The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 32

 

Episode 32: Free Grandparents?

On this episode, we’ve got a flaccid IPO market and some somber news out of Ukraine. AJ is back and mad at the IRS, but not as mad as John and Shane were last week. We’ve got tech companies in a hiring crisis, a town in Indiana luring tech workers with free grandparents, and many other shenanigans. We’ve also got Russian oligarchs skirting sanctions with all their assets in crypto. Yikes. This one is stinky.

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Speaker 1:

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered tax or investment advice. Welcome to the Liquidity Event. A show about all things, personal finance, with a laser focus on equity compensation. Hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI, each episode will take you through the week's news on FinTech, IPOs specs, founder wins and fails, crypto and whatever else these nerds think is interesting. Learn more and subscribe today at brooklynfi.com.

Shane:

Welcome to the Liquidity Event. We're your hosts, Shane.

AJ:

And I'm AJ, did you miss me?

Shane:

She's back. Back from... Where were you?

AJ:

I don't even know where I was. I was in Los Angeles.

Shane:

The Springs de Palm? Did you win the Palme d'Or?

AJ:

I did.

Shane:

This is episode 32 of the Liquidity Event. It is March 1st, happy March.

AJ:

Wow. Happy March. Only 17 days till St. Patrick's day.

Shane:

Charlie's birthday.

AJ:

Charlie's birthday. Happy birthday to your adorable Australian shepherd, for those who are not familiar with Charlie. But if you listen to this podcast, you probably know about Charlie. Speaking of Charlie, what are you reading, Shane?

Shane:

Wait, what? I thought you were going to make a,... I thought you were going to make a Vietnam joke. Speaking of...

AJ:

I was going to make a Vietnam joke about Ukraine and then I decided not to. SI went with something less spicy to talk about.

Shane:

You're trying to be topical. You didn't want to do an off the top Vietnam Ukraine comparison top of this episode?

AJ:

Well, I recently watched Good Morning Vietnam on up flight, which is, I wouldn't say a fantastic movie. It did not age well. It's incredibly misogynist and racist, but good overall commentary on the utility of war. Anyway.

Shane:

Yeah. I watched Dances with Wolves.

AJ:

With Robin Williams, Robin Williams. Always a good movie if you've got Robin Williams in it.

Shane:

True. He carries any film he's in. Yeah, I watched... What?

AJ:

I was just trying to think of a bad Robin Williams movie, but I couldn't.

Shane:

I'll give you 10 on that one.

AJ:

Patch Adams, I don't know.

Shane:

Great movie. I mean, it probably doesn't stand up. I watched a white savior movie the other night, Dances With Wolves. Yeah. Those 25 year old, 30 year old white savior movies, kind of rough.

AJ:

Don't really hold up. Yeah.

Shane:

Yeah. Becoming a Native American, that type of film would not really fly today would be made [crosstalk 00:02:41].

AJ:

I have not seen that.

Shane:

Yeah. Answer your question. I'm reading this book called, a therapist recommended this book, called 'Set Boundaries, Find Peace' by Nedra Tawwab. It's about how, my therapist was essentially telling me that I don't set proper boundaries and then I let my emotional battery run to 1% and then I lash out at people. I mean, I told her that and she told me why. And she told me to read this book. I'm working on myself.

AJ:

Good. Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it.

Shane:

Are you?

AJ:

Was one who has been on the receiving end of those emotional lash outs, I am glad to hear that you are finding peace.

Shane:

The set boundaries is my part, the find peace is your part.

AJ:

Anyways.

Shane:

You don't have a book here. What are you, you're not reading anything right now?

AJ:

I am not reading. I am overwhelmed by the world and the state of things and tax, honestly, it's a really busy time for us. When I clock out at night, I'm not reading books, I'm watching TV. I just finished the Anna Delvey show on Netflix called Becoming Anna, highly recommend for those fans of... I've been describing it as Gossip Girl meets Spotlight. It's upper east side, bitchy rich people, but also investigative journalism. I loved it, I thought it was really great. Just finished it last night.

Shane:

Cool. Cool. Cool. Yeah. It's number one on Netflix. Yeah.

AJ:

That's what I'm reading. I'm growing deaf, so every time I watch TV, I have to put the subtitles on. Does that count as reading?

Shane:

That means you're turning 35 soon.

AJ:

Right. Okay.

Shane:

That's what that is.

AJ:

I'm about 17 myself.

Shane:

Tell me you're turning 35 without telling me you're turning 35.

