Empower Your Finances: Achieve Better Loans with Personal Responsibility

Stephen S. (00:03.502)
Welcome to the show where we interview the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs welcome back if you’re joining us for a second third or a hundredth time and welcome to it if you are joining us for your first ever episode we’re in for a treat today i’ve got bret martin in the studio recording and we’re gonna get into his expertise and lending he is a marketing phenom and i know you guys are gonna get a ton of value out of this so just remember at investorfuel.com

We help real estate investors, service providers, and real estate entrepreneurs, two to five X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses they’ve always wanted, to allow them to live the lives they’ve always dreamed of. With that being said, Bret, welcome to the show.

Bret Martin (00:44.719)
Thank you, sirs. Thank you so much for having me.

Stephen S. (00:47.342)
Hey, I am privileged to have you here in the studio with me today and record this podcast. Before we kind of get into maybe some niche specific topics, some of the ways that you’re able to help and serve in unique ways to the real estate industry, give me a little bit of background on what got you started in this. You got your start in 2007. You were closing 800 loans a month by 2009.

And that’s not something that you hear every day. So give us a little bit of a background, what got you into it and what’s gotten you to where you’re at today now in 2025.

Bret Martin (01:21.093)
You know, it gives me goosebumps. Sorry for interrupting you, but I got to tell you what I ran into as an entrepreneur and as a business person was repeatedly, not only getting turned down for loans when everything seemed right, but the same thing that most entrepreneurs and business owners go through when they go for a standard business loan or a SBA loan, whether it be a bank or some sort of processing facility is where

They just keep asking you for more and more documentation and pretty soon you feel like you’re punch drunk through this rite of passage. And now it’s 98 days later and they tell you no. And you’re like, you’ve got to be kidding me. This entire time you made it sound like I was going to have this. It becomes very anticlimactic. know, people become, my God, suicidal, homicidal. And

I too went through those sets of feelings. Certainly didn’t follow through on any of them, but one day I came across this industry and it was like, my God, this is the wave of the future. And the way it’s really done, the long and the short of it is, is no more need for tax returns, no more need for credit reports. Let’s just look at your bank statements because bank statements don’t lie.

I mean, we know what’s coming in. We know what’s going out. And that’s how we grade the file is based off of six month business bank statements. And when I saw that, I said to myself, I got to get into this. And to boot, you get your answer in one to two days, start to finish, and you get the money that next day. So you’re getting your money in three days or less versus, like I said, sitting around waiting. So.

That’s what got me into this. I had come from the mortgage industry. I owned one of the largest mortgage brokerage firms in the country, sold it on December 15th of 2006. Timing is everything, right? And then the next thing you know, I went from the mortgage industry where loans were taking 30, 60, 90 days to get a yes or no to this industry and us to get our money, the money we earn.

Stephen S. (03:23.242)
No kidding.

Bret Martin (03:41.731)
was taking another 10, 15, 20, 30 days where I came into this industry and was getting my money start to finish in five days, my commissions. And pretty soon I was just like, you know what? I’m going to get behind this with my own money and I’m going to start lending our own money and get my own credit lines and start my own company. And we were off and running and it was just a natural. mean, just everything about it just makes your entire, you know,

exterior and interior body much more groovier. You’re just not stuck in this quagmire which causes a work environment where you’re involved in hell if you’re the lender or if you’re the borrower you’re involved in hell in this rite of passage. So it’s really been harmonious for me.

Stephen S. (04:29.944)
Wow. So I want to flush something out there a little bit because what you mentioned there are some things that maybe some people have heard of, some of them haven’t. But when you’re talking about no tax returns, in some cases no credit score, et cetera, but you did say specifically off six months of business bank statements, this isn’t something that just a traditional person could necessarily apply for, get approved on a loan. It’s primarily for businesses, is that correct?

