Born with an entrepreneurial spirit Damion started his first business at age 11, has started 30 since then, and is the published author of 5 books.

Damian paid for his first rental house with a VISA, then over next 5 years bought 150 houses across 7 states, and went through a $20,000,000 meltdown in 2008.

Damian’s personal philosophy combined with a love of financial markets and money psychology drove him to start the Austin-based financial-tech company, Total Control Financial in 2016. His aim was to disrupt wall street and empower main street.

On today’s episode we discuss some of the messes and misfortunes Damion made as a real estate investor. What can we learn from his experience? Let’s find out, and enjoy our other interesting tangents of discussion.

If you missed our last episode, be sure to listen to the Ask Marco: Asset Protection, Holding Title, Closing Dates.


Maverick Mistakes in Real Estate Investing – Damion Lupo
Welcome to Passive Real Estate Investing. I'm your host, Marco Santarelli. As you know, this is the show where busy people like you learn how to build substantial passive income and create wealth for the long term.

On today's show, I wanted to bring on a guest who I find rather interesting because he has been very, very successful in real estate in years past. But then, has also learned from a lot of messes and misfortunes. I'm hoping that he can share some of those lessons in maverick mistakes in real estate investing with us today.

I guess, us, as investors, if we can learn from other people's successes and other people's mistakes, it will just spring board our success and it will shorten or compress the length of time that it takes for us to get to where we want to achieve those investment goals.

My guest today is Damion Lupo. He is born with an entrepreneurial spirit. Damion started his first business at the age of eleven. He's started 30 since then. He is the published author of five books. Damion paid for his first rental house on a Visa, of all things. Then, over the next five years, bought 150 houses across seven states.

Then he went through a $20 million meltdown in 2008. Damion's personal philosophy combined with a love of the financial markets and money psychology drove him to start his Austin based financial tech company, Total Control Financial in 2016. His aim was to disrupt Wall Street and empower the Main Street, which I just love.

Damion, welcome to the show. 

Hey, Marco. It's awesome to be here. Thanks for having me.

It's my pleasure. Before we get into meat and potatoes here, I have a curiosity thing. I took martial arts for many, many years. In my earlier years, I spent many years studying Judo and then I spent years in Aikido and Hapkido, which is a Korean version of the martial art. Apparently, you have three black belts and you created your own martial art, called Yokido. I was wondering if you could maybe tell me a little bit about that, because I'm very curious.

Definitely. I started Aikido about the same time I started my real estate investing. Actually, it was the same year. Over the next decade and a half, I ended up with three different black belts in Aikido or versions of Aikido.

At some point, about five or six years ago, I started studying yoga and realized there was such powerful component of yoga, with breath work and core, strength that could really be brought into the Dojo, the martial arts space. And empower people to use their breath, which is so important that gets left out often times, and infusing things like the meditative aspects of yoga and bring that in so that people could be more powerful simply by breathing correctly.

This was a good bridge for women that loved yoga and really wanted to feel comfortable walking around. Especially with Aikido, if they saw there was a gentle way to take yoga and bridge into self defense, they could have a different experience showing up in the world and living without fear of ...