KGCI: Real Estate on Air - From Debt to Wealth: A Journey to Financial Freedom

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Welcome to Real Estate Real World, where we talk to the movers, shakers, and leaders that are getting it done right now in the real estate industry and beyond. I'm your host, Marjorie Cressbillow, and I started this podcast, simply dedicated, calling people about what's really happening in this crazy roller coaster ride of real date. Be sure to subscribe on iTunes and stay up to date on the newest stuff by adding yourself to the list at www.orgate real world. Now let's dive into the world of real estate. Hello, everybody, guess what? It's time for real estate real world where we get to talk to all the cool people. And this next guest is no exception. I saw him speak here locally in my market a few weeks back.

And as I was listening to him, I took so many notes. And I'm like, I need to have this guy on my podcast. So it's so important to really listen to what we're doing with our money. And as real estate agents, it's probably one of the biggest. I've heard stats that the average real estate agent has several hundred thousand dollars in debt and owes money to IRS because they don't do their taxes. Hopefully we're going to learn some tips and tricks today from my very special guest, Matt Plummer, who is an expert financial and business coach, acclaimed speaker and author transforming real estate success. Matt specializes in empowering real estate agents to create scalable wealth, unlocking true time and money freedom. With his strategic expertise, Matt helps agents build more profitable, sustainable businesses that don't just generate income but build the dream lifestyles they aspire to.

By working with Matt, real estate professionals discover how to grow their profits, scale their businesses, and design a life full of opportunities, financial freedom, and lasting success. Welcome, welcome, my friend Matt. Marguerite, I need to take you as like my traveling MC. That was as good as I've heard. Like we'll add some like music to that and that'll be the trailer and the intro from being on out. I love it. Oh my goodness. I'm happy to.

I'm happy to. I know when you were here, we, I don't even know that you got a formal introduction, did you? It was get up on stage and go. Yeah, but I know what I'm going to do as soon as I received this recording is that's going to be my introduction. I love it because I, when I was changing clothes today for this, you told you tell this great story and you'll have to tell it on our show today. your Harley's story. So I found my Harley shirt because my husband Joe loved his Harley. He wrote it for many years. And he had to sell it a few years ago because he has Parkinson. So the balance thing didn't work out so well. So we sold the Harley, but I kept all my heart of gear. So there you go.

Thank you for joining us today. So I really loved your story. And I would love for you to share it with our audience. Yeah, thanks for having me, Marguerite. It's been great getting to know you. very quickly, right? In the last 30, 45 days, we've become fairly fast friends. And so like my world didn't start and I didn't end up on this podcast because I sold a ton of real estate or I did this magical thing. It was that actually started before that. 12-ish, Melinda and I had just gotten married. We'd been together forever. But I'd always fought weight. I'd always fought money. I'd always fought addiction. Like I had this yo, I always had this yo-yo life, right? The yo-yo weight. I think I'm in the, I will put my name in the hat for the person that has lost and gained 20 pounds of the most.

But overall, you lost like 100 pounds or something, didn't you? And so, you know, a decade ago, or a little over a decade ago, Melinda and I just got married. I was, had a successful career in the world of outside sales, was in management. I made, we made good money. We just had no time. And like a lot of people who are trying to figure out marriage and jobs and careers and identity and all of that just like we ended up on the counselor's couch after 18, 14, 18 months of marriage. I'm being together for a decade or so. But, you know, I was on one side of the couch. She was on the other. And we were just having an honest conversation with the counselor. And he asked me a very specific question that day. He said, could you go 90 days without a drink? And I didn't go there for alcohol counseling. I didn't go there because I thought I had a drinking problem. It was. more, I think anger and just relationship issues. But, you know, again, like any good counselor or coach, we focus on the problem and not necessarily the symptoms. And I said, I don't know if I can or want to, but she'll still be the same person she has today. And I was looking external and not internal.

And this was also, I was 300 pounds. I was an alcoholic. I was an addictive sports gambler. Smoked a pack to two packs of cigarette today. You did them all. Yeah. And I didn't even know the financial problems we had. Those were just masking all of the other things. And he said, Matt, I don't know if you're going to do it or be able to pull it off. But I will tell you this, if you do not make a decision very quickly, you're going to be dead, divorced, and jailer broke in less than 12 months. That must have been hard to hear.

