How Responsible Credit Management Can Change Your Financial Future

Stephen Schmidt (00:02.948)
Welcome back to the show where we interview the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs and those that serve the real estate industry It’s your host Stephen Schmidt and I know I say this quite often, but you guys are in for an absolute treat today I got Dez Pena in the house here in the studio Otherwise known as the trillionaire woman I’ll let her divulge if if she would like to on on where she got that nickname from which is amazing, but

She is an absolute wizard when it comes to wealth generation and helping business owners preserve and grow their wealth utilizing things that they otherwise might not think about things that sometimes in most cases only billionaires use. So again it’s your host Stephen Schmidt. If you’re joining us for the second third or hundredth time welcome back. I you’re going to get a ton of value from this show and if it’s your first time well let’s just say you’re about to become a regular listener of the series here. So.

We’re going to get right into it and we’re going to go all over and we’re going to talk about her experience and especially about how leveraging credit is one of the most important things that you need to have on lock in order to be investing in real estate yourself. So before we get started, just remember at Investor Fuel, we help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs, 2 5X their businesses, which allows them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. And with that being said, Des, welcome to the show.

Dez Pena (01:23.906)
Thank you so much, Steven. I appreciate you having me.

Stephen Schmidt (01:27.464)
Absolutely. I’m really excited for our conversation today. Before we go into some of the nitty gritty about credit and real estate investing and investing in general, because I think we’re going to go all over the place here today, give us a little bit of background on you, how you got started in this space, how you became a wealth advisor, and how you got to where you’re at now today.

Dez Pena (01:50.574)
Absolutely. So just for clarification, I’m not a tax specialist. I’m not a financial attorney. This is strictly for educational and information purposes only. My name is…

Stephen Schmidt (02:00.705)
for entertainment, folks.

Dez Pena (02:02.154)
entertainment. And basically how I got started in the space originally finance was not my primary industry. I originally was in the health field. I worked at the hospital for about six plus years and then once COVID came around I needed to pivot because I like to spend a lot of time with my family and some of them are elderly and the last thing I wanted to do was get anyone sick. So I ended up quitting that job and then getting into trading. So a friend introduced me to this

MLM where I got education about how to trade crypto and how to trade foreign exchange currencies and then I was hooked but you know as Gambling is because sometimes that can be gambling if you don’t know what you’re doing I literally end up exactly where I started so I invested all this money and I ended up back at zero by the end of the year and I said you know what maybe this isn’t for me and one of the people I had brought on had invited me to start a credit repair company and upon this credit repair company the

Needs of my clients grew as they grew so they ended up we fixed their credit Then they wanted financing for their business some of them didn’t even have a proper business structure set up for example the LLC the EIN the DUNS the phone number everything and I needed to insert that service in there in order to get them the financing that they needed some of them being for real estate projects Honestly, one of my favorite stories if I could share a story now, that would be awesome we had

Let’s just say her name is Jennifer for confidentiality purposes.

She was living in the basement of her uncle’s house with her husband and her two kids in the Bronx. Fast forward after we fixed her credit one year later, she had purchased her first home. I fixed her and her husband’s credit. She purchased her first home and she was able to get funding and that’s when she renovated the basement to a commercial kitchen because she loved cooking and she didn’t just buy a single primary family home in Yonkers. She bought a three

Dez Pena (04:06.87)
family. So while she was living in one, she rented out the other two units as per my recommendation and she went ahead and made the bottom basement of business. Then she got a contract, a government contract, to provide school lunches to the kids in Yonkers because she was so infuriated with the school systems, you know, lunches that they had because she didn’t feel like it had enough nutrition. And so she literally did a complete 180 over a span of two years just by working with me. And then those clients who

continue to develop a little bit more and let’s say start acquiring more assets under their belt, that’s when we reanalyze the structure that they have to help them primarily save on taxes utilizing private trusts.

Stephen Schmidt (04:51.265)
That’s awesome. That’s such a great story too.

Dez Pena (04:55.852)
Yeah, I love the transformation. It’s just, you you got to stick with it long enough. Same in real estate. It’s a patience game. It’s a resilience game. You can’t just expect something to happen overnight.

