26 May An Insight Into The Mortgage Note Investment Industry With Martin Saenz

Those who are diligent, focused, and able to manage their time accordingly will find great chances of success in note investments. But before jumping into it, one must know how to maintain the success he or she will find here. Matthew Sullivan breaks down the ins and outs of this industry with Martin Saenz, Managing Partner of Bequest Funds. He explains how to navigate the business with all the bank policies and the ever-changing industry trends, as well as his approach to keeping a productive team. Matthew also shares his essential tips in starting a business venture in note investing, detailing how he goes in-depth with this through his mastermind classes. 

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An Insight Into The Mortgage Note Investment Industry With Martin Saenz

I want to welcome you with open arms, Martin Saenz, to the show. That’s from the bottom of my heart. Welcome to everything that I can offer, which is very little. 

You got to bring humor to the startup process.  

If only we could find humor in a desolate wasteland that is the curse of the entrepreneur. You’re already a cursed entrepreneur, from what I’ve read. It looked like you had a proper job and then decided that you’re going to throw away all that sense of security, go and fend for yourself, build your own empire. Is that completely true?  

Build an empire as I perceived it at the time.  

When did you start? When did you make the leap as it were?  

There’s nothing more challenging than fighting your own mind on a daily basis where you have self-doubt and negativity. 

When I got fired from my corporate job.  

It’s funny that many people say, “When I took this conscious decision to follow the path of an entrepreneur.” You mean you got fired. I did get slightly fired but that had nothing to do with it.  

There was a new management regime. It was a corporation and they didn’t like me. They have their own people. I was bad at politics. They managed to do their thing and got me out the door. That was one of the happiest days of my life.  

Have you ever watched The Office? It was originally a UK series that they brought over here. Having been an entrepreneur for a long time, if you watched the episodes of The Office and you’re cringing and thinking. I had my own business. As an entrepreneur, you go into these offices and you would see exact replicas. Do you find now that you have your own thing you have had for decades when you meet people and you go into these office environments?  

Yes. I look at it from a different perspective. When I go in and I meet a business owner and they have a whole operation with employees, I have a great deal of respect for what they’ve built. When I meet a struggling entrepreneur, that’s a solopreneur working out of their house and they’re still struggling, trying to do everything themselves instead of hiring out and using economies of scale with labor. I look at it in different ways. I don’t go into too many corporate offices.  

It’s the big corporates. That’s the place. That to me is hell on earth, the scary faceless, this idea that you have to be good at politics first and then maybe good at your job second.  

There are lots of conference calls, emails, activities that don’t drive true value. I view that in Corporate America. There are lots of initiatives that don’t necessarily translate to the mission of the organization.  

We digress. I wanted to find out much more about what led you towards note investing. What were you doing before when that wonderful day happened? What’s quite a complex, relatively unknown? Even though it’s a big business, it’s still very much clogged in complications and regulations. It’s not an easy business to get involved with. 

Prior to getting fired, I was doing a lot of reading in my off time on books. There’s this author in particular named Tyler Hicks. He wrote about how you can have a side hustle doing a variety of different business models. I was always curious about things. When I got fired, I went into a whole deep dive into education, into reading Robert Kiyosaki books, going to real estate seminars. I had gone all–in on a full-time level to not repeat getting another corporate job.  

That’s difficult to transition from going to real estate seminars, reading books and taking that rather large leap into doing something yourself. How many people have you met over and over again, go to the same seminars and spend fortunes on these educational classes but never get their feet wet?  

There’s a sea of those individuals where they’re buried beneath. It’s a tough journey in your own mind. Forget about what business model to do, how to build a customer base, how to deliver a product. Fighting your own mind on a daily basis where you have self-doubt. You have negativity. You have “I can’t do this” syndrome. You go to seminars. It’s the shiny object. It’s who presents the best that can sell you on what they can do for you. At the end of the day, you find that only you can do for yourself. Other people can help you, guide you and give you partial roadmaps but at the end of the day, it’s got to be something you find within yourself that you get rock bottom, you get sick of it, you get sick of your circumstances. You know that there’s something better. You know that you’re meant for something bigger. You forge ahead with whatever it is you can do.  