And it was really hard to hear, especially with a huge ego. And I was the number one sales guy. And I was the talk of the town. And I was the life of the party when I walked in. into the bar, like everybody loved me. I just didn't love myself. Crazy. And so that sent me on a journey.

I didn't want to stop drinking. Didn't want to stop gambling. But I knew I could affect and I knew I could change what I put into my mouth. And so I found some stuff online. I said, hey, I can drink this meal replacement shake instead of going to McDonald's. I can get up off the couch and let me start having some success there. And I saw the scale go to 293 and 289 and 286. And I was like, man, if I just keep making these.

I think if you look at NASCAR, IndyCar, or racing, you just, all they do is just four hours of left-hand turns. They don't ever go anywhere, right? There's just a mile to three miles. It's just around in circles. And I'm like, if I can just keep making these right-hand turns, every time I come to the crossroads, I'm going to eventually end up in a new place. And I started drinking less, and I would never show up seven days sober. And I think that's important, right? I think that's important to hear for people as they're going through this training.

transformation, whether it's physical, financial, emotional, spiritual, relational, whatever it is, I would never show up seven days sober. It was always one, two, zero six. It was never set. I never went Thursday to Thursday, because Thursday was the day we went to counseling until I was, I was, I was, I was done with just pissing away days of sobriety. Like, I was just throwing them away because I met Marguerite and we had a cocktail, right? Or I met by, and we had a drink. I played golf and we had a couple of beers on the back porch. And until I made a decision, May 19, 2012, that was the last day I was going to have a drink.

And I made that decision driving down I-66 in Northern Virginia. And to this day, I haven't drank since. And so that steamed all the way to losing 100 pounds, becoming sober, accepting Jesus, changing my marriage. And we ended up on a couch two years later, a 500. $151,000 in debt. Wow. And so I'm like, how did it happen?

The answer was, we bought things because we could afford the payment, not because we could afford the thing. Turn over and over. Melinda, $29,000 to death on Amazon and Groupon and Living Social, your younger audience has no idea what those subscriptions are. Right. And I $29,000 does to death, the cars, the lifestyle, the hotels, the, the, the, the, time shares. And so I got exposed to some new information, got exposed to Dave Ramsey,

started understanding what the Bible said about money, and then the very first lesson of Financial Peace University, 2015, you know, 10 years ago, I heard what Dave was saying and I was like, that's exactly how I lost 100 pounds. It's exactly how I became sober. It's exactly how we saved our marriage. We're going to smash this. It's just math at this point. And so we went on a journey to lower the water, which I call, which is reducing expenses and reducing lifestyle, which I call lowering the water. Because we've been so for so long, we're on a river trying to get from one side to the other and we're hitting our head against the boat. Or we're hitting our boat against the bridge. So I needed a way to lower the water so the boat could go through the bridge.

And then once we got everything paid off, Marguerite, I realized I needed to raise the bridge, which exposed me to the world of real estate because it's the most expensive. thing and people can make the most amount of money doing it. And it's so easy because everybody's doing it on social media. Yeah. Until I got my first check and it was $10,000 and I'm like, Marguerite, what would you do with it? And Brent, what would you do with it? And Bob, what would you do with it? And I heard, I didn't hear hire a coach, invest in an admin and, you know, do the things, right? Like invest in marketing and have an event. I heard pay last year's taxes and next month's card out. And I immediately shifted from thinking I wanted to go build this massive real estate

organization and team that the buyer and seller were no longer my client, you the real estate agent was my client. So after thousands of conversations and hundreds of financial transformations later, I'm on a podcast with you sharing that real estate agents don't make as much as they think, spend more than they care to admit, and are generally behind on taxes and your retirement. that's keeping them on the transaction treadmill forever. So it's interesting because a couple things. Like I was talking to my previous guest and we were talking about a word of the year, right? And I've done word of the year many years for my career.