Bret Martin (04:58.446)
Primarily for businesses and interestingly enough, there’s 752 different types of businesses out there. And we work with all those businesses, cannabis owners, pornography.

tobacco related, alcohol related. you know, what most of your banks, believe it or not, don’t like tobacco or don’t like alcohol related businesses or marijuana, CBD, cannabis, pornography, these types of things. So pretty soon what was should be available A through Z. Yeah, what they call high risk industries. It’s like, come on, it’s a business for God’s sakes. You know, so

Stephen S. (05:25.762)
high-risk industries.

Bret Martin (05:37.762)
Yeah, we don’t look at it as high risk. We just don’t.

Stephen S. (05:41.314)
That’s really interesting. Why is that?

Bret Martin (05:46.393)
Well, I think the bottom line is that we get to look at this person on on.

their bank statements and we could look at their habits and they’re no different than you and I. They’re going to Carl’s Jr. You know, they’re going golfing on the weekends. They’re going to a wedding. You could see the withdrawals in the ATM. You could see the purchases and it’s not as though these people are evil people for God’s sakes. They’re just human beings. They’re going on vacation and this and that and after a while you start to realize it’s like, look, you could falsify a tax return.

but you can’t falsify a bank statement. so it just became a natural for me. was like, this, this is a perfect industry from the standpoint that.

It’s an underwriting that makes sense versus, you know, if you have a late from Toyota Motor Credit four and a half years ago because your wife or your husband or your partner didn’t send out the payment or you didn’t send out the payment on time or maybe the mail. mean, my God, nowadays mail can take five, 10 days to get mail across town, you know.

Stephen S. (06:56.014)
right.

Bret Martin (06:56.736)
and it gets hung up and you know, what do they want out of you and I every time we turn around, automatic withdrawal, automatic withdrawal, automatically withdrawal. You’re probably no different than me and you and I don’t really even know each other, but I don’t want people in my bank account making automatic withdrawals with pre-authorized, you know, withdrawals and seems like they just constantly trying to get you and I to go that direction. so, you know, this is what

Stephen S. (07:23.234)
Yeah, I mean, for the sake of convenience, I can understand why it makes a lot of sense. But at the same time, to your point, the only automatic withdrawal I have come out of any of my bank accounts is my life insurance because they would not allow me to just pay it, pay it direct. Right. So but nothing else that I have of any bill between my businesses, my personal, etc. None of it’s on automatic withdrawal because I want to have full control over that process, see what’s coming in. So that way it can also be audited.

Every single month of hey did this go up, you know, and I had even a situation with my phone bill Um in the last couple months where it just was getting ridiculous and I called him in And i’m like, you know, maybe it’s not worth my time. Maybe it is whatever But I called him and i’m like, hey, this is the situation. I don’t understand why this is the way it is There’s no explanation i’ve looked at all the charges that you of course make super simple to read on a spreadsheet And uh, and so why is this the way and I was able to end up getting my phone bill cut

Bret Martin (08:18.347)
Yeah, right.

Stephen S. (08:22.638)
with like four lines from $220 a month down to $116 a month. And I’m like, I just saved myself a thousand dollars in a year because I was willing to make a phone call because I pay attention to it.

Bret Martin (08:34.82)
Boy, as a business owner, can tell you right now, I am sitting here right now with five cards and I can tell you there is not a day that does not go by where I don’t have my staff involved in an environment where you need to justify why you’re putting this in a pre-authorized environment. So what I did here five and a half years ago was I finally just said about every 60 days.

I call and just shut off the card and guess what? Now my employees have to come to me and say, Hey, you know,

this isn’t coming out of the account anymore. I don’t have these services. It’s like, all right, justify why you’re doing this. I want to know. And inevitably what ends up happening is I’m able to run a tighter ship and there’s a lot less waste. mean, we’re seeing this right now, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you know the bottom line is Dodge is out there going through the budget of this country. And why wouldn’t we, for God’s sakes, we go through our own home budget. No, we don’t. In fact, I could tell you,

Stephen S. (09:14.323)
That’s awesome.

Bret Martin (09:36.543)
having lent to over a million homeowners back in the mortgage days and over 2.7 million business owners in this industry, people don’t audit their own business. In fact, I was going to tell you earlier, young man, I’m proud of you. I’m almost twice your age that you have life insurance.

