Welcome to the Flip Houses Like a Girl Podcast

You're listening to the flip houses like a girl podcast where we educate, empower and celebrate everyday women who are facing their fears, juggling family and business, embracing their awesomeness and wholeheartedly chasing their dream of flipping houses. Each episode delivers honest to goodness tools, tips and strategies you can implement today to get closer to your first or next successful house flip. Here's your spiky-haired breakfast taco loving host, house flipping coach Debbie DeBerry.

Just as the podcast intro suggests. Yes, I have spiky hair . I'm a huge fan of breakfast tacos. I'm also a house flipping coach. In addition to that, I'm a real estate investor and I live in Austin, Texas with my partner and my son. While the structured coaching programs that I offer are geared toward women, I definitely have some spouse teams and solo men that I coach as well, so I know guys will get plenty of goodness out of this podcast. I'm not worried about that, but it goes without saying that this is a male dominated industry. It's a good old boys club, if you will, and I'm here specifically to empower the crap out of women. To take calculated risks and go after their big dreams, and I'm going to do all that without the usual hype and bs that comes along with this industry because truth be told, that stuff just sets you up for failure. You're not going to hear me talk about how to become a millionaire flipping houses. Do you know why? Because that doesn't resonate with me. What resonates with me is having so much control over my time, my energy, my financial security, getting to enjoy life, getting to go to my son's field trips in the middle of the day because I can, even though he doesn't freaking want me there, I don't care. I'm going. But really the conversation here is going to be about generating consistent cashflow by loving on old, tired, disregarded houses, adding rental properties, leaving a legacy, and having so much fun and loving our lives along the way. And while we're doing that, we're going to be making enough money to cover all of our bases. We're going to cover everyone's once their needs. We're going to donate to charities and organizations that are meaningful to us and we're going to save. We're going to actually have some to tuck away for savings. That is the conversation here. I just want to be super clear about that. We'll talk about balancing kids and family and business responsibilities. We'll talk about how to find the time to do the things that we need to do to move the needle forward on our business and so much more. If you want to learn the ins and outs of flipping houses in the mindset that leads to success in this business as well as celebrate everyday women who are completing their first flips with big grins on their faces, then you're in the right place. Now, my whole life, I've gone against the grain and I intend to do that here as well. I'm here to encourage you. I'm not interested in interviewing other coaches or the gurus out there. Those stories are tired. I'm interested in how a fellow mom has had this dream for so long and she finally puts herself first and chooses to chase her house flipping dreams, how an exhausted and beat down real estate agent starts flipping houses and gained so much more control over her time and finances. Those are the stories I'm interested in and those are the stories I'm here to share. Frankly, I'm interested in you and in your story. We'll be talking about how to overcome the internal challenges and battles we have like overcoming imposter syndrome and making big strides in our businesses when we do so and how to keep our minds right when things just do not go our way, how to stay so attached to our why and committed and determined to make this house flipping thing work. Those are all going to be parts of the conversation here. Flipping houses involves way more than just the step by step process and if you ignore that way more, that's what tends to keep people stuck and down when things don't go their way, when they get knocked down, when things don't happen fast enough. In addition to the things we've talked about so far. Each episode we'll have tips, tools, and strategies that you can implement in your business immediately. All right, let me tell you a little bit about myself and my house flipping journey so you can see why it might be at all relevant to yours. So I have been in real estate since 2003 I got my real estate license for two reasons. One, I wanted to be a real estate investor. I don't know. I thought it sounded cool and I thought you needed your real estate license in order to do so. And to my mom said, hey Debbie, you should get your real estate license. I think you'd enjoy it and you'd be great at it. Honestly, I think she just wanted access to the houses that were on the market because she really loved dragging me to open houses and we always talked about real estate growing up. We were always talking about houses. So there's that. I got my license in 2003 and over the course of the next few years I invested in a couple of rental properties and I was super busy in my traditional real estate business working with clients, buyers and sellers. And frankly, I was so burned out. I was exhausted. I was tired of the chase. I was tired of the hustle and the grind because it was a really ugly hustle. It wasn't a structured hustle and I don't know how best to explain it, but it just felt chaotic and it felt, it just felt so overwhelming. The problem is that I was incredibly grateful for the business. I mean, we had a great business and I was incredibly grateful for that and I knew I needed to make some changes because eventually I wanted to have a family, but I did not want to have a family under those circumstances. I needed way more control over my time, way more control over my finances. So I always had in the back of my mind that I wanted to flip houses. I just didn't know how to do it. And so I thought I could just figure it out. Of course I could figure it out. I was a real estate broker. Well, five years later, five years of trying to figure it out and being super frustrated and feeling totally stuck in traditional real estate. I finally hired a coach and finally did my first flip. And that just opened the floodgates and I was in love. The coolest part for me, honestly, even though I made over 60 grand profit