And the funny thing that came up today, I was literally looking at the list. And I always just kind of choose the word that pops out to me first. And it was the word consistency, which I just heard you say that, right, is the value. And I've been consistent in my real estate career, so that's been great. But I guess my question to you is it seems that money, finances, all of this is such an emotional conversation, such an emotional thing. Like, I don't want to give up that car or I need to have that house. And I would imagine that some of it comes from childhood. Like I grew extremely poor and homeless at a period of time in my life. So then, of course, you'd

take it to the opposite extreme, right? You're like, okay, I'm going to have everything out there at the cost and risk of all of the things you talked about. So what are your thoughts on that? I believe that when we get into this world of real estate and selling the largest asset that people are going to buy and making the most amount of money per sale that really anyone can make on a per sale transaction other than maybe a large business or an exit, right? I mean, we're selling 500 to $5 million to $50 million properties. Then we're making tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars per transaction, right?

And so there's obviously this image that comes along with it of, hey, I want the nice things. I deserve the nice things. And there's nothing wrong with having nice things. I just don't want the nice things to have you. And so I've navigated the and created the wealth method through all of my coaching clients and relationships and just having conversation with people that, haven't sold a house in six months to people that sell 50 houses in a month, right?

600 or 1,000 houses a year is the number one thing that the two things that cause the most stress and anxiety for real estate agents is inconsistent income and financial disorganization. Exactly. And so when we can solve those things and then start to implement the wealth method and identifying the five mistakes that agents make and navigating and organizing those to where hey, when 10, 20, 30, 40, $50,000 a deal in a month or a quarter or, you know, whatever comes in. We have to have a map and we have to have a blueprint to that money before it even hits our bank account or else that money is going to show up and we're going to get the direct deposit in the wire that

Marie Marguerite was paid $50,000 and there's now 50 grand news. Like, you can go buy anything that you want with a $50,000 check in your account, right? you can go to you can go here to Las Vegas and down the strip and buy anything in you want, except you don't know if there's another deal coming the next month. And so you can get out over your skis. And again, I use that as an extreme example. It doesn't mean that you can't get the bag or you can't have the nice golf clubs or you can't have the membership or you can't fly first class. No, you can.

You just have to plan it and you just have to organize it. And that has to be a part of the master plan, which is what we do, you know, inside of the wealth department. which is, you know, crafting your Oz and designing your blueprint and mapping your money so that you know how many houses and how many conversations and how many people you need to serve so that you can go live your standard life, the life you want, the life you desire, and your level 10 life. Because those are all three, four, five, six significantly different numbers. And so you just need a plan for it before you go out and just do it. So it's interesting to me because, you know, I'm having a few light-bold moments myself here, right? And one of those things is one thing I've learned about the real estate side, but maybe not on the money side, is that numbers don't lie to you. You know, numbers tell you where to go.

If you know your numbers, you know what to do. For example, if you run an ad and you get no calls, the problem is the ad. If you run an ad and you get a bunch of calls, you get no appointments. The problem is you, right? So it's interesting how that works. And it's also interesting to me that I didn't really look at it from the financial aspect of it. And I would assume that that's one of the biggest mistakes that agents make, correct? Well, yeah, the number one mistake, we can kind of just go through the framework.

I actually talk about it in my e-book, creating stress-free wealth, which is a free download. And we'll be posting a link in our show notes. The number one mistake. that agents make is they don't have a plan on how to exit selling real estate. So number one, it's like, I'm just gonna go sell another 36 houses, another 12 houses, another, I'm gonna go get another four deals,

or I'm gonna go hire and recruit another 12 agents. Like there is no plan for when you walk into your brokerage on day one that anyone says, here's how you stop selling real estate. Right, investors that are buying and selling real estate are buying real estate, right? The people that we're helping buy and sell real estate, if they're an investor and they're not just

Perry homeowner that's just trying to get from 2025 to 2035, living on three Main Street, if we're looking at through the lens of an investor, most investors are looking at how are they getting out of the deal before they get even into the deal? Like what's their exit on this? What are they trying to get from a tax perspective or a cash flow perspective or an appreciation perspective?

before it even happens. So the number one thing I want you to do is that the end of this episode is right now, when are you done? When is going to be your throw the phone in the ocean moment? So you don't have to take a listing. Just chuck this thing in. I don't have to do any more reels. I don't have to do any more listings.

