Real Estate Millionaires: How We Did It

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Michael Zuber (1:00)

All righty, folks, as you know, the three amigos all are currently enjoying the retired or at least semi-retired life. Yes, Matt is still in the throes of managing his units and projects. So let's not call him retired, let's call him semi-retired. But Deon's living the lazy landlord life on repeat.

And I might be in between the two because yes, I do produce 15 hours of content a week. So it's fair to say that I have at least a part-time job. But I thought we would go around here and talk about the five big steps we each made on our journey to financial freedom. I suspect a lot of them will be very unique, so you might get 15 different things. But Deon, this is your topic. We'll let you start. What was the first step in your journey?

Deon (1:45)

My first step was a day that I hope everybody has. It's when we wake up and realize we have to think about money.

For me, it didn't happen till I was 40 Before 40, money was something that my job would take care of. I would just work. I would get a pension, I would get a paycheck, and at 40, I realized if I don't think about money, my money is never going to work for me.

Michael Zuber (2:09)

Love that. Matt, when was the first step in your journey to financial freedom?

Matt (2:15)

Well, when I was a teenager, I was doing sports cards because I was doing homeschooling. So I was doing sports cards then, and realized very early on when I worked for other people, and I did it for myself. I liked a lot more working for myself.

Boss was a total asshole, but knew how to deal with him.

It was kind of appropriate, but that was kind of it for me. And so you can't make a lot of money when you first start a business.

It's a thousand hours a week, it's all the money, everything that you make goes back into it. And so I defined that the best way for me to do it was to be a W-2 employee and also start a business. And so I started trying to learn about real estate. Family was in real estate, I didn't want to go that route, so I went the tech route. And then I was just like, you know what, I enjoy it, I'm good at it, much like you, I build product lines, that was all fun, made a lot of money doing it. But recognize that right after the.com bomb, and you start watching all those rolling layouts happen, like you and I weren't in executive management at that point. We were individual contributors. And so the one thing that you learn very quickly then is, number one, it's revenue based usually, and number two, mostly, sometimes it's also like, I just gotta fire this guy, I freaking hate him. And sometimes it's that, and sometimes I was on that list. But what I realized was I saw people crying, packing their offices. We were in tech in the early 2000s, and after they had done all that hiring for Y2K, and all that prep, and then all the business dried up for all the movement around Y2K, and then the market seized up. Well, you know what? Individual contributors were getting lanced. I mean, literally, it was like, I remember one week, 17% gone. And then literally, we get an announcement. Four weeks later, we're gonna make another massive layoff, right?

Deon (4:24)

Yeah, brilliant layoffs, yeah.

Matt (4:26)

That's where the moment was for me, where I was just like, I can't live my life always looking over my shoulder. And depending on the fact that I'm the number one guy in sales, I can't let that be my only option.