Because this is a thing that I believe is very important at your age. If you have family, you know, and especially if you have children, but it’s so interesting how many people miss these little things that are next to nothing at your age. can get life insurance for next to nothing at your age. If you make these adjustments rather than waiting to my age, my God, if you save like on my spectrum bill, if I save $70 a month, you know, pretty soon I’m at $840 a year. mean,

That adds up. You do that over 10 years, that’s $8,400. 30 years, you start talking about $24,000, $25,000, and now you put in the rule of 72, where money doubles every six years at 12%, or every 12 years at 6%.

Stephen S. (10:27.821)
Right.

Bret Martin (10:40.664)
You wake up one day and look at it. You become my age. You look at it you’re like, good God, I got a hundred grand sitting in here off of having saved myself a little money along the way, you know? So, you know, we that’s, that’s the way just to go back to these loans and not get, not to digress too much. That’s what we’re looking at with these loans is are these men and women he, she, they using this money?

Stephen S. (10:48.983)
Nice.

Stephen S. (10:52.739)
Right.

Bret Martin (11:09.908)
in their accounts for the right purposes for their business. And if they are, then we’re all about lending to them. But if they’re in the middle of, you know, going and seeing prostitutes or gambling or, you know, constantly involved in environments that are, you know, I would say things where the flesh is out of control, drinking, these types of things. Then we start to ask ourselves, do we want to partner with that business owner?

You know, so that’s, that’s why we love the bank statement is they don’t lie. They’re like a footprint in the snow. get to go retroactively, go back and see that movement that they’ve made.

Stephen S. (11:40.066)
Mm, for sure.

Stephen S. (11:51.373)
Right. How important is it for a business when they’re coming in to potentially like get a loan with you? Like what you’re saying, like because I think a lot of business owners, I feel like I do a pretty good job of this myself, of getting paid in my LLC and paying out the things that I need to take care of, you know, my personal finance and only leaving expenses in the LLC that are actual legitimate expenses for something that’s going to further the production of profit and revenue, etc.

So how important is it for people to not commingle funds of, well, hey, we’ve got it in the business, maybe not my personal account, but let’s go to the movies or go out to dinner and this and that and all. We’ll just write it off as a business expense. How important is that? Not even from a CPA’s tax standpoint, but for qualifying for a loan through you guys, for example.

Bret Martin (12:41.656)
Look, I’m an old man.

I’ve been in business now for over 40 years and I can tell you there was a time when the word co-mingle meant that you were going to get fined or you were going to jail. But nowadays it’s just a common denominator. It’s going on everywhere and no one, even CPAs seem to look at it, not as gray matter, but as normal. But the long and the short of it is, I can tell you, when I got in this industry in 2007, when we looked in business owners’ bank accounts, which we did every day,

They had six months to a year to a year and a half worth of reserves in their accounts. And they were using this money for entrepreneurial purposes. Now the last five, five and a half, six years, they’re using this money to put Band-Aids on the dam and try and stay afloat. And they’ve got no money left in their bank account. And…

that they’re bringing money in from outside sources to include other bank accounts that they have of their own or 401k, this type of thing, know, Roth IRAs. And we can see those.

deposits being made and then we’ve got to ask him, you know, why are you making this deposit? Well, I’m covering, you know, the fact that I’ve got NSFs and overdraft, non-sufficient fund days and overdraft days. And so then what we’ll do is we’ll kind of veer off and say, hey, then get us six months worth of bank statements for that bank account also, so we can see that you’ve got some money in there. And then that’s when we typically find they’ve got a little money over here, but you’d be surprised.

Bret Martin (14:21.444)
many businesses. mean, this is probably the biggest maybe insight that my,

trainees go through is it’s a complete awakening for them. They’re like, my God, none of these business owners are as rich as I thought they were or have any money. And it’s like, welcome to the American business owner right now. They’re getting by by the skin of their teeth and it really is tight out there. So that’s why our industry, I think is, has become just so busy.