Stephen Schmidt (05:07.543)
I totally agree with that. And let me ask you this, who do you really enjoy working with now? Is it stories like this or what’s like the long-term vision with what you’re

Dez Pena (05:21.836)
The long-term vision eventually is going to go back to my roots of health. Another reason why I ended up quitting the hospital was because I did not feel like I was healing anyone. I felt like I was just putting a bandaid on the problem, not really helping solve for the root cause. And I didn’t want to be part of a system who just kept people sick, you know? I wanted to make sure that they could actually heal from their ailments or illnesses. So I’ve been studying holistic medicine. actually did a portion of my

masters in holistic health, leadership in holistic health, so that way eventually I can honestly just reprogram the way that families operate health within their

within their family unit. So I’m in finance now to build up to be able to fund myself a very large project that will eventually rival McDonald’s. And instead of people saying that they want to go to McDonald’s to eat, they’re going to want to go to my store because it’s healthier and you want to do what already works. And I do know that McDonald’s is a real estate business first and not so much a food industry because they’re actually a franchise and they own all the lots that they build upon.

they have a franchise fee on top of that. So their model is absolutely incredible. And if you want to do something big and impactful, then going towards that avenue of doing what already works is going to be your best bet and actually succeeding. So I definitely want to right now I’m I’m in finance, I make money, I go ahead and invest my money primarily still in the finance space. But eventually that’ll be in a company that will rival McDonald’s and people want to go to my store rather than McDonald’s. And you do that through

programming, you have to build an ecosystem when you’re building any business. So for example, you have your primary business. Most of the time, you’ll also need marketing. So you have to have a marketing system or team developed. If you’re not going to build an in-house, you’ll have to hire out-house for that. In addition to that, you also need a financing sector. You need to track every single dollar that is coming in or else it’s just going to disappear into the abyss and you’ll never know what happened to it. After that, you need actual proper structure in order to make sure that whatever

Dez Pena (07:36.218)
you have built thus far is protected. Because if you can’t do that, then it’s easily take, it can easily be taken away by the courts, by a client who wants to sue you, by a spouse, and it’s all gone. So you have to think about all these things. And when you actually build an ecosystem, that’s when your fortress cannot be penetrated.

Stephen Schmidt (07:58.776)
100 % well folks if you’ve listened to my shows before You know that it usually happens where we say we’re gonna talk about something and then we go off on a completely different Tangent and that’s what the whole show is focused on I’m gonna try not to do that here, but does if it happens it happens So something that’s very interesting that you brought up which doesn’t happen for a lot of people I think most people that get into the healthcare space do it for the exact same reasons as you do and they say Well, I’m gonna go help people and most of them

say probably the 90 % even more than the Pareto principle of the 80-20. I’d say 90 % of the people don’t realize they’re in a system that’s a complete lie. And you figured that out. You’re going into the holistic health route. I’ve had the great fortune of connecting with a lot of holistic doctors myself and very natural minded in my own approach to health and all of that. Good friend of mine, Dr. Hoffman, I was just hanging out with here.

Dez Pena (08:36.652)
Yeah.

Stephen Schmidt (08:54.071)
a few days back. He’s somebody that was a traditional doctor, but found that somehow in the 40 years of his practice. And how did you come to figure that out? Very rare someone does that. And then what is, obviously I don’t think you want to give too much details on your health company yet. That’s still in the works. But what derived a passion for you to actually want to pursue that as like a long-term real big

Dez Pena (08:54.35)
Good

Stephen Schmidt (09:23.211)
big business for you.

Dez Pena (09:25.862)
That primarily stemmed from me, I would say probably the health space in general I was interested in by the time I was 13. I have a little brother, have multiple little brothers, but the first one I ever got, he actually was born prematurely. And when he was born prematurely, he had to go through occupational therapy so that way he can write, so he can zip up zippers because he would get very frustrated that he couldn’t do these things.