With the first bit I agree with but it takes some real something to be able to step out of that environment and not bump along the bottom. That’s the real first step. First of all, in my case, it’s always been, “What am I going to do?” In other words, you need to find something that you believe and that you’re interested in. I’m curious. What led you to notes? Was it the fact that they’re non–tangibles as it were where you’re not physically moving product around? Was it the mathematics that is magical in some respect? What was it that caught your imagination?  

I have a slightly different opinion. I understand the popularity or the thought process, finding out what you love in doing that because you have some passion behind it. From my perspective, what I’ve learned has been you have to look for what there’s a market for. That should drive. You’ll learn to love whatever it is you’re doing that you can build a big business around.  

What made you make that decision? You’re right to pick up about this received wisdom that you need to follow your passions. I think that’s BS, frankly. It is a road to ruin where you turn a hobby into a business. You waste or lose all your money. It sounds like it was a very strategic decision based on supply–demand needs, a real business.  

It was two parts, service to others. We buy mortgages across the United States. Oftentimes, the bars are in default. They haven’t made a payment in a few years. We purchased those assets at a discount. We’re able to help the homeowner get back on track with the payment plan. We’re able to make certain concessions to work with them financially. There’s a good service that’s provided for homeowners across the United States but also it’s very lucrative if done correctly. It’s two-part. 

You got two sides to the equation. You’re moving into notes. This will follow the journey here. You start off scientific research basically, as opposed to gut feel, which is always the best way. “This is the business I’m going to be in.” How do you make your first deal? How did that happen?  

One, if one’s going to jump into an opportunity, whatever that opportunity is, they need to go at it big time or don’t do it at all. I’ll give you an example. When my wife and I started our government contracting company, we sold museum exhibit displays to the federal government. These are things that you would see in museums and the Federal government buys those. We started out of the gate. We could have sold to every mom–and–pop business up and down the street. We would have chipped away at the rock but we said no. We’re going to sacrifice a few years to go and sell to the largest customer in the world. Starting with the end in mind and the big picture is going to help anyone build to that. When I started buying mortgage loans, I said, “I’m not just going to go and buy onesie-twosies. I want to buy on a large scale in the secondary mortgage market which is where a lot of the pools of these mortgages are purchased and sold.” 

That takes two parts of the equation. You need capital on one side, which are investors. On the other side, you need the supply. When you’re starting out, you can start small and build up. That’s a real chicken and egg situation, particularly for real estate investment. You either got too many deals and not enough money or you got too much money and not enough deals. How do you bridge that gap?  

I would suggest that starting with forging strategic partnerships. Understanding that supply is key. You have to have something to acquire or you have no business. If you don’t have any capital backing the acquisition then you don’t have a business there too. As a starting point, someone should be focused on building their identity, understanding how they’re going to be perceived in the space, building a marketing brand around that and spending daily concentrated efforts on developing strategic partnerships in that industry. From there, only good things can happen.  

I agree with you with this whole idea about the concentrated effort on a daily basis, that it doesn’t happen overnight. It is this process of attrition and osmosis. It is a time–honored challenge for real estate. How do you get your first investors? What advice would you give people to get the ball rolling? You can build strategic partnerships but a lot of those people don’t do anything. You need to catalyze that first transaction. What is the best path forward for people that are starting out, trying to build their own real estate funds, portfolios or do something like you on a large scale? How do you start?  

You start with education. In any business environment, there are always the fundamentals. I wrote a whole book called Note Investing Fundamentals.  

You wrote five books. 

This book in particular is close to my heart because it touches on the fundamentals of what you need to have in place in order to begin sourcing deal flow and begin advancing yourself in the space. A focus on education is critical. Everyone jumps to the sexiness of, “Let me buy this. Let me raise money here.” That’s all. It’s sensationalized, that whole idea. “I’m going to be a wheeler and dealer,” unless you have daily discipline whereby you’re building the fundamentals through self-education, that’s sexy to me. If you can do that then along with a concentrated effort of outreach for strategic partnerships then opportunities are going to start to find you. I can tell you that the best place to find capital is from industry players within the industry you are operating. In other words, if I’m a soon-to-be note investor, I’m self-educating, I’m putting all the right pieces together from a fundamental standpoint and I stumbled upon a deal. I should then try to line up capital from another player in the industry for that deal because that other player can be much more than a capital partner. They could also help with underwriting, packaging, negotiations, asset management.  