And it will never go back to traditional lending, quote unquote. That’s why you see the chases and the key banks and the Wells Fargo and the US banks starting to lay people off more and more and starting to close these high-stake real estate locations where they were on the corner for years.

In fact, we just opened a retail storefront, the first one in America. There’s nothing like this anywhere in your community or anywhere throughout the United States. We actually have a business loan location where you can drop in and get a business loan that day in a retail storefront manner. And those don’t exist. They existed 30, 35 years ago.

Stephen S. (15:34.445)
Mm.

Bret Martin (15:42.251)
at AmeriQuest and these types of places, household finance in these malls, and they existed at banks. But the days of you going in and getting a bank, even if you’re a perfect borrower for a business, they’re just…

You know, they’re going by the wayside. I mean, I think that the mantra that I have really holds true and that is banks lend money to people that don’t need money, not to people that do need money. Because let’s be honest with one another. Once you take that hat off and you come up to the kingdom and you knock on those giant doors of that King’s castle with your hat in hand, he knows right then you’re in trouble or you would never go there. Right?

Stephen S. (16:06.915)
Mm.

Bret Martin (16:26.148)
because the standard procedure thousands of years ago or, you know, 500, a thousand years ago was I would not only, you know, charge you an arm and a leg, but I’d probably go and pregnantate your, you know, next born, right? Or impregnate your wife, you know, to go along with the privileges I had as being the monarch, the king.

You know, and that’s not the way we treat these people. And I think that the old system, that monarchial system of lending is going away and there’s going to be a new, you know, everyone talks about new world order, but a new way to get money. And that is a way that just makes sense. Look, if you’ve done a great job of running your personal life and a great job of running your business life.

You’re going to get an offer out of us and it’s probably going to be a great offer. If you’ve done a poor job of running your business and your personal life, you’re going to get a poor offer, but you’re still going to get an offer versus traditional environment where you don’t get any offer at all. Hell, you may not even get a phone call or an email back. anyway.

Stephen S. (17:33.39)
sure. How do like what do interest rates look like in your world compared to like traditional financing?

Bret Martin (17:41.465)
They suck and they’re great and they’re in between. And so the best way that I

Stephen S. (17:46.68)
Tell me more.

Bret Martin (17:48.387)
The best way I could describe this is exactly how I teach it. It’s exactly how I talk it every day. And that’s this. If you’ve done a wonderful job of running your personal life and a wonderful job of running your business life, you’re going to get a wonderful offer. But if you’ve done a poor job of running your business life and a poor job of running your personal life, you’re going to get a poor offer. But more than likely, you’re going to get an offer out of us.

Inevitably, what they say in return is, so my bankruptcy is going to affect me. Yes, it is. But more than likely, you’ll still get an offer. I’ve done a great job of running my business life and my personal life, so I’ll get a great offer, right? Yes, you probably will. And that suffices.

So we don’t talk about APR, we don’t talk about factor rate, we don’t talk about cost of money, terms of the loan. What we do is we say, hey, listen, let’s be honest with one another. You already know the terms of this loan. We don’t, you do. We’re going to look at this paper, but you know whether you’ve done a great job of running your business and your personal life. And you know if you haven’t.

And you’re smiling so you know, I know you know what I’m talking about, right? I mean, we know. So what do we do? What we do historically as borrowers or prospective borrowers, we try to hold information back. Right. It’s like, I hope they don’t see this and I hope they don’t see this. And maybe if I don’t give them this, they won’t ask for it. Where with this, they can’t hide. They hand in the bank statements. There’s no hiding, you know.

Stephen S. (18:58.2)
Sure. Right.

Stephen S. (19:19.416)
Right. Sure. You know, it’s.

Bret Martin (19:22.004)
And to be honest with you, you’d be surprised. Sorry for being so long winded, but just as many people pro rata share, take these loans that are bad. That you and I may call bad as people take that are good because let’s understand one another. There really is no such thing as a bad loan when you need money. Right. And so I mean,

Stephen S. (19:26.732)
You’re good.

Stephen S. (19:46.424)
for sure.

