Are you gambling with your financial future? Are you chasing the next big stock, or are you building a foundation for lasting legacy? On this episode of Exit Strategies Radio Show, host Corwyn J. Melette sits down with a titan in the world of finance who believes in something more powerful than a “get rich quick” scheme: the American Dream.
In Part 1 of this powerful interview, host Corwyn J. Melette sits down with financial expert Mark Matson, CEO of Matson Money and author of the national bestseller, Experiencing the American Dream. Mark shares his personal story of growing up in poverty in West Virginia and reveals the three “lies” that convinced him the investing industry was broken.
This episode will challenge everything you’ve been taught about wealth. Mark makes a powerful case that money itself can’t buy happiness, and that you must find a purpose for your money before you start to invest it.
Part 1 was just the start of the journey. What if your portfolio could reflect your purpose?
Listen to Part 2 of our interview with Mark Matson next week, you’ll learn about his transformative “Matson Method”—a powerful, purpose-driven approach to investing. He’ll also share the personal story that became the true foundation of his success.
Key Takeaways:
- 02:08 Mark Matson’s Humble Beginnings in West Virginia
- 04:16 The Broken Investing Industry
- 05:30 His Journey into the Financial Industry
- 06:21 The Three Lies that Convinced Him the Industry is Broken
- 07:23 Why Financial Education is More Important Than a “Magic Bullet”
- 10:19 The Psychology Behind Bad Investing Decisions
- 13:44 Mark’s “Sleep Factor” Concept
- 16:45 The Importance of Diversification
- 20:11 Wholesome Beginnings and Purpose of the Book
- 20:53 Contrasting Views on the American Dream
Connect with Mark:
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmatson/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/matsonmoney/
Connect with Corwyn:
- Contact Number: 843-619-3005
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmelette/
Shoutout to our Sponsor: Country Boy Homes
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MARK:
Start with picking out your purpose in your life and your purpose for your money. Because if your purpose is speculation and gambling, then that’s the default purpose for most people when they look at their portfolio. But what you want to do is find something that’s greater than money itself, because money can’t by itself make you happy. There’s a lot of studies that show if you win the lottery, win $100 million, do you think that’s going to make you happy? It’s not. And history is full of people, whether it’s Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hughes, that had massive amounts of money that were absolutely miserable. In the end, the money actually helped destroy them, not give them an amazing life. So first, you’ve got to start with, for example, my true purpose for money is helping people fulfill their American dream and create freedom, fulfillment, and love in their family. Now, from there, then I can run my business and make portfolios and make financial decisions based on that purpose. And if you start looking at your money before your purpose, you’re in for a lot of pain and suffering.
CORWYN:
Good morning, good morning, and great morning, guys. Welcome to another fabulous episode of Exit Strategies Radio Show. Hey, if you do not know who I am, I’m about to tell you. I’m Corwyn J. Melette, broker and owner of Exit Realty Low Country Group in beautiful North Charleston, South Carolina. Guys, if this is your first time listening to this show, you, sir or ma’am, are in for a treat, because our mission here is very simple. That is to empower our community through financial literacy and real estate education. Guys, we’re legacy building. That is what we do. So I’ve got to give a shout out to those who listen to us faithfully. Guys, you’re listening all the way from Hollywood, what you don’t know good, all the way up to monkeys calling. Y’all know my mama live out there, y’all. All the way up muddy Mullins and Marion. Guys, thank you so much for tuning in. You guys rock. And I really, really appreciate it. It humbles me each and every time one of you says, Corwyn, I’ve been listening or, hey, I love what you’re doing on the show. Guys, our mission again, is to empower our community. And it starts most importantly with the information, but subsequently it is made real by your action. So guys, let’s not just take this information in today. Let’s do something with it. And I’m super duper excited because I have with me today, a guest, if you will, with my own heart, this guy’s going to talk to us today about how to get it right. How to look at it from a larger picture, from a bigger perspective, with a focus on financial literacy and investing. I’m super humbled to have him. He is a bestselling author. He has been on everybody’s show. I was lucky to trip him up in the hallway and have him land in our door over here today. So I’m super excited to have with us none other than Mark Matson. And Mark, again, is the author of the national bestselling book, Experiencing the American Dream. Mark, how are you doing today? I’m doing great. It’s great to be with you, Corwyn. Well, awesome. Awesome. Mark, if you don’t mind, give our listeners that 50, 100, however high you want to go, we’re going to go with you, overview of who you are and what you do.