I can if I want, but I don't want to at this day and draw a line in the sand and then we build it backwards. And so when we know we're crystal clear on when we get to Oz, I literally just drew this out for my, for my workshop attendees is like when we get, and get that crystal clear on what we want and when we want it, 2025 is so much easier. It seems, though, sometimes overwhelming. The numbers are overwhelming. Like, I have a friend of mine, an agent back east, and he had, he owed IRS $200,000.

And, you know, not including his mortgage, his car. is everything else. And he's like, I can't keep up with the interest. I can never get that paid off. And so how do you respond to situations like that? So, I mean, I think ultimately for the people that feel like the walls are coming in and they're, you know, the quick sand is building up and the dirt's coming in and they're about ready to subcate is like, I have a saying, stabilize the present to structure the future.

So if we can stabilize the present. right and that means what does it take to live how can we just get from the first to the 30 what's it actually take not what we want or hey we go and eat at whole foods versus publics i'm talking about the first to the 30 like we need oxygen at this point and that's the only thing that we need to live right because there's a really good chance that we have enough food in our pantry to get us to sunday there's a really good chance that we don't need any more clothes or shoes for the next decade, right? I'm talking about just like these small, seemingly insignificant choices that compound over time that, hey, we just need to get from A to B. And we did that when it came to our

lifestyle and our car, right? And at the end of 20, 17, 8, 2014 or 2015, it was like, hey, what do we need in our life just to get from A to B? So if you have that quarter million dollar tax bill, it's just weighing on you. right or credit card debt or student loan debt or the cars like just piece by piece right we had all of this massive debt weighing on our chest however like it i couldn't fix it april of 2014 i had to wait i had to get through all of the stuff and just all these little bitty things that just start adding up to where it's like we've created a thousand dollars we've created two thousand dollars we've created three thousand dollars maybe over six or seven months to where now i can have a conversation

with a car dealership and say, hey, how can I get out of this car? When I couldn't have done that in February because I was too suffocating. So this is going to be a process. And some people can do it quicker and then others. I'm here to tell you, like, we have the number one largest asset and the thing that we can go sell, that if you just put your head down and just make a decision, and that's part of the financial transformation is awareness, decision, and intentionality, when you can just make that become aware,

I got a quarter million dollars and make a decision, and I'm going to go run up the scoreboard in 2025 and being intentional with every dollar, you can radically change the trajectory of your life and your financial snapshot in a very short period of time. You just have to make the decision. Even credit cards now is 29% interest or something absolutely insane. I'm hoping some things maybe will change with the new administration. We'll see.

But the reality, that kind of debt is, and I've seen it for myself. and with my kids getting a credit card. They get like 50 invitations a month to apply for credit cards. And they want to go to a concert. They get a free hat and a free t-shirt. Exactly. So that they can pay $10,000 in interest. Yeah, because nobody wakes up.

Again, I think, you know, one of the core values and principles that I have with myself and my coaching clients and my students in the wealth department is say it out loud. before you do it. So when I was going through our transformation, I was smoking cigarettes, I had already lost the weight. I was 300 pounds, I'll call like addictive sports gambler

and smoking a pack of cigarette today. Never in my life would you have told me that the cigarettes were going to be the last thing that I kick. Like I had to lose 100 pounds and stop drinking and stop gambling to realize and say it out loud that, I'm literally lighting tobacco, nicotine, chemicals, and fiberglass on fire, inhaling smoke into my lungs 20 times a day.

So like when you say that, will you ever smoke another cigarette again? No. So when you look at it through the lens of financial IQ, that's emotional intelligence. When you look at it through the lens of financial intelligence and you're like, all right, I'm going to get this piece of plastic. This is a gift card, right? But let's just say it's, I'm going to get this. and there's $10,000 on it.

And I'm going to go use this instead of, I don't have my prop here, but instead of money to go buy groceries, you're telling me that this has $10,000 limit and that has $100 bill. You're not going to go spend more on this than you are with this? 100%. 100%.

So you're going to go to the grocery store and spend $125 versus $100 because you're psychologically thinking that you're going to get rewards and points. that when you do the math over the course of a year, you spend $125,000 versus $100,000, how many flights and airline tickets and hotels could you have bought for $25,000? Well, and we're headed into holiday season. So let's talk about that.