And that’s what kind of inspired me to go into the health field and potentially pursue occupational therapy. By the time I was 18, I was like, I don’t know if I can do…

this occupational therapy because it’s too slow. I need to, I’m from New York, so I love running around. I always have to be on go and working in the ER, because that’s where I actually started. I was in emergency department tech. I was saving people’s lives, doing CPR, healing gunshot wounds, doing the primary vital check. I was the one that had the most interaction with the clients. So I developed a lot of empathy for it. And then I didn’t wake up to the realization that this was simply a system that you get stuck in.

until I was already six years in working for them and I literally

had to change what I did first. So I had to change the foods that I was consuming because you are eating all these dyes, you’re eating all this processed food. And what it’s actually doing is capping your ability to think at a full capacity. And you’re not you’re likely not getting enough oxygen in your brain either because you’re not moving. Your blood is stagnant when you’re sitting down all day because you don’t go for walks. You don’t get your seven K, 10 K steps in. And when I started making these micro changes to myself,

Dez Pena (11:17.232)
That’s when I was able to think more clearly. So everything starts with what you put in your mouth really. So you are what you eat and that is a very tried and true phrase that I live by simply because it’ll show. It’ll show on your skin, it’ll show in your teeth, it’ll show in your nails. So all of these different hints that your body’s trying to give you but you’re just not noticing them is how you can pay attention to it just a little bit better and start doing research on what you can do to heal yourself. And I’ve done that for my family.

as well. So my grandmother had type 2 diabetes. I found a functional medical practitioner who was also affiliated with a nutritionist. I brought her there every single week or every other week when she had appointments and I said we’re doing this and we’re gonna do it right and we reversed her diabetes in three days and three months. Sorry.

And so since then, she’s been keeping up with that regime of making sure that she’s keeping it under management. And she literally switched from metformin and these heavy medications to simple supplements. Guys, what are in these little pills? They’re actually herbs. And if you just take the herbs in your teas, you can heal yourself naturally. Obviously, if you have a doctor and you have a serious condition, stick with your doctor, but don’t think that those are your only options. Get other options from functional medical practitioners.

holistic health practitioners, because those are the people that are actually going to get to the root cause of the problem and help you heal instead of putting a bandaid on it.

Stephen Schmidt (12:47.888)
Mmm, because most people just want to feel a little bit better and they’ll do whatever it takes to feel better not actually solve the problem,

Dez Pena (12:55.298)
Sometimes you gotta do the hard things. Like, did my grandmother wanna go on walks every day? No. Did she wanna work out twice a week? No. These things are hard. Did she wanna eat her favorite foods but couldn’t? Yeah, of course she did. But she wanted to see her future grandkid.

You know alive first before passing away She wanted to be able to see her great-grandson and right now she has sorry her grand her grandson from her youngest son And now he’s here. He’s one years old. My grandma’s still still alive and in good health So she got to actually meet her goal But that’s how you have to you have to have a strong enough why and that’s in anything you do that can be in business That can be in health you have to have a reason why you are doing the things that you’re doing because if your reason isn’t strong enough You’re gonna give up

you

Stephen Schmidt (13:46.008)
100 % agree on all counts. And if I don’t get us back on track, we’re going to talk about this for like six hours, which I would gladly do with you by the way. Super big passion of mine as well. So let me ask you this. What are some of the things that go into credit that people that are looking to invest in real estate don’t actually realize about their current profile?

Dez Pena (13:54.712)
I would too.

Stephen Schmidt (14:13.877)
or maybe they’re about to buy their first home, having kind of a interesting brain noodle moment here on trying to figure out how to ask this question in the most effective way, but hopefully you got something out of it. Maybe just speak on that.