AJ:

Without you turning 35. What?

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

I can't understand that. Oh, that's how you spell that. Oh.

Shane:

Yeah. Subtitles are for adults for sure. I can't watch this twice.,I'm not missing a line. There's stuff going on. Yeah.

AJ:

It's very interesting because in my household, previously, [Nabeel 00:04:40] was anti, he would just find it really hard to follow foreign movies because he had to read it. He's like, honestly, it's really hard for me to follow. I can't read the text and pay attention to the screen. But ever since I've gone deaf and turned 33, now we watch everything with subtitles and now he's discovered foreign films and now he watches all these great movies in French and Turkish. It's been a really great Renaissance in our Netflix watching in our household.

Shane:

I'm proud of your-

AJ:

Thank you.

Shane:

You opening Nabeel up to international...

AJ:

[Crosstalk 00:05:12].

Shane:

I guess. All right. We're recording a little earlier in the day today. We've got some travel coming up. We're not drinking today because it's noon.

AJ:

I'm drinking water.

Shane:

Oh I'm drinking black coffee.

AJ:

In my XY Planning Network cold bottle. Shout out XYPN.

Shane:

Right on. You're in Brooklyn now, but you're not going to be in Brooklyn tomorrow.

AJ:

No, I'm going to London tomorrow.

Shane:

Now that COVID is over.

AJ:

Now that COVID is over, best friend of mine moved there a couple years ago, it's been a few years since I've seen her. Seemed like a good time. I'm going to go say hello.

Shane:

Cool.

AJ:

Say ello.

Shane:

I'm so glad we're not recording from London.

AJ:

Well I'm in London.

Shane:

Oh God. Can you do-

AJ:

Don't worry, I'll be back in a Jiff.

Shane:

The best English accent of all time is Paul Rudd in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Just one sentence. Can you do it?

AJ:

Wait, what is it? I don't remember it.

Speaker 4:

You sound like you're from London. Yeah. I'm from London.

AJ:

Oh.

Shane:

You don't have the same movie encyclopedia that I...

AJ:

From quote remembering, no I don't. I do not. I have to work at it to remember things.

Shane:

Well you hang out with me long enough. Do we have an IPO? We don't have an IPO this week, right?

AJ:

We don't have an IPO this week. I actually have a report on the state of IPOs in February, which is the month that just ended, instead of having an IPO because there's not that many exciting IPOs right now, which is why we're not doing a deep dive this week. You want to get into it? Should we get into this-

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

Renaissance Capital report?

Shane:

Yeah. I mean, for those listening, they've noticed that we've been talking about... We haven't had a really exciting IPO in the past, I don't know, 12 weeks. I think the last one that was really was Samsara was the last big tech IPO. We haven't really heard much about them, maybe we'll revisit Samsara next time next week. But yeah, we've got this article here from Renaissance Capital about the February IPO market update and the bar graphs are looking slim, looking tiny for February.

AJ:

Looking a little slim. Yeah, there were eight IPOs raising a total of-

Shane:

Maybe that's their new year's resolution to slim down.

AJ:

Oh my God.

Shane:

The IPO-

AJ:

Oy vey.

Shane:

Could take a couple pounds off.

AJ:

The IPO raised a slim $271 million, which is a 76% year over year decline in the IPO count and a 97% drop in proceeds. A year ago, a bunch more IPOs raising a lot more money. Yeah. Look, February's a short month, right? Can't blame February, only 28 days to get shit done. Can't blame them

AJ:

I mean, look, there's an IPO drop. I think we can speculate, I'm sure smarter people than us have speculated endlessly, but look, we're all scared of inflation, markets feel a little bit rocky. This was before Russia invaded the Ukraine, but now that Russia has invaded the Ukraine, I imagine folks are just not excited to make their public debut. They're waiting, they're sitting on their S-1's or they're waiting to file their S-1's. Those are the trends that we're seeing. Interesting. What do we have to say? Yeah, there was only one deal in February that raised more than $100 million. What else we got here? On the bright side, IPO markets show signs of finding a bottom. Oh, we found the bottom, wonderful.

Shane:

Find the bottom of a bottom-

AJ:

Hello.

Shane:

Every night.

AJ:

We found the bottom. We're calling the bottom here, I guess, with the IPO index down just 1% outperforming the S&P 500. Meaning that in the month of February, the IPO market was actually doing better than the S&P 500. That's good news. Little bit of silver lining there for tech companies, I guess. I don't know.