There are a lot of steps involved. Is this the business that you would recommend to someone who wants to build their own business in real estate?  

It’s a very tight–knit community. You’re going to have challenges that way. You have challenges in any industry. If this sounds like something for you and that you feel like you can work with homeowners, you can negotiate. You can create daily disciplines for sourcing and building your identity. By all means, start for yourself. There’s no room for mom–and–pops in our industry. You have to be fully committed to building out an operation with a team. Maybe not from day one but that should be a short-term goal for yourself. There’s compliance. There are other components to our industry.  

Let’s get a bit more into detail in terms of what is involved. If you were to describe simply what note investing is, how would you do that?  

The best way to put it is that you have an individual that’s looking to take out a mortgage on a home. They’re going to go to a bank and apply for a mortgage. At the closing table, they’re going to sign a promissory note to promise to pay back the money given a certain set of terms. They’re going to sign a mortgage or deed of trust that’s going to tie that promise to the property in the form of collateral. From that point, you’re going to have some of those mortgages that are held on the bank’s books go into default. The borrower is going to stop making payments for whatever reason. That financial institution is going to bundle those defaulted mortgages into a pool and is going to sell them off into the secondary market. My company buys those loans from the secondary market that are defaulted but BeQuest Funds, my income fund, buys performing mortgages from that same secondary market as well.  

You’re buying those at a discount, presumably.  

Buying both non-performing and performing. If you take a mortgage that’s in default and a bank sells it for $0.25 to the secondary market to a hedge fund, that hedge fund gets it to perform. That mortgage gets seasoned, then it can get sold. BeQuest will buy that into our fund for $0.70 or $0.80. The hedge fund benefits financially. BeQuest receives a 20 or 30-year cashflow stream by which we can pay our investor payments.  

You’ll learn to love whatever it is you’re doing that you can build a big business around. 

One of the questions that you hear a lot is why would the banks sell those off at a discount? Why would they not go through the foreclosure process, get the property, sell the property and make more than $0.25?  

First of all, they’re not in the real estate business. They’re not very good at it. Their hands are tied in terms of creative solutions that they can employ with the borrowers. When that paper gets defaulted over a period of time, it gets kicked out of a securitized portfolio bundling. It’s no longer government-backed. From a bank’s perspective, oftentimes, they will charge off that mortgage internally. They’re going to want to recoup as much as possible by selling that mortgage off into the secondary space so they can resume doing what they’re good at. That is lending.  

You’ve got a two–stage process it seems. The first stage is where you’re picking up non-performing notes, getting them back on track. You’ve got that more secured seasoned revenue stream, which you can then put into your fund, which generates cashflow effectively. Do you deal with first position mortgages, a second, combination of the two?  

It’s a combination of the two but a heavier focus on the junior liens on the second mortgage.  

Those are the mortgages that tend to be forgotten by the homeowners where the dust is swept under the carpet until it’s too late, presumably when you come along. What reaction do you get from homeowners when you phone them up or write them a letter and say, “I’d like to introduce myself or my company. We are the proud owners of your second position mortgage?” 

You get a variety of reactions. Everyone’s different. In some cases, we have people that are very thankful. They didn’t know who to connect with. They have their job back that they lost a few years prior and they’re in a stable place. They’re looking to get caught up so that at some point, they can pay off this obligation. You get others that want to avoid the whole subject of the debt obligation. You get other people that are a little bit more confrontational. You get all of them. At the end of the day, what we emphasize here is to treat everyone with compassion. We treat all the borrowers as customers. By definition, they’re paying us, our bills, our wages. We want to treat them as customers with the utmost respect. We feel like if we stay true to who we are and how we need to come across with the borrowers then only good things will happen as a result.  

