‘Filthy Fortunes’: Matt Paxton Searches for Buried Treasure in Hoarders’ Homes

Matt Paxton isn’t afraid of a little trash pile. Well, maybe not just a little as viewers know from watching the decluttering and downsizing expert on Hoarders. The author, also known from Legacy List with Matt Paxton, is back with his new Discovery series Filthy Fortunes. Here the“King of Hoards” venture across the country in search of rare, big-ticket items hidden in mounds of stuff. 

Over the season, he’ll strike up deals with clients to not only clean out these overloaded properties, but also walk out with a nice payday. Paxton enlists the help of his team including Mike Kelleher, expert appraiser, and Kayland Brock, clean up manager, take on the biggest, most dangerous and physically demanding jobs to transform the properties and the lives of those in desperate need of their help in the process. Episodes will see the crew uncover everything from valuable baseball cards and misprinted stamps to military memorabilia and rare coin collections worth thousands of dollars. 

Paxton sat down to tease some of the unique finds and stories to come. 

Matt Paxton in a client’s hoard. (Discovery Channel)

This show is great because it’s like Hoarders mixed with Pawn Stars. How did this project come together? 

Matt Paxton: Pretty much that’s it. I’ve been cleaning houses for 25 years professionally and on TV. Everyone knows me from Hoarders. I was the host of that show for 15 years. Just naturally in my business life people kind of switched from donating things to needing to sell it. A showrunner contacted me saying everyone is redoing all these old shows. They asked me if there was anything new about hoarding. I said, “We sell everything now.” It was simple as that.

They asked if there was anything cool in the houses. I took the producers to a house in Los Angeles. I didn’t know what we were walking into. We were just walking into this guy’s house and found some of the coolest stuff. Old vinyl, old art, just cool things worth 20 grand in this house. It’s really what is happening in the houses we’re cleaning across the country. People inherit a couple of houses with two to three generations of stuff. Now like your grandpa’s stuff is from the 1980s. It’s not prewar stuff. It’s like an Atari 2600. We found one of those this year with all the original games. I think it’s just good timing. Economically, people need to sell their stuff. And there is a lot of cool nostalgia in here. 

What’s one thing you were surprised there is actually a market out there for? I think about the premiere when you discover the marbles. 

You read my mind. We found over 60 grand worth of marbles. I didn’t know there was a community for that. One thing I’ve learned in my life is there is a community for everything. We were in that house for the salt and pepper shaker collection. And that didn’t make the show because the marbles were worth so much. Going in, we didn’t even know the house had marbles. There were marbles that would be a hundred bucks a piece because they were hand-crafted by artists in West Virginia.

The one that really blew me away was the remnants. I learned so much in this house. This lady would go to West Virginia and the old marble factories and dig in the dirt and dig so deep they would find the remnants of things that fell off the production line. They would take them and document them, and we would find them 50 years later and are worth a lot of money. The documentation made it so valuable. That lady had documented everything. We knew where each was from, who the artists were, the factory we got them from and could sell them for a lot more. 

You look to put a lot of trust in Mike’s abilities to appraise these things and make a good deal. Talk about your dynamic with Mike and Kayland. 

Kayland used to sell me Slurpees at 7-Eleven a 20 years. I’ve known Kayland for 20 years and Mike much of the same. We’re a team of hustlers, and I mean that in a positive way. We all grew up together and cleaning houses. When I was off doing Hoarders, writing books and doing speeches, they were the guys cleaning houses for me. So, the trust is earned. We have been through 15 years of cleaning houses. The story of meeting Mike is pretty crazy. Mike was picking vintage sweaters out of a Goodwill before that was cool. He was selling them out of his car. I asked him what he was doing. He was telling me how he would get them and then sell them at Christmas time for $60 to people like me. We’ve been working together ever since.

I put a lot of trust in Mike, but he knows the market. Especially, when it comes to things that are not traditional. I can sell your grandma’s dining room, china and silver, but Mike knows how to sell the t-shirt from the concert you went to in 1986. He knows which version of that videogame would sell more or less. One thing we found this year that I never knew I would find is Pokémon cards. We found more Pokémon cards than we did baseball cards. Mike can tell you if it’s fake or not. He knows the difference. We’re taking a big risk here as a team. This is money. I think in this episode we turn down a near $40,000 offer. That was hard because that was real money. You have to believe in what you have and trust the numbers and data. You also have to look at the economics of the time. It was the summer when things were good where we may have taken that $40,000 today. We didn’t, and it paid off. 

