault: You’re like, oops, out of integrity more often than I’m in integrity. Cause this is how my partner sees me. This is how I show this relationship. So that’s a good test.

Richard Matthews: That’s a really good test. I know I have a bit crazier stuff going on in my family cause we do a bunch of, you know, we do crazy things like travel full time and, you know, go out and start businesses and do things that other people find, you know, are risk averse to.

Richard Matthews: And so I’m regularly coming up with new things and my wife is always just like, she’s like, we’ll find a way [00:59:00] you always do. So,

Matt Theriault: Perfectly said, because I’ve got students that come in, and a lot of times it happens with Mercedes clients as well, where husband and wife will come in, and if they choose not to move forward, whether it’s the husband going to take on a real estate investing because he wants to get his hands dirty and fix and flip houses, or, you know, the wife freaks out with Mercedes.

Matt Theriault: It’s because that it’s somewhere there’s always typically a dreamer and someone that’s a little bit more practical, more conservative. And it’s typically because the dreamer somewhere in that relationship made a promise and didn’t keep it. And for the other person that they’re put that role or that’s playing over and over in their head, they’re remembering it and it might be totally in their subconscious. They’re not aware of it. That’s almost always where it is.

Matt Theriault: So, one way to restore integrity is just to make a promise and keep it and start a new track record.

Richard Matthews: And I really love the metaphor of you’re in it or out of it because like, it’s really easy to just get in it. It just starts with how you act now, [01:00:00] right?

Richard Matthews: And that starts the new track and you know, try and spend more of your time in it than out of it.

Matt Theriault: Yep.

Richard Matthews: It’s really good. I think that’s a great place to wrap up our interview.

Richard Matthews: I always love wrapping on integrity but I do every interview with a simple challenge. I call the heroes to challenge. We do this to help get access to stories we might not find on our own.

Richard Matthews: So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life and your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story?

Richard Matthews: Who are they? First names are fine, and why do you think they should come to share their story with us here on The Hero Show?

Richard Matthews: First person that comes to mind for you.

Matt Theriault: First person comes to my mind. Rob Cosberg. Was one that came to mind, you know, Rob?

Richard Matthews: I don’t know, Rob. What’s the quick reason there?

Matt Theriault: Robert, I think is one of the very first people that had the company where he’ll write your book for you.

Richard Matthews: Oh.

Matt Theriault: I think he’s got, he was a real estate agent. Coincidentally, we didn’t know each other then. And then lost everything in 2008 and reinvented himself from publishing people’s books.

Matt Theriault: And so he’s got this whole program against people, the number one bestseller. And it’s amazing. And he’s a really good dude. So that’s the first person that came to mind.

Richard Matthews: I would love to get an intro to him and see if we can get him to come on the show. If they sometimes they say yes, and when they do, sometimes we get really cool stories out of it.

Richard Matthews: So, appreciate it.

Matt Theriault: For sure.

Richard Matthews: All right. So in comic books, there’s always the [01:01:00] crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for their acts of heroism.

Richard Matthews: So our analogous to that as we close on this show is where can people find you if they want your help? Where can they light up the bat signal and say, hey, Matt, I would really like to start getting involved in real estate?

Richard Matthews: But more importantly than where is, who are the types of people that should light up the bat signal, the people that should ask for your help?

Matt Theriault: Got it. Well, if you’re listening to a podcast, you must like podcasts. So we have the Epic Real Estate Investing Podcast, and it’s the longest-running real estate podcast. We started in 2009. And so we’re the first ones here. Even when people didn’t even know what a podcast was, we had to explain to people what it was, what’s a podcast.

Matt Theriault: And so that would be the private, great way. I’ve got a YouTube channel by the same name, Epic Real Estate. And then we have a website by the same name, EpicRealEstate.com.

Matt Theriault: So that would be how you’d find us. And so choose your medium as you wish. And then the people that, that I kind of explained in the beginning that those that want to maybe supplement their retirement or speed up their retirement and those will be the ideal people or just dissatisfied [01:02:00] with what they’re doing for a living and want to be in total control of their finances.

Matt Theriault: It’s hard work. I’m not going to say it’s easy, but you will be in control and you’ll be able to you know, steer your own ship, so to speak, and if that’s what you’re looking to do, then you can actually go fill out a little questionnaire.

Matt Theriault: It’s r e i a c e dot com. And you answer a few questions, pick a time, we’ll hop on the phone, we’ll brainstorm some ideas, and see if there’s a fit here or not.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. so much. Today, Matt, I really appreciate it. And I’d love to just hear your story and hear more about what you’re doing with real estate.

Richard Matthews: And I love your mission and I love that. I love real estate in particular. And I was like, I have real estate is next on my for life. And I was very particular, like, Hey, we’re going to build a business that throws off cashflow so we can invest in real estate. We’re almost to that second stage.

Richard Matthews: So, no, I really enjoyed coming, just hearing your story today. Do you have any final words of wisdom for our audience? For this, a stop record.

Matt Theriault: You know, Richard, I appreciate you for having me on. I’m very grateful for it. And I think what you do for a living is remarkable. And I think it’s a business built for the future because, you know, I think we’re living in a time where your personal brand is just really important. We’re seeing signs of it all [01:03:00] over the place with celebrities and with non-celebrities and creating brands and just opening up massive doors.

Matt Theriault: And I think what you do for people is extremely valuable. So thank you for doing what you do.

Richard Matthews: Awesome. very much. And if you are watching the podcast, make sure you go check out Epic Real Estate Podcast yourself and check out their YouTube channel. We’ll make sure that the links for all that are in the description for this on wherever you’re watching, you’ll be able to find links to them.

Richard Matthews: And Matt, thank you so much for being on here

Matt Theriault: Thanks, Richard.