Everyone is different. Every mortgage, every loan has a story behind it. You mentioned compliance and regulation. How much flexibility do you have to deal

with these people? What is the level of compliance that is involved in this type of business?  

We work with a licensed servicer. This licensed servicer will send out the monthly loan account statements. They will accept payments and handle all the ledger accounting. They will send out the year-end tax statements. From a servicing standpoint, we’re always ensuring that we keep in compliance. As it relates to certain states, there are various debt collector licenses. There are other regulatory certifications that you have to go through. We’re conscious of that from a state-by-state basis. We worked to ensure. We have one individual that’s in charge of compliance for the company. We place heavy emphasis on compliance.  

Do you think that with all of the four million–plus mortgages that went into forbearance as a result of the CARES Act that there’s going to be this tidal wave of defaults? How do you think the banks and the servicing companies are going to deal with the obligations that are on their shoulders?  

The CARES Act deals with government-sponsored mortgages. Fannie and Freddie back mortgages. When we purchase mortgages in the secondary market, they don’t fall under the CARES Act. With that said, we’re very conscious of keeping in practice how the CARES Act unfolding. This whole thing is still evolving. What I understand and what I believe to be the case is that a majority of the mortgages that are in default or have a forbearance program associated with them, the lender will place the past due interest arrears on the back of the loan, not accruing any interest to be paid upon payoff. It will give the homeowner a fresh start.  

We talked about the supply side, which is where you get the notes from and the buy–side, which is the investors. What type of investor profile typically would be your average investor?  

We work with credit investors. Our ideal investor is someone who has monthly bills. It’s simply put. We’re an income fund whereby accredited investors invest in our fund. We pay an 8% or 9% annual return. We make our payments monthly. Anybody who’s accredited and has monthly bills is a perfect client for us. Our whole objective is to help deliver passive income to those individuals that cover their monthly bills. Plus also pads their pockets to meet any financial aspirations that they have.  

It’s a good business to get into from a number of areas. First of all, it’s attractive to investors because it produces a fairly solid yield. You’re collecting that from a large number of homeowners. You’re not concentrating your assets and or your risk in any one particular place. How many people do you think it takes? What’s the size of the team that you think you need to run the business that you have?  

Our team is eight individuals. It’s a $50 million income fund. We also have the other side of the business that works with non-performing loans. It’s an interesting thing in terms of how many people we’ll need to hire to achieve the goals that we’re looking to go to. We’re looking to strive to $100 million in operations in the next years. If that means we have to double the team size so be it. We understand the value. We appreciate the value that a good employee can bring to the organization.  

There’s a whole set of challenges that in terms of finding the people.  

I’ll take that overworking out of my closet as a one-person to show I’m doing everything myself.  

There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people who want to get involved in real estate investing, knowing everything that you’ve known now and this is not something that you can start as a mom–and–pop or with that aspiration. Can you start this business? Will you sell 1 or 2 notes to someone who says, “I’ve got a certain amount of capital. I want to buy a note from you. I want you to teach me how to work it out?” Can people do that? Can you work with people and help them build a business where they’re half investor, not an employee but almost like they’re working with you? Is that something that you can see happening?  

We hold some mastermind groups. I do a mentorship with only a couple of people every six months. Maybe 2 to 3 people at most. I need to understand that they’re serious and committed. At the point I’m at in life, I don’t need the money if it comes with aggravation. I want to make sure it’s more significant than the money. I don’t mind building someone up that I see could be a strategic partner with me, we could do deals and we could grow together. I’m all for that. If it’s a matter of trading time for training, I’m not interested.  

As a business or as a way into real estate, this sounds like it’s an opportunity. If you can buy one note, there’s nothing better in terms of learning than learning by doing. Is this a business that you would recommend to someone who says, “I want to get involved in real estate investing. I’m willing to roll my sleeves up, put the work in. If I buy a note, I’m going to learn an enormous amount. In the same way that if I buy a house, try and do a fix–and–flip, I’m going to learn quickly?” Is that how you started? Is that how you would recommend people should get going?  

I started with buying ten mortgage notes for $240,000. 

Where did you get them from?  