Yeah. And so now, like with the psychology of our generation, whether it's Z, X, Y, millennial, you know, you know, my, my age, your age, my parents, their parents, right, Melinda's parents, I mean, there's several generations there, like, they don't use credit cards, right? They never use credit cards. And so, you know, buying this thing, these things that we can afford the payment, or it's just to get us from Black Friday to Christmas to maybe the first of January, because we know we have three closings. And closings always close on time. Always. And rates never go to 8%.

And there's never anything that that suffocates our nation as an illness and shuts down the entire. That will never happen. Right. And caps never reset. And there's never referral fees on deals that we forget about. Like none of that stuff ever happens, Marguerite, in the world of real estate. Of course. Right.

And so, you know, the things that you spend hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of dollars on between now and Christmas, you have forgotten. You bought them and the bill's coming. and or you're using this to say, hey, I have a closing that's coming in. I'll buy this thing and then I'll pay it off. You never pay it off. Yeah. And then for the next decade,

you're always playing from behind versus playing with a lead, which is where stabilize the present and so structure the future comes in. So that as we're working through the wealth method of wisdom is earned, the W stands for wisdom, or that's where we make the commitment to Oz. We make the commitment to ourselves. that we're going to look at money differently.

We make the commitment to ourselves and our business and our spouses and our family. And then the E is earn, like this is where we got to go do the work. E is earn. A is accumulate. That's where you have to earn the money and accumulate the money. Because I want Marguerite to have two, three, four months of cash in a shoebox under her bed, regardless of what's happening in the market because I don't believe any real estate agent on planet earth and the United States today can have enough cash. Yeah. I know I can't. And I'm not even a sole. I'm not even a real estate agent. I don't sell real estate.

I don't sell real estate. As a coach, as an online business coach, I cannot have enough cash, whether it's for my personal life, my business life, future savings, future spending, things that happen to come up like I cannot have enough cash. I'll put it in the, I'll put it in the mattress. I'll put it in the high yield savings account. I'll put it in market where it just earns some some interest that's not the wear is not necessarily the point the point is we can't have enough catch because an opera because either something's going to happen or an opportunity is going to come up and i'm going to say hey marguerite i've got an opportunity to go buy a rental property it doesn't fit my matrix but it fits you it's in northern

california i think it'd be great you should go by and you and joe should go by and look at it right if you don't have 250 or 500 000 liquid somewhere in the world like you just just can't go buy it. So there's that famous quote that I've heard many times in my career that says, please God, give me one more real estate boom, so I won't piss it all away. That's funny. Give me one more boom, right? When in reality, we've got a boom.

It's called quarter one, 2025, right? It's called quarter two, 2025. It's called 2025. Like, there are going to be people. I just interviewed a young lady on my and my workshop, who has, when I met her and she started working with me, she was selling about $5 to $6 million a year on a team. Today, she has $47 million in inventory. Wow.

Made a decision, right? I'm not living like my mom lived. I'm not living like the people in my office live. I'm not living. And she lives so far below her means. And her lifestyle is so extravagant. People must think that she makes and spends hundreds and thousands of dollars a month. And I can promise you she doesn't.

But it's because there's no payments and there are no, none of her money is going towards obligations. It's all going towards opportunities. So what do the last three letters mean? We heard W-E-A. Lend and leverage. That's where compound interest starts to come in. That's where investing comes in. T, track.

Do the math and know your scoreboard. This is where like budgeting, tracking our net worth, paying attention to our investments. How many appointments do we need to go on to make sure that we hit our numbers? It's not all about just math, right? What's our credit card balances if we have any? What are our car balances? What's our house balances? What's our housework?

This is where we have to track all of the important metrics. This is where business owners have to be business owners. This is where real estate agent take the real estate agent hat off. and put their business owner hat on. They put their investor hat on, right? And H is health. This is where consistency and habits are formed. I love it.

I love it. I feel like we could talk for hours and hours. I mean, there's definitely a lot. And I know that you have some great programs out there for people to get engaged in. They can first start by going to Mattplummer.com. It's Matt, P-L-U-M-E-R dot com and grab his e-book first and form. I grabbed it and I've read it a few times since before we were talking from your event. And it's really fascinating.

