On this episode of House Flip Masters Holly is joined by guest Damion Lupo. Damion is an entrepreneur at heart starting his first business at age 11 – since than he has started 30 more businesses. Damion is also the founder of his own form of martial art, Yokido. Damion paid for his first rental house on a Visa card and bought 150 more houses in a 7-year time span and then went through a $20 million dollar meltdown in 2008. Today Damion runs an Austin-based FinTech dedicated to disrupting Wall Street. He has written 5 books and 2 more are being released in 2017.  Damion got the entrepreneur bug when he was a young boy in Alaska buying and selling Nintendo games. When he got older Damion went to college and was asked to leave because he started a bookstore on the campus that was putting the college bookstore out of business. When Damion went through his business meltdown in 2008 he was working on buying properties because he wanted to do one deal where he would get paid multiple times over because the ides of flipping homes and getting paid once did not appeal to him – Damion wanted to become the bank, he wanted to go home and still have his money make money for him. Damion became very successful with this strategy and kept plugging away. Holly asks Damion to share with listeners what happened with his business when the crash happened and what he did after that. Damion shares that in late 2006 he was involved with 7 different projects - homes near Graceland, a condo development - but a year later he was dealing with foreclosures and lenders backing out. Damion learned from this that plans can be good but when you are faced with things that you can’t see or plan for you find out who you really are. When the crash happened Damion starting giving money back and properties back and started to unravel the mess that he was in. Damion admits that after the crash he ignored what happened for a few years and acted like it didn’t happen until he realized that he needed to face the music. When a person goes through a tragedy they need to fix it from the inside out, he needed to realize what was going on with himself so that he could heal from the crash and learn from it and make sure that it didn’t happen to again. Damion says that in his business he feels that it is important to work with people who have experienced a bad deal or something gone wrong because when things don’t go as planned he wants to make sure that he is working with someone who is able to stay on top of their game when the plan falls through. Holly asks Damion to explain what he means by the green and red arrows of wealth. Damion says that in real estate you mostly see just green arrows going up. Damion met a woman who was always watching the news and looking at the stock market, seeing the green arrows and red arrows – she felt that when the market was good she wanted to celebrate and when the market was bad she wanted to get out. Damion helped her to get off the Wall Street rollercoaster to a point where the green and red arrows no longer mattered to her and she did not watch the news anymore to see where she stood financially. Holly asks Damion to explain what he means by the Wall Street rollercoaster, he says that when you are investing you want to be actively involved in your investments and that you should not just check out. Damion likes precious metals because you can control them, the Wall Street rollercoaster is things you cannot control, and you are subject to fees and manipulation that you have zero influence over. Holly wants to know Damion’s take on retirement and why he hates the word ‘retirement.’ Back in older times retirement was related to machinery or animals no longer being of use and they would get rid of them. People are so happy to retire and basically happy to be done and stop contributing to the universe. Damion says that what people need to be doing is setup for financial security and financial freedom so