MARK:
Yeah, thank you. My formal title is the CEO of Matson Money. It’s an $11 billion registered investment advisor company. We have over 500 advisors all over the country and 35,000 families that we work with to help them experience their American dream and learn how to prudently invest so that they’re not gambling and speculating. They’re actually using science. But down at my very heart, I’m kind of a hillbilly. I was born in Charleston, West Virginia, up in the hollers and the mountains. We came from there. My grandpa lived at the railroad track. My dad grew up by the railroad track in a shack, literally feet from the railroad. In the wintertime, there was rats that came into the house. So they had to take the tops off of instant carnation milk cans and nail them to the baseboard. They had one pair of shoes a year right before school, and then they had to go barefoot. They ate meat one time a week. They had chicken on Sundays. Other than that, it was white beans and potatoes. So I’m a firm believer in the American dream. I got to see how my dad got me out of the hollers, got our family out of the hollers. I’m well aware of how beautiful that part of the country is, but also how stifling some of the poverty is. And I take a stand for investors and families that they can experience the American dream when so many people have kind of given up hope on it. Let’s take a short break.
Ads..Let’s take a short break.
CORWYN:
Do you remember your grandma’s front porch? You know, that spot where stories were told, kisses were stolen, and sweet tea was always being sipped. Now imagine giving your family a place to make those same memories, but in a brand new, energy-efficient, and home that was built just for you. At Country Boy Homes, we help folks just like you find that forever feeling. Whether it’s your first home, your next home, or your we’re done with rent forever, like seriously home. We specialize in affordable, and durable, manufactured, and modular homes. The kind that make room for muddy boots, big dreams, and second helpings. Come see what coming home really feels like. Call 843-574-8979 today. Country Boy Homes, built to last, priced for you. Well, Mark, that’s humbling. That is a true humble start, I guess is what I’ll frame there. Now, Mark, you are the CEO, massive money. Look here, when you said money, I said, wait a minute. He’s saying something right there. So if you don’t mind, how did you get into this arena? Again, that is a heck of a story from where you started from, but how did you get to where you are, and what you’re doing now?
MARK:
A lot of kids wanted to be football players, or major league baseball, or firemen, or policemen. I wanted to be like my dad, and he was an insurance agent up in the hills and the hollers. So I went to school, got a degree in finance, got a degree in accounting from Miami University of Ohio. Then went to work at the age of 21 as a financial planner, trying to help people invest their money, trying to help them do tax planning, trying to help them do estate planning, make sure they had insurance when people died. But I learned very, very quickly that the investing industry was broken, because it was based on three primary lies. One was that somebody could actually pick the best stocks for you in advance. Two was that someone could tell you when to get in and out of the market, get all the upside, none of the downside. And then that if you could just look at somebody’s track record, you could then base your portfolio on that, and then you could beat the market. And I couldn’t believe through actually trying to do all this stuff through my broker dealer, that was just speculating and gambling with people’s money. Twenty-seven, I went to a debate, an academic debate about how markets really work. And then I committed myself to opening my own business at 27 with zero assets under management, $30,000 in debt, and an overhead projector and a yellow pad as my marketing. And since then, I’ve been spreading the good news that you don’t have to gamble and speculate with your money. There are scientific ways that you can invest it that will help you have a more successful long-term investing experience. And that’s how it started out.
CORWYN:
So, you just kind of touched on something. Everybody’s looking for the quote-unquote get rich quick or the magic bullet button, whatever it is you want to say it is. One, we can wave and just miraculously all this stuff lines up. You focused instead, because you learned something. So, then you focused on educating others. That’s what I heard you say. So, why is it more important for the education versus just, okay, just do this?