Shane:

I'm sorry. I'm just reminded, my buddy likes to send me unprompted stupid financial commentary.

AJ:

Okay.

Shane:

And the S&P was down, I don't know, it was down today or yesterday. And he just texted me an apropos of nothing. More like shit and piss 500. I was just like, what? Thank you, Mark and anyone else that just texts me general financial things, you're scraping the surface of financial knowledge and you just to talk about it, I'm here for your juvenile sophomore childness.

AJ:

Agree, agree. Renaissance Capital is a company that just keeps a lot of data on private companies. They've got this private company watch list. They have 217 companies that they're just keeping tabs on that they're thinking these are the next companies that are going to file to go public. During the month, they removed over a dozen companies, meaning that those dozen companies were not looking like they were going to go public anytime soon. But their pipeline has some good deals. We've got Zazzle, the eCommerce firm. That'll let you basically print anything you want on anything you want. I have a great calendar mousepad-

Shane:

Anything?

AJ:

That I got from Zazzle. Yes, anything. As long as you're not violating any copyrights. And sock brand Bombas, are you familiar with the Bombas sock brand?

Shane:

Yeah. How can I not be? I'm a millennial that has Instagram.

AJ:

They're terrible. They're terrible socks.

Shane:

Whoa.

AJ:

I threw away all my Bomba socks.

Shane:

Wow.

AJ:

They're supposed to be like compression socks, but they're just aggressively compression and they all have holes in them after three months of wearing them. That fault.

Shane:

Interesting. Interesting.

AJ:

Anyways.

Shane:

Can we get that again? Was that the board or was that you?

AJ:

That was me.

Shane:

A lot, improv. That was a-

AJ:

There's no more board.

Shane:

Yes, and...

AJ:

I got bored of the board.

Shane:

Okay. All right. Let's keep it moving.

AJ:

Oh, anyways. Anyways. An Indiana town is offering free grandparents for people who are willing to move there.

Shane:

Oh, right. We're moving on.

AJ:

Anyways. Next story.

Shane:

Sorry. No, I was thinking about the chairman of the board.

AJ:

Would you like a free grandparent?

Shane:

Do you usually have to pay?

AJ:

I don't know.

Shane:

What's the discount here?

AJ:

I guess it's more support. Greensburg, Indiana is a small community of 12,000, but the town has a goal to grow it's population and hoping that by offering free grandparents, they will attract remote tech workers who perhaps feel lonely and want an elderly companion to share their wisdom.

Shane:

You know what they say? If the product is free, you are the product. I'm not falling for this. I prefer to pay for my grandparents personally, when I indulge.

AJ:

Note, you must be 18 years old to be matched with a grandparent.

Shane:

Gotcha. I've honestly never understood grandparents, because I've never really had them dead or missing or no attention. I don't get it. I've never understood it until my nieces and nephews had my mom and dad for grandparents, which seemed cool. I guess there's money and lots of toys. But yeah, at my age, I think I'm good. I think I'm good.

AJ:

Oh man. My grandpa was such an important person in my life.

Shane:

I know. It's very different for you because you've got an awesome relationship with your grandpa into your mid thirties, which is crazy.

AJ:

Yeah. Shout out Murray [Grosanne 00:12:44], still kicking it at 98. We email all the time about the markets, he asks about Brooklyn, he asks about you, he asks about... Yeah. He is a very special person that I'm very lucky to share some DNA with. Although I don't want to live till 98.

Shane:

Yeah you do. Yeah you do.

AJ:

And whenever you ask him what the secret to long life is, he always says yogurt.

Shane:

Murray.

AJ:

Each your yogurt, kids. Murray Grosanne.

Shane:

I've heard it with something else. I thought it was pinching booties in the retirement home.

AJ:

Oh yeah. Anyways. Some things I share with you are not for this podcast. Anyways. Tech companies face a fresh crisis, hiring. We've got a long and well researched New York Times article. Shane, what do you have for me here? You read this one.

Shane:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We've been experiencing recruiting issues as well. I mean the great resignation is going on, people went into remote work and sitting at home without much to do, less of a commute on their hands and started to rethink how they wanted to interact with the world. And with work, most specifically, which has been draining people with wealth inequality and the rise of the capitalist class, people's wages have been suppressed. And when remote work hit, a lot of people decided that they were done with it, especially in accounting for one. I mean a lot of other industries have experienced this and we had a difficult time... What are you laughing at?