Dez Pena (14:24.366)
Yeah, I got you. I’ll pick it up. I’ll follow the good crumbs. So, first time home buyers or people who are interested in getting into their first investment project, you’re going to obviously eventually go to a loan with a lender and that’ll primarily be a bank. If you’re not already getting the money from a family friend or a hard money investor that has upped the wazoo rates, you need to make sure that your report card reflects that you’re a

So that report card is going to be your credit report. And your credit report, I’m going to give you all the secrets of exactly what they’re looking for when you’re getting approved for a mortgage and how to actually boost your report card in order to make sure that you can get approved, because that’s the primary goal. It’s not about making sure you have a great number on there. It’s about making sure that the number that you have on there is able to get you into the position that

you want to be in. So credit is awesome, but credit isn’t going to do anything if you don’t have a vehicle to be able to leverage that credit into. And one of those, one of the favorites is definitely real estate, which is why I’m here today with you. Thank you so much. And

Stephen Schmidt (15:38.647)
100 % Yeah, you bet

Dez Pena (15:41.688)
Here’s a little bit of a breakdown. So one, we want to make sure that we only have one name file on our personal credit report. That means on TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax, because those are the primary three credit agencies. A lot of people don’t know that these are not credit bureaus. The only credit bureau is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the agencies are your TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. Those are the top three. Obviously, there are many smaller credit agencies, but we’ll just speak about those three.

file on there. You want to have only one address reporting on your credit report because they’re easily able to find you. Imagine you’re in the position of the lender, of the bank, and you see 20 different addresses on there because you’re hopping around from place to place every one year or two years and now let’s say there’s a bill that you haven’t paid and the lender doesn’t know where to send that bill to. That’s what makes you look like a high-risk lender and these are the flags, a high-risk borrower, and these are the flags that the lenders are looking out

for before giving you any type of money. It doesn’t matter that the house is collateral. It doesn’t matter if you can provide even more collateral outside of that. They want to know that you are someone that they can trust is going to pay them back. So another thing on there that we should have are about seven primary, seven trade lines. And now there’s a difference between primary trade lines and authorized user accounts.

This these seven different accounts. These are just accounts that report on your credit That’s what trade lines are accounts that report on your credit and we want multiple Different types of accounts that will provide a healthy mix One of them can be credit cards One of them can be loan Another one we can have our in our mortgage section because there is a mortgage section of our credit report where we can actually report our rent So we want rent payments. For example, you can go to rental karma.com. You can go to rent report

You can go to BoomPay and all of these different rental reportings are going to help you increase your credit score but also show the people who are about to lend you a mortgage that you are responsible and capable of paying back $3,000 a month, $5,000 a month, however big your project is going to be. Now this definitely comes more into play on the person who’s only going to buy a primary home. If we’re talking about a

Dez Pena (18:07.952)
multifamily, which I’ll get into a little bit later, then you can obviously apply for a DSCR loan or if you’re going to do commercial property that’s bigger than four units, you can also use a DSCR loan and in which case they’re primarily looking at the available cash flow that will come in once you have tenants in the property. And also I’m sure there are a couple of government loans as well, like a 203k loan that’ll help you build from the ground up. But going back to our primary

people who are borrowing for the use of a primary residence or for their first investment property that they’re going into.

We’re going to continue on with having a couple of credit cards. Ideally, each of these credit cards have about a $5,000 limit or more, and you would work your way up towards that. So if you’re 18 and you haven’t started building your credit card yet, go and apply for at least three different credit cards and get approved for it. So that way you can show that you are building this credit over time, because by the time you’re 28 years old, you’ll be eligible for having an 800 credit score, because one of the tricks to getting an 800

credit score is actually having a primary account that is in your name that is 10 years old. And that’s the little thing that’ll take you over the edge. If you don’t have any primary credit cards, definitely get one. But you can also fulfill this need by having someone add you as an authorized user on their card. You would typically ask a friend or a family member, say, hey, I’m simply trying to build my credit. I don’t need the credit card. When it comes in the mail, please cut it up.

Stephen Schmidt (19:21.429)
Mmm.

Dez Pena (19:44.358)
away but I simply want this on my credit report because I’m trying to get approved for in-house but I don’t have enough credit history here.

And in order to get that authorized user on your card, that primary account holder would call the company and give them your name, your social, your address to make sure that they can be added on, you can be added onto the card. But this is only going to help you because it can equally hurt you. It’s only going to help you if they have a high credit limit. So ideally 5,000 or more. If you can get 20,000, even better and longer age of history, meaning that they opened this card three years ago,

years ago, 20 years ago, and that’s what’s going to boost your score. If they happen to not make their payments on time, that will equally affect you negatively, and late payments can drop your scores anywhere between 30 to 130 points.