I think as we wrap up today, probably the thing that's the most impactful to me is that it's all possible, right? Everything is figureoutable. But like you said, it feels so overwhelming. And I know for a fact that this is how the majority of agents out there feel because we just came off of a booming market the last couple of years. and things were not as easy this last year. And people are struggling.

And I think there's this whole generation, I'm sure you can relate to this, of real estate agents and consumers, frankly, that have not seen a down market since 2010. So we're talking almost 15 years. So 2010 was the bottom of the market. And I've been 31 years in real estate. That was the bottom. And since then, we've only seen values increase and low interest rates until, this year. So even agents who've been 10 years in the business haven't seen a challenging market.

And every consumer think I can sell my house every two or three years and make money and move on to the next thing. Yeah, I joke about this. And I know we're going to wrap, but I have something that I want your listeners to hear as a framework that I'm working through, but then also I'm sharing it with people like yourself. And again, back to your down market. I coined myself as the world's greatest real estate agent because I've never had a listing that didn't that didn't not sell. Every buyer I met with signed an agreement and bought a house in record time. And I sold real estate actively in Northern Virginia, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21. I was like, it was the nation's capital and like interest rates were three and a half percent.

But everybody bought a house. But if we take that mentality where a lot of people haven't not seen a down market and up until the last 36 months is when we've seen a price, cost of living has exceeded, has gone up tremendously, right? And just bare essentials, lifestyle, and then I, you know, are not necessities like luxuries, right? Hotels, travel, et cetera. Like, it's all gone up. And so if we look at what the activity, what the average agent, or even the high producing agents were doing in 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, and the result they were getting, because everybody was moving. It was fish in a barrel.

Like it didn't matter your skill sets. It didn't matter your activity, right? Up to 21. And then as rates started going up, the amount of work produced a smaller result. And prices went up 15 to 20%. And then results or activity has either stayed the same or gone down. We've had a recession, transaction recession, right? So now you're doing the same amount of work to getting a third.

to half the amount of income, and now things are 30, 40, 50% more. And so now this is just creating this natural squeeze on people that are making $75,000 to $250,000 a year that they don't realize they're getting squeezed, right? It's the frog in the boiling water, like, and you're just moving it up and up. People are not realizing that they're doing the same amount of work. They're making 50% less and things cost 50% more than it did five years ago. And so when people realize that's what's actually happening, and it's not because of administration, it's not because it's because of activity.

Activity has not changed. So when activity goes up 3x, nothing of this other stuff is going to matter. And so that would be my leaving, my challenging, my leading and parting words for your audience is double and triple the amount of activity you believe it's required to go sell 24 to 36 houses or 56 or 250 houses next year. and watch what happens over the next three to five years and watch that swing back into your direction because of how much wealth you can go generate in the next three to five years. It can happen so fast with the decision and the intentionality. That is so impactful. And I hope that people will really listen because I know, especially even for myself, right,

in being vulnerable. And I've been through all of this ever. I had bankruptcy in 2009, right? I've been through every bit of this. And we just have to pay attention and we have to do the work. And so many didn't learn that work ethic and what is required there. So thank you so much for being on our show today. Matt, it was such a pleasure talking to you.

And I'm looking forward to hanging out with you a little bit more in the future. Do it. Awesome. Thank you. You bet. So everybody go out there and make sure to get a copy of his e-book. And I would love to hear your stories, whether they're good or bad or challenging. if you need help, Matt has an extraordinary coaching program that you can participate in.

Head on over to Matt Plummer.com. Grab his ebook because it's definitely worth it. And thank you so much again for joining us today. Everybody out there, be sure and follow us on social media and be sure to share us with your family and friends. Thank you for joining us on Real Estate, Real World. By the way, I've come out with a new report that you can access on my website at margueritecrestfellow.com. on the 10 fatal mistakes that real estate agents make that's holding them back from their version of success. So head on over to my website and be sure to download that free report. Thanks again, Matt, for joining us today. We appreciate it. Thanks for everyone. Thank you, everybody for joining us on Real Estate Real World. Go out and make it a successful day.

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