Towards an online platform called FCI Exchange. They’re no longer functioning. There are some online marketplaces, Paperstac, Loan MLS. There are a few online exchanges that sell mortgage notes. To answer your question, if someone’s going to commit the time and energy, this is not as capital intensive as one may think if you’re going to put in the work. The more work you put in, the less of your own capital you’ll need.  

Is that because you can revolve the capital if you can buy a note? I presume that there’s a ready market for people that want to buy performing notes. Does that mean you can make your capital work more efficiently?  

Many people start the business by buying non-performing, get the notes to perform and then flip the note so they can recapitalize. That’s a good strategy. It’s not a long-term strategy, which is why we created BeQuest Funds because it’s a legacy play. We want to experience all $360 monthly payments made by the borrower. 

That’s passive investment specifically from the active investor. You can get quite excited about the fact. Let’s say I’ve got a little bit of capital. I want to be a real estate investor. There are a number of platforms where I could buy my first note. I can learn, which is the self-education process. I learned by doing.  

Other people can give you partial roadmaps, but at the end of the day, the solution’s got to be something within yourself. 

They need to start with training in the fundamentals before they buy their first note. A few months of intensive immersion into the process so they have some sense of what they’re doing before they go out and buy a few training notes. My recommendation would be to buy very small principle balance loans to practice on so you don’t get busted out with large dollar amounts.  

You’ve got compliance too. As a buyer, presumably, I can buy a note. Do I need to be regulated or is there a compliance burden for me?  

It depends on the state. If you’re in Georgia, there’s a state mortgage license that you need to have in place or you can face a hefty fine to buy a note. If you’re in Texas, you’re fine but everything’s changing.  

You need to know a thing like that. That’s to show stuff. There’s importance there. 

We foreclosed less than 2% of the time for our entire non-performing portfolio which is crazy. Our average length of default period is about four years. We end up working out terms. We’re very good. We have a lot of finesse. We have a lot of compassion. Imagine that if there are 100 loans, let’s take them as an example and only go to the auction block. At that auction block, you have 20 or 30 real estate investors. They’re feeding off the crumbs.  

That’s something that I’ve always understood about this type of market. It’s very difficult to become part of the inner circle. Hedge funds went and talked to you until you’ve got momentum. It is difficult. As an investor, the institutional players that are selling tapes of notes, they’re not going to entertain calls from someone that says, “I know you’ve got $100 million worth to sell but do you mind selling me $25,000 worth?” That’s one of the challenges. Did you always have the intention to have a fund? That brings its own set of challenges. You’ve got passive investors. Was that part of the game plan? That’s moving closer. When you have investors then you’ve got a lot of people that you have to answer to. That changes the dynamic of an entrepreneurial relationship.  

When I express about mom–and–pops working out of someone’s closet, I’m speaking from someone that did this for the first four years, primarily out of a Starbucks. I’d have my headset on. I’d be plugging away. A borrower would call me and I would step outside. If it was cold, I would go into my vehicle and have a conversation. I’m speaking from that perspective. I get that. When I published Note Investing Made Easier, my first book, it brought me out into the limelight. I enjoy. The person you’re talking to is not the person. I’m the person that wants to be alone, plugging away, doing my own thing in my own cave. I’m happy. The books brought me out. It brought other opportunities, people that wanted to mentor under me and new opportunity deal flow. I see the other side of it about building an operation. I didn’t have that vision initially. If I could do it again, I would have started with the end in mind. The large hundred-million-dollar fund, how do I build to that?  

That tends to be the case where people start out with the desire to work with people, investors and realized that the smaller investors tend to have the louder voices. It’s like an inverse proportion rule. The less you invest, the louder your voices.  

You summed up Facebook.  

It is an enormous amount of noise. Government contracting business, is that something that you’re running as well? That in itself is a fascinating strategy, trying to break into what must be an incredibly complex layered compliance–driven marketplace.  

My wife and I sold that company in 2013. At some point in time, I had written a book, Secrets to Winning Government Contracts. That’s the bestselling book. Everybody wants to know how to sell to the Feds. 