on that first flip, that is fantastic. And that was in 2008 even though I made that big of a profit, the very best part for me was seeing people's reactions and hearing their reactions because all of a sudden people were calling me creative. And my whole life I had known myself as an athlete and as like this kind of numbers nerd person, so to be called creative was so new and so far out there. It took me a while to grasp and yeah, I am super, but I didn't have any awareness of that until I sort of flipping houses. So that was my first flip and within 12 months I was making six figures and I was so happy, like there was so much joy. It was so different than the traditional real estate I was doing and I really just stopped doing any sort of marketing or any lead generation for real estate clients. I wasn't doing anything. I would work with past clients, which is what I do now, but I do not go out and seek traditional real estate clients. So just to recap, I was an exhausted, frustrated, totally burned out real estate agent and I knew that I needed to make some changes. And so I finally got the courage to go all in on my house flipping dreams. And I'm so freaking glad that I did. So my sole focus was flipping houses and investing in real estate until March of 2014 which is when the rug kinda got pulled out from underneath my feet. I lost my foundation, my beloved mom, my biggest fan, my biggest cheerleader, my rock, she died in her sleep. She just didn't wake up perfectly healthy woman, not on any medication. Perfectly healthy. So to say it was a shock is an understatement. And the way I coped was by throwing myself totally into my kid and the renovation projects that I had going on. I had two flips going on at the time. Thank goodness, thank goodness for my kid and thank goodness for my flips. And that's what I did for about a year. I just focused on flip after flip after flip, after flip. Because if I had stopped creating in that time, as well as been deeply grieving and mourning the loss of my mother, wow. I don't know how things would've turned out because what I've learned is that creative expression is immensely important in my life. So during that time of morning and trying to figure out how could I turn the death of my mother into anything remotely positive, and it took me a while , it was really important to me that whatever I did was super meaningful to me and made a huge impact on others. And because my mom had always instilled in this sense of, Oh heck yeah, I can totally do that, because she always had my back. She was my safety net, she was my biggest cheerleader and I knew I could go try new things because I knew I'd always have her. And so when that was taken away from me, what I realized was during that first year I was asking the wrong question. I was trying to figure out how do I move on? How do I keep going in this happy go lucky, everything's going to be alright . Attitude that I had always had up until my mom's death because I'll tell you what, that was kind of taken from me that was hard and I was kind of just waiting for the next thing. What's that next terrible thing that's going to happen? Because what I learned was that really awful things can happen and come out of nowhere. Within nine or 10 months of my mom's death, I got a divorce. So the time I got to spend with my son was reduced. I was now sharing custody and this is the dude remember that I was pouring a lot into in order to heal that open raw wound that I felt around my mom's death. So it's like my Woobie was taken away. So that was the second crummy thing that happened in the time period of 2014 and 15 on top of all of that, I ended up in a really bad flip deal where a title company made a really bad mistake and for two years I was basically at their mercy trying to get everything resolved. Of course with the help of attorneys and trying to get my money back out of a property, it was a mess and it was a total fluke what happened? But I was like, okay, seriously, this is the worst timing ever for this. So I'm in deep grief over my mom. I then get in this financial mess and have zero control over how fast things get resolved. I'm at the mercy of the title company for two years. That took two years to get resolved. It forced me to file bankruptcy on one of my businesses to know how embarrassing that is and humiliating. Do you know how little I felt in all of that? So what a couple of years I had 2014 to 2016 work kind of awful, but at the same time, for lack of a better word, it birthed this beautiful, awesome vision and idea of mine to pay forward all of the love and support my mom always gave me and everyone around her and do that in a way that empowers women to chase their dream of flipping houses and to do it with a support team they never realized they could even possibly have. Because I'm here to tell you the support and the encouragement and the love that we give each other, these amazing women that I'm fortunate enough to call my tribe, my people. It is simply unparalleled. And that right there was the only way I was ever going to put my name on any sort of real estate investing coaching program. And that was if the support was through the roof, that it totally blew people's socks off. That it was more than anything anyone ever expected. And that's what I did. And I'm doing that with the help of all of the awesome women that I get to work with in my program every single day. It's amazing. So out of a couple of years of really crummy experiences that I had that would have kept a lot of people on the sideline, it would have kept a lot of people down. I was determined to not be defeated by those circumstances. I was going to put on my big girl pants and make big things happen. I didn't know how. All I knew was I needed to surround myself with the right people. And that's a lesson for everyone because who you choose to surround yourself with matters. Are they helping you play a bigger game in life or are they keeping you small? You've got to be willing to take a risk. You've got to be willing to get into action and you've got to be resilient when things don't happen exactly as you want them to all the time. All right , so in a nutshell, that's me and we'll get to know each other along the way. And I am really excited to get to take this journey with you. Thank you so much, and we'll see you on the next episode. All right, y'all make it a great day.