In addition to that, you wanna make sure that they keep a very low utilization. And this goes for you as well on your primary cards. Utilization, you want that to be between five and 9%. So the way you calculate that is you take the credit limit, times it by 0.05 or 0.09, and that is what the balance should be on the payment due date. And then don’t use the card until one day after the statement end date. Where do you find this? You go ahead and look at your bill and then it’ll show

you payment due date and statement end date. So for those five days you don’t want to use the card at all so that way it can post to the credit, I’ll call them credit bureaus for now because that’s what you primarily know them by, they’ll post to the credit bureaus and it’ll report a low utilization. You can still use your card up to the max if you’d like but as long as during that small period that the utilization is down between that five and nine percent you’re going to be in the best position utilization wise.

Stephen Schmidt (21:33.718)
Mm.

Dez Pena (21:34.124)
You also are going to want to have an auto loan on there. This is how to build a full credit profile. You can get an auto loan or if you’re not able to get approved for an auto loan, have somebody co-sign for you. But obviously make sure that you make your payments because again, this will affect both of you. If there are two people on an account, it will affect both people. And if you’re a parent and want to help build credit for your children, you can 100 % do that. You can add more than one child on your credit card, in fact, to help them boost their credit.

And then lastly is just inquiries. So for inquiries, they want to know that you’re not shopping around too much. ideally you want to keep five inquiries or less. And these are called hard inquiries. These hard inquiries are authorized inquiries that you basically put in an application for and you got approved for the card or for the loan. And that’s what remains on your credit report. Now, if there are inquiries on there that you didn’t get approved for the card or for the loan or for the mortgage, you can take them off.

is simply call the credit bureaus and let them know, I didn’t authorize this inquiry, please remove it from my credit report. You may have to follow up with writing out a letter and mailing it in to them, but those are gonna be your two best methods of either clearing things on your credit, is gonna be writing the letter and calling, or simply just calling and making sure that they update. If you have something less severe, if you’re just updating a name and address and the inquiries, you can easily do a phone call without sending a letter.

And then that’s going to put you in the best position, yeah, to get approved for those loans for the homes.

Stephen Schmidt (23:04.785)
All great advice.

Stephen Schmidt (23:10.195)
And to a point you made there that I want to stress, something that severely benefited me when I was 18, 19 years old, is my mom, for whatever reason, had put all of us chillens on a credit card account that she would use once a month, never racked up a balance on. She would pay something with it and then pay the card off immediately.

So I woke up at 18 with a 792 credit score, walking into the bank, going to get a loan, thinking I’m about to get railed by the system. And I look at the loan officer and I’m like, hey, I know I don’t have any credit here, but like, what can we do? And they pulled my social up, they pulled everything up and they’re like, actually you have phenomenal credit, sir. And I’m like, how is that even possible? And like, well, you’ve been on this account for like 12 years. And I’m like, what? So.

Dez Pena (23:42.399)
Nice.

Stephen Schmidt (24:06.763)
For real, if you’re a responsible person and you’re not just gettin’ it… Do what?

Dez Pena (24:07.48)
Your mom.

Dez Pena (24:12.226)
Your mom’s a good woman. She’s a smart lady.

Stephen Schmidt (24:15.095)
100 % one of the best one of the best I’ve ever known so Seriously, you can if you’re a responsible individual you can severely help your kids or severely hurt your kids That’s the flip side of that coin is you don’t want to mess with their credit too and put them behind the eight ball because then that Stress will carry on generationally. But anyways, this has been such a wonderful episode does if people want to connect with you for more

or they want to find out what you’re working on, where should they go for

Dez Pena (24:47.98)
You can go on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube and type in Despenya if you want to go directly to or Trillionaire Woman, either or they’ll both pop up, or you can go ahead on my website to thetrillionairewoman.com.

Stephen Schmidt (25:04.957)
Absolutely love it. What a phenomenal show. Alrighty folks, hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. We’ll see you on the next episode. Thanks again for being here, Des.

Dez Pena (25:13.602)
Thanks, Steven.