The clue is in the title. How active are you with mentoring mastermind? You do a couple of guys every few months. Are you growing that training side of the business to bring more people into this type of industry?  

I’m scaling it back. When the book came out, I had people flocking to me daily. “Can I take a training class? Can I mentor? Can I this and that?” I was like, “I’m not going to say no to money.” I started bringing the money in. There was a point in time, maybe about 1.5 years down the road and my wife’s like, “You’re not buying as many notes as you used to. You need to think about that.” I was like, “I do.” The notes are the long-term play in that.  

That’s your long-term hedge as opposed to the short-term capital. Even though you are an absolute expert in the field, the concept of running these classes and masterminds, presumably there’s a lower hanging fruit or there’s an easier way to make a living.  

The money’s quick. I throw out a training class. It’s $2,000. Ten people sign up and a couple of weeks with some email blasts. You’re putting some money in your pocket. You didn’t have to put a few $100 out for a hotel room.  

You do have these fifteen years of experience behind it that allows you to do that.  

There’s no fluff. I had been to so many seminars. I knew what fluff looked like. I knew what it looked like where someone’s holding back the nugget until you sign up for the next level. I got that whole scam. When I did the training, I did the opposite. When I do the fundamentals training, I haven’t done one in a while. When I do it, I give them so much content. I give them my whole operation that it’s oozing out of their ears and they need me. They’re like, “I can’t do this alone. I need the BeQuest Funds. Will you mentor me?” I took the opposite approach.  

That’s the right way to do it where you drip feed people in the expectation that’s stupid and that they don’t figure out what you’re doing, hoping that they’ll come back for more. That attracts entirely the wrong people. Ultimately, that’s a road to ruin because you end up with very disgruntled customers.  

It’s $79 for this course. The next one is $250. It’s like a breadcrumb trail to nowhere. It’s horrible. 

You end up with disenfranchised upset customers who haven’t learned anything. You firehose them with, “This is the reality of the deal. This is what it takes. Here are many years‘ experience in four hours. Fasten your safety belt.” People realize then that this is quite a complex business. It is one of those businesses that I still like. I would love to get started on it. It is appealing from so many different levels purely from exercising your mind the mathematics, the complexities, the structuring and the fact that you are enabling people to stay in their neighborhoods. There is that impact.  

The best place to find capital is from industry players within the industry you are operating. 

Do why you should come into the note industry? It’s because people are leaving in droves.  

Why is that?  

There’s a whole cleansing that’s going on with all the mom–and–pops where there’s no inventory on the retail level. They didn’t build a business that’s scalable. They’re getting busted out. They’re not equipped to handle note investing in the environment. 

When I looked at this years ago, it was dominated. There were significant numbers of very small operators, guys that would do maybe 10 or 15 notes a year. You’re saying that’s all gone now.  

There are individuals that are still running around with 10, 15 notes. You would swear they had a PhD and they’re on Facebook telling you what you need to do because they know so much. They’re spending more time on Facebook than they are in the actual process of their company. There’s an opportunity here. My partner, Shawn Muneio, is my first protégé. He reached out after I launched the book. I mentored him for six months. We later became partners. If you are someone that’s diligent, focused and willing to put in the time then eventually, you will get accepted in this circle and you will work yourself in.  

As it is a small group, there’s probably no time for trying to educate people that come in. You’ve got to come in with chops, credentials and something.  

At least an identity, a willingness to learn and to be genuine, being a human 101. Go to a conference and say, “I’m new. I’m willing to learn. I’m absorbing. Next time I see you, Martin, we’re going to do something together.” Being that person that’s hitting the books, you’ll eventually find your way through.  

They’re still very much active people with the books. What book would you recommend out or the books that you’ve written to be the best starting point for people that want to find out more about this industry?  

Note Investing Made Easier is a good starting point. In that book, I wrote about the sourcing lifecycle, which still I believe is applicable. That is how someone starting their journey through building a note business and starts with building their identity. It breaks into marketing and branding efforts, daily outreach efforts, how they’re going to operate on social media. There are do’s and don’ts with that, tapping on deal flow, transacting on that deal flow and then allowing that cyclical process to snowball itself.  