MARK:
Yeah, it’s a great question. So, most people are taught to think about investing from the world they’re in, whether it’s social media or whether it’s TV, whether it’s radio, whether it’s just talking to their friends. They’re taught to think in terms of find the stocks that are going to beat the market, get out of the stocks that are under going to perform in the market, try to predict economic and political things that are going to happen in the future, and then base your portfolio on that. But the reality is that all of the knowable and predictable information about the future is already in the price today. So, the only thing that will change it is unknowable and unpredictable events. So, investors are hit with the question, well, if I can’t pick the best stocks and I can’t get in and out of the market at the right time, because I can’t predict the future, then how do I invest? And there are a lot of great economic studies from the University of Chicago, Nobel Prize winning research that shows that if you’ll just try to get market returns, for example, the S&P over the last almost 100 years has averaged 10%, small stocks, 12%, small value stocks, 14%. So, you don’t have to do stock picking, you don’t have to market time, you don’t have to track record invest, but you have to be in those categories long-term, and then you have to rebalance your portfolio when things are bad, like 2008, 2009, the real estate crash, the markets took a major tank in the ballpark of about 50%. And if you had a 50-50 portfolio of stocks and fixed income, you got to be able to sell, and now your stocks are only maybe 30% of your portfolio, you have to be able to sell the fixed income, buy the stocks while they’re down, so that when they finally rebound, you’re actually getting higher rates of returns on your money. Very easy to say, very, very hard to do.
CORWYN:
One of the things I heard in there on the line, and Mark, forgive this, but sometimes what I heard you say is that people at times try to treat the market like we treat the GPS. I don’t know if you got time, Garmin, or maybe you just got what it is on your phone or what have you, but if those things say you’re going to be there at three o’clock, somebody trying to get there at 2.50, and you think you’re going to beat the market, if you will, in the same fashion, and what I just heard you say is, that’s unrealistic. What I heard is, seek to meet where the market is, and if you base your projections on that, then you’re in a better or safer space. But let me kind of take that maybe a step further and kind of ask this question, because obviously there’s a psychology that exists related to that. Again, I’m speaking that with trying to beat the GPS. I know that I like to challenge the GPS. So what is it that you found, because this is your arena, your space, why do people focus on it and try to do it that way and fall victim, if you will, to that thought process?
MARK:
It’s the engineering of a human being. Okay. Right? So three major things, people, first of all, the vast majority of human behavior does not come from your cognitive portion of your mind, like your spot from Star Trek. It actually comes from the subconscious part of the mind, and it’s driven largely by emotions, fear, greed, doubt, stress, anxiety, and then it’s instincts. We run away from things that are painful. We run towards things that are pleasurable. So when the market’s down 50%, we get afraid. Then our instincts tell us to run, so we sell, and then we buy something else, and then we get out of the market, so we don’t get to rebound. Or when it runs way up, like it has been over the last 10 years, it runs way up. People buy it when it’s very high. For example, from 95 to 2000, the S&P made 22% a year. Tech stocks, measured by the NASDAQ, made 45% per year. So everybody wanted, guess what? They wanted large tech stocks. And then the crash came of 2000, and large tech stocks lost 75% of all their value. So if you’re planning for your American dream, and you worked hard your whole life to create this money, and then all of a sudden, because you didn’t prudently diversify internationally, and you didn’t know the volatility of the portfolio really, then you lose 50% to 75% of all your money, and now all the fear, and all the anxiety, and all the suffering kicks in. So most people live in a reality around money. Money is hard to make, hard to keep, and hard to invest, and it creates a lot of anxiety and pain so that people aren’t fulfilling on their American dream. And of course, as you know, one of the primary things of the American dream is people want to own their own home, which is a great thing to be able to do. But if they get to the end of their days, they sell their home, then they end up with these assets. They don’t know how to invest them, and they end up taking on way too much risk. Everybody wants to get rich quick. There’s fear of missing out. We have herding bias. If everybody’s doing it, we want to do it. We have familiarity bias. If people know the name of the company, like Nvidia, they want to buy it. They have short-term bias against whatever did great the last three to five years. So these are all human instincts. You go back 5,000 years, there’s no picture of a pie chart and standard deviation in a cave, right, in France. So this idea of investing is pretty new for human beings.