Discovery Channel

What are some of the unique things you’re finding this season? 

There is a thing called a Gibson Girl, which was from World War II. It’s like a hand crank radio device where these guys would jump out of a plane and parachute with it. They would use that to be found if they were lost in the ocean or somewhere. I’ve heard of them, but never saw one before. We found three in a house in an attic. That’s real history. It was really cool. We found original Jeep parts from World War II. An Edison phonograph was cool. Before vinyl records, but the same technology and shaped differently. There is a wine collection I can tease. There is an insane wine collection we found. Who knew wine was worth that much money? And cash, man. We always find cash. I love finding cash and silver and gold. I love it. It is literally a treasure hunt where you feel like a pirate. When you find boxes of gold, there is nothing better. 

And gold value continues to rise. So, you’re telling me there is a little bit of Gold Rush mixed in here. 

I mean yeah. One episode we found this guy who had been panning gold for 30 years. We just found these gold jars full of panned gold. It was kind of funny because one of the producers joked, “I think we found more gold in this house than we did on Gold Rush. They found more gold, but it was funny. We find a lot of gold,  but it’s the same mentality. You have to know where to dig. You have to know where to find it. 

What can you say about the people you meet? These are a lot of times relatives grieving the loss of a family member. 

There is the emotional part of it nobody realizes. We’re finding this stuff in somebody’s house where it’s usually someone’s grandma or grandpa. There was one story where we’d emptied this one house. We have to find the value in these cleanups. If we’re costing 20 grand to clean up a house, we have to find 40 grand in value because we want the family to make some money, we want to make some money and cover costs. It’s a risk. Sometimes you don’t find it. We were deep into the house where on Day 3 we were wrapping up. At lunch, we hadn’t found anything. The crew forgot this was a business and not just a show. 

They could see my attitude change dramatically. We were beat and just sweeping up. I told Kayland to throw away the bookshelf and we’re done. He kicks over this crappy bookshelf that was trash and behind it was a trapdoor. You can’t make this up. It’s from the late 1970s, and no family alive knew that ever existed. I’ll tease it. We found out the grandma had really looked after this family and nobody knew it until that exact moment. That’s the kind of sh*t you can’t make up. What we learned throughout the years is you can’t give up until the last minute. You always can find something in the last 10 minutes. People hid it for a reason. We found a Mickey Mantle rookie card this year. We found a Sandy Koufax rookie card in such good condition. The same house we found a John Wilkes Booth card. That’s the craziest thing. It was a card from the play he was in as an actor. We were five minutes from the Ford’s Theater and this thing had been sitting in the house for probably 60 or 70 years. 

What can you tell us about the condition of the houses you walk into?

Every house is dangerous. It has been sitting. You know there is treasure on that pirate ship, but I’m thinking about that scene from The Goonies. That ship has been sitting there for maybe 100 years. I’m being excited here, but that’s the way we have to see it in our heads when we’re finding treasure. We were in an attic this past summer where it was 115 degrees. We’re digging through stuff and you have to keep hydrated and rotate guys. We had one house ridden with rats. It was just an hourly flow or rats coming through. We’re still picking through stuff because that’s our job. A lot of times you don’t know what’s going to fall down. 

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One time we thought we were standing on the floor of the attic, but it turns out we were standing on top of a pile from the room below us. There was no floor. The attic floor has disintegrated. Sometimes you don’t realize what you’re dealing with until a couple of hours into it. That house full of rats, we pulled out one of those old colonial butter churners. It was beautiful and worth a lot of money. We pulled the top off, which can be worth a lot of money, and a bunch of rats ran out of there. It scared the crap out of me. Then you look in there and it’s the worst smell you’d ever smell in your life. Then it’s a graveyard of rats. This is the reality of some of the houses you’re in. You find a lot of cool stuff, but to get to the cool stuff, you have to go through some absolutely disgusting stuff. You don’t get one without the other. 

Filthy Fortunes, Series Premiere, March 9, 10/9c, Discovery Channel