What do you do in your spare time? When you’re not up to your neck in those, what do the weekends have in store for you?  

They’re very different than the weekdays. I have four children, eight and under. When I’m not making babies, I am going and taking care of babies. We’re doing activities. I love doing nature walks and trails. We’re always having activities. We’ll go to the beach, rent out a boat, go on the water. Make it fun for the kids. During the weekdays, I don’t see them as much. I get up at 4:00 in the morning and then I’m off. They see me around dinner time usually.  

You don’t work at home. You work in an office, presumably. That’s tough with the younger kids.  

My wife has stayed home since they were little. I hang out with you. You’re agreeing with me. I’ll go home. I’ll get some direction. You could have done this better in a constructive way.  

We’re moving on to the rapid questionnaire section. Martin Saenz, question number one. What is your favorite word?  

Cashflow. 

Number two, what is your least favorite word?  

Laziness.  

Number three, what are you most excited about?  

Building a legacy for my family and being a model for my kids.  

Number four, what turns you off?  

Complacency, lack of productivity, lack of advancement.  

Number five, what sound or noise do you love?  

We have a success bell here at the office. It’s like a Navy bell. It’s ringing every time when someone does something successfully. I love hearing it. We all come out, clap and congratulate the individual. I love hearing my kids play the piano.  

Number six, what sound or noise do you hate?  

My eight–year–old makes a screeching sound. He does it kiddingly but I don’t like it.  

The other ones to that question are other people’s kids learning to play the piano. Question number seven, what is your favorite curse word?  

I generally don’t curse. It’s very rare. I don’t curse. I don’t have a favorite one.  

If one’s going to jump into an opportunity, whatever that is, they need to go at it big time or don’t do it at all. 

Do you sit where your face goes bright red and people understand? They wanted to swallow the anger. 

I’m a tad bit emotional as a person. I can get emotional without the curse.  

If you’re not a curser, what’s your favorite object to hurt someone?  

I like getting the Nerf guns and shooting my kids.  

Number eight, what profession other than your own would you like to attempt?  

There are other asset classes I’d like to delve into at some point. The development of industrial parks is one that I’m intrigued with and looking to do in the near future.  

Question number nine, what profession would you not like to attempt?  

Anything that’s small, anything that’s solopreneur or where I can’t scale.  

My final question, number ten, if heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?  

You served me well.  

My final question is how do people get hold of you? How do they find out more? How do they get to hold of your books and learn more about this fascinating enterprise that you’ve created?  

They can go to Amazon and look up Martin Saenz. They’ll find all the books there. They can reach out to Martin@BqFunds.com. I’ll have one of the team members send out an eBook for BeQuest Funds. They can go to Note Investing Made Easier and learn about some of the mastermind classes. That would be great for anyone.  

Martin, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been an absolute pleasure. It’s been brilliant having you on. I can’t wait to stay in touch and follow your progress.  

Thank you so much, Matthew. 

Important links: 

• Martin Saenz 
• BeQuest Funds
  
• Secrets to Winning Government Contracts
  
• Shawn Muneio – LinkedIn 

About Martin Saenz

Martin Saenz brings social good into smart investing. Martin is a Managing Partner of Bequest Funds. Renowned as a thought leader in the mortgage note investment industry, Martin is generous with his firsthand expertise, to the benefit of his many clients and followers. Genuine, loyal, and passionate about creating a better world through profitable business, he works hard to share and spread success.

Together with business partner Shawn Muneio, Martin cofounded Bequest Funds with the dual purpose of helping investors grow their wealth and helping mortgage borrowers stay in their homes. Martin owned and operated multiple successful companies prior to launching Bequest. A successful entrepreneur and real estate investor for over 15 years, he brings a high level of strategy and experience to the Bequest model. He has directly helped over a thousand families stay in their homes, and countless more through the influence of his mentorship.

Martin holds a BA degree in Philosophy from U.T. — San Antonio, an MBA from Drexel University, and a M.S. in Project Management from George Washington University. Martin, his wife Ruth, and their four children live in Sarasota, FL. Together, they enjoy exploring the natural beauty of state and being a part of their church community.