CORWYN:
So you hit something in there, because I remember what you’re talking about. I distinctly remember organization I was running a company for at the time, and the CEO, I mean, he was retirement age and had been hinting about retiring. And the tech market stopped. It crashed. And he was heavily invested and lost, if I remember correctly, about half of his net worth seemingly overnight. So he had these like, look, I got to keep working. I mean, he actually worked, if I remember correctly, roughly another five, six, seven years past what he intended to because of that. So a question I got in there is if that’s where you are. So let’s say that’s your investment style. I mean, it’s inherent that if you have an investment style that either leans towards being uber conservative or risk averse versus the other way, which is your risk taker. I mean, doesn’t it make sense that, okay, if something like that happens, that you understood the risk and in turn would make an adjustment and figure out how to move forward from there? Man, that’s my dream is that everybody would think that way.
MARK:
So it really is. So the only thing that’s more misunderstood than what the returns are of the model that you picked is that the understanding the risk behind what you have. So when we analyze portfolios for clients, we show them what they have, and then we show them in bad periods of time how much money they could lose. And a lot of times in 73 and 74, they would have lost 40% of all their money. And then 2000 and 2001, again, they would have lost another 40% or 50% of all their money. And then in 2020, when the pandemic hit, they would have lost 20% to 30% of their money in one quarter. So you show people this and say, when you built your portfolio, did you know that you could lose this much money? And invariably, it’s almost always we had no idea. And then I explained, does that meet your sleep factor? I mean, if you can’t handle that much risk, then I got to build a better portfolio for you. Because if you’re willing to take that kind of risk, we can get a much higher expected return by diversifying internationally, but you’re all in the US. So for example, this year, the people that are all in US stocks, the S&Ps up maybe 1%. Right now, large international value stocks are up 20%. So that’s a 20% differential. And most people have no exposure to large value international stocks at all in their portfolio. So the name of the game is, as you said, know exactly how much risk you have and can you actually live with it. And then number two, build a portfolio that gets the highest expected return for the amount of risk you’re willing to accept. And if you’re not willing to accept that risk, then build your portfolio so it has less volatility. And there’s actually Nobel Prizes, one for how to calculate that. But most people don’t have any idea that it even exists.
CORWYN:
Well, look, I know about me. I can tell you, look, I ain’t winning no Nobel Prize for it. I can tell you that much. Look here, I love what you said in there, Mark, about the sleep factor. So basically what I heard you say is, look here, if you’re knowing this information won’t allow you to sleep well at night, then you probably need to change something in your portfolio. That sounds about right.
MARK:
Yeah. And come to terms with the human… I think investing is interesting because it teaches you so much about science and the world. But I think it’s even more interesting because it teaches you about yourself, how your brain actually works, what your values are, what your purpose is. I always tell people, don’t start with trying to pick out your portfolio. Start with picking out your purpose in your life and your purpose for your money. Because if your purpose is speculation and gambling, then that’s the default purpose for most people when they look at their portfolio. But what you want to do is find something that’s greater than money itself. Because money can’t by itself make you happy. There’s a lot of studies that show if you win the lottery, win $100 million, you think that’s going to make you happy? It’s not. And history is full of people, whether it’s Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Howard Hughes, that had massive amounts of money that were absolutely miserable. And in the end, the money actually helped destroy them, not give them an amazing life. So first, you’ve got to start with, for example, my true purpose for money is helping people fulfill their American dream and create freedom, fulfillment, and love in their family. Now, from there, then I can run my business and make portfolios and make financial decisions based on that purpose. And if you start looking at your money before your purpose, you’re in for a lot of pain and suffering.