Bret Martin (19:49.407)
One man’s pain is another man’s pleasure. Or what do they say? You know, one man’s junk is another man’s treasure. And so I try to teach my staff not to have this self-fulfilling mindset that says, they’re never going to take this because I wouldn’t take it. It’s like, you don’t know what their wants and needs are. You don’t know that their stove went down that night, that morning, and they have to get it fixed before that next day. Or they can’t be in business and they’re doing a million six a month.

in their Mexican food restaurant. The roof came off on their hotel. It’s April now or March and closing in on May or June and it’s Yellowstone and everybody’s prepaid for that hotel and the roof is missing. It’s like, you need a roof on that hotel now because the entire season is paid for in advance.

And we don’t have time to wait for Wells Fargo, key bank, US bank to fool around for 60 to 90 days. So that’s why these loans just make sense for people.

Stephen S. (20:56.15)
Right, now that makes a ton of sense.

Yeah, you bet. So really, mean, to put it in a nutshell, really, the more personally responsible you are, the better loan you’re going to get.

Bret Martin (21:14.626)
You got it.

Business-wise and personal-wise, you know, I mean, I’m amazed at how many people run their business life differently than their personal life. You’d be amazed. And for me personally, I can tell you this, it will happen to you. You stay in business as long as I have. One day you’ll realize there is no difference between your business life and your personal life. They’re one in the same. I mean, I had to laugh the other day talking to my CPA and he made the comment, he goes, well, I don’t know

if we could write that off. I don’t know if it pertains to your business. I am a business. 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. I live in a business in my brain. I should be able to write that off. And you know that as an entrepreneur, as a businessman, businesswoman, the bottom line is, you know, we probably better off working for other people. This is a lot more hours.

Stephen S. (21:51.564)
Yeah.

Bret Martin (22:14.146)
The only thing that’s rewarding about it is we get to dream the dream. And if we do a good enough job of manifesting and yearning and longing for what we want at the end of the day, we get stuff that a lot of people don’t get because we don’t have We have unlimited income potential and opportunity.

Stephen S. (22:37.262)
So let me ask you this kind of as a final wrap up question. If you had to go back to the beginning and like just start over back then 2007 with what you’re doing now and you could take all of the knowledge, experience, failures, wins, et cetera, that you’ve gained over the last, you know, almost 20 years now, what would you do different and what would you do the same?

Bret Martin (23:02.596)
You know, there’s a great movie out right now about a company called WeWork. And it’s called We Crashed. It’s a doc. It’s it’s a one of those mini series.

Stephen S. (23:15.5)
Okay.

Bret Martin (23:15.516)
And it’s a legit, it’s legitimate business. And I can tell you it’s, it’s based on a real story called we worked, we work. the, again, the docu, the series is called we crashed. And this kid that founded the company was somebody like myself that had absolutely no problem. You know, planning the future every single solitary day striving for the future.

and expanding into the future in advance prior to when you, you know, had the money.

And for me, I can tell you if I had anything I would do differently, I would have expanded five, 10, 15 times, 20 times faster, which is what I’m doing now. My goal is to have 200 retail storefronts in the next five years. We’ve got the one, all I’ve got to do. I mean, we hear about the word all the time, your generation, especially scale. And all I got to do is scale it.

And there’s nothing to it. I’ve had multiple business locations before in the mortgage industry. Why wouldn’t I do that in this industry? One day you’re going to wake up and if I have my way, every single solitary major corner in America is going to have a place in it where you can get a business loan. Where it used to be that way, just, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, and they were called banks, but that’s what I would do. If I could tell anyone, I would

Stephen S. (25:15.33)
Yeah.

event.

Stephen S. (26:22.156)
Mm.

Stephen S. (27:11.864)
You bet. Bret? No, that’s so great. Bret, thanks for joining us today. If anyone wants to learn more about you or what you’re working on, where should they go for that?

Stephen S. (27:39.67)
You’ve got your welcome Bret. Well everyone. I hope you enjoyed today’s show and if you got as much out of it as I did I know you did so we’ll see on the next episode. Thanks for being here