CORWYN:
You know, there’s a term, matter of fact, it is written on my board over here. Guests I had some time ago, we’re talking about real estate investing. And they framed the term, which I’m pretty sure you’ve heard it, of impact investing. The real estate investments they did, they did for an intent with an impact. So to impact someone positively, they really focused on who they were serving. Again, starting with the end in mind is, I forgot the book title, or having your why, Simon Sonic would start with why. But something that you said in there, purpose, making money is, I mean, you can do a lot of things to make money. But by the end of the day, you’ll keep the money that you do something intentional with, meaning, okay, this is for this or, and here we talk about legacy a lot. You know, what are you leaving? We really focus biblically, what is the inheritance for your children, your children, so forth and so on. So if you’re focused on building and creating that legacy today, what do you do with your money today and how you manage it and what you put into place today, those mechanisms should carry for yet generations yet to come and have a positive impact and influence on them. So I think that kind of wraps up some of what you were just saying there. So you’ve talked a bit about diversification and getting out of really just U.S. investment, U.S. stocks, et cetera. Now, obviously we’re in an interesting political climate and I don’t go too far. I mean, most of my views don’t match most people, but at the same time, what I know, I understand intent. That’s what I look at when I look at decisions and all the headlines and all that stuff is going on, but you’re making mention of a diversification out of mere U.S. stocks alone. And most people think, and I’m going to say this, Mark, and I definitely want your answer, but most people have in their mind that all this stuff is going on now or has went on in regards to tariffs, et cetera, is going to take the economies in other countries. And I’m pretty positive. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it’s going to take the economy here. I think we’ll have some, you know, it’s going to be uncomfortable a little bit as people try to figure out what a new normal is, but that’s just my thought. Give me yours.
MARK:
Well, I agree with you that there is a lot of fear. There’s fear about the tariffs in a tariff war. There’s fear about two real wars in the Mideast and in Ukraine. There’s fear of recession if deficit spending goes on. So there is a lot of fear out there in the world. But at the same time, for example, we’re in 27,000 individual holdings in 78 different countries all over the world. And we have an algorithm that manages the whole thing so that it stays balanced no matter what happens in the politics. If your portfolio needs a forecast about the future to work, it’s already broken. You need to build the diversification in your portfolio so that no matter what happens in the world, you have a great opportunity to create wealth over time. And people think when there’s bad times, the market always does bad. That’s not true. Even if things are hard or are bad, that doesn’t mean the market does bad. For example, from Pearl Harbor when we entered World War II all the way to the end when we signed the treaty with Japan, that was 100 million people died. We had Holocaust, we had Europe being destroyed. We had massive resources in our country going. We had hundreds of thousands of men dying and mainly men at the time and women dying in the wars all over the world. And it finally didn’t end until two nuclear bombs. And one would think if you knew the headlines that you would get destroyed and stopped. What’s counterintuitive is the S&P made 12% per year during those five terrible years for humanity. So my message is just because you know there’s a risk, even if you knew the headline tomorrow, you still wouldn’t be able to predict what the market’s going to do. So stop trying to predict the future. I know it’s hard for people, but you can’t predict the future. Last year, this time, if you would have told me Donald Trump was going to be the president after all of the being in jail and the fraud and the criminal and getting shot at twice and I mean almost twice. But I mean, after all this stuff, I would just think, gosh, there’s no way. So you can’t predict the future. So guys, you know, listeners, please just stop trying to predict. You really can’t even predict your own future, much less the future of the whole world.
CORWYN:
Exactly, exactly. Stay tuned next week for the second part of this episode. Guys, that was a great show today. And we thank you so much for taking the time to listen to Exit Strategies Radio Show. My name is Corwyn J. Melette. Yes, that is me. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for tuning in for today’s episode. Exit Strategies is my baby. It is how I give back to our community. It is how I foster goodwill, spread good news, and trustfully help you get great results. Guys, as I always say to as I always say to you, I love you. I love you. I love you. We’re gonna see you guys out there in the streets.