AJ:

Sorry. I just was thinking of the Monte Python and the Holy Grail skit where it's like help, help I'm being repressed. It's like help, help, help, help. Our wages are being suppressed.

Shane:

Is that when the mud farmers are going on?

AJ:

Yes. Yeah.

Shane:

I didn't work for you.

AJ:

It's like, I didn't vote for you.

Shane:

Just because some tar in the lake threw a sword at you.

AJ:

A sword thrown at you doesn't make you of king of England. Well, actually it does.

Shane:

Come and see the violence in the system. All right. That's too much Monty... Anyway.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

People putting their...

AJ:

Yeah. You could just rattle off... I've probably seen that movie, not exaggerating, 25 times and I recognize that scene, but I cannot rattle it off with the grace at which you do, so props to you.

Shane:

I got one thing going for me. Yeah. People are quitting their jobs. And what the article here, we looked at hiring recruiters ourselves to find tax managers, which people are dropping out of tax left and right. The industry has not evolved, the average-

AJ:

I wonder why.

Shane:

The average-

AJ:

Why are people leaving tax? Sorry, I missed last week's episode. Did you talk about that?

Shane:

Oh my God. Yeah. It's a tough job and no one wants to do it and it is oftentimes not rewarding. We'll talk about that when we talk about cyber security later. Oh, actually you have a prompt here for me. The-

AJ:

Yes, I do have a prompt for you here, which as I started to read this long article, I was like, blah, blah, blah. Hiring is hard, blah, blah, blah. Who's being paid the most, who's getting jobs? It's people who work in tech or it's something like less than 1% unemployment versus four or 5% overall. And then within that, if you work in cyber security, you are definitely employed right now. My question to you is knowing where we are in the state of the world right now, how "easy" it is to get a job in tech and how well paid you could be and all of the potential job flexibility it comes with. Going back in time, would you change your career trajectory to go get one of these great jobs and or would you tell your future children and or your nieces or nephews to go into this field to get these great jobs?

Shane:

Most people, in an effort to make amends with who they have become will say everything happens for a reason and I would be a different person if things didn't happen the way that they happened, I don't subscribe to that. I often say, yeah, I would change the past dramatically. And I don't know who I would be if I didn't get kicked out of high school, but I'd probably have more opportunities before I had gone into a tech route or whatever it is, I would probably still have the amazing friend circle and support network that I have. I don't know, but I imagine going into cybersecurity is a lot like tax in that there are parallels in that they're really, really complicated industries that people only feel you add value if they don't hear negative things.

Shane:

If something doesn't go wrong. People expect with cybersecurity, you would only hear if something went wrong if there was a cybersecurity threat that actually resulted in a ransomware attack. And with tax, it's the same thing where you only hear about it when you make a mistake. You often don't get to add value and say, we actually reduce your taxes by this because it's backwards looking. One of the rad things about financial planning is that we get to look into the future and do advisory to reduce taxes and create outcomes that we want. And we craft those, which adds a lot of value to people. Whereas with cybersecurity, yeah, I'm sure it pays a ton, but do people at the water cooler pat you on the back and say, "Hey, great job today with preventing nothing from happening."

Shane:

Probably not. They just don't understand it. They understand that you make more than them. You make more than them, you probably have more flexibility and you can demand more from work and you have more options and you have more... Yeah. I don't know. It's an interesting question. It's better to have more opportunities, net net, right. I imagine I would be pushing my teenage nieces and nephews into a field like this because just like with accounting, you can go a lot of different directions because you've got a skillset set that it's in high demand and few supply. That's my take on it. Which you got it. Would you not go into music journalism and get into cybersecurity?

AJ:

Were you and I having conversation about this, about what would you change if you could go back in time? Would you change the course of your life? Was that you that I was...

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

I think about that fairly often. Yeah.

AJ:

Yeah. I don't know. Sometimes I think yes. There are definitely decisions. I wish I had been involved in tech earlier in my career because I didn't realize that I would be so interested in it and I kind of fell into it by accident. I took a big left turn into it and I didn't realize how much I would love it and how much I would love the culture because I wasn't even exposed to it growing up.

Shane:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

AJ:

That's kind of my regret is that I wish I had learned a little bit early. I didn't fall into the tech world until my mid twenties. And I wish that I had sought that out more in college. There was an amazing computer science department at my college I didn't even know about. I wish I had known those kids and known those professors. I feel like we would've, I don't know. Might have been a different path.

Shane:

I think you and I would definitely be a little bit less extroverted if we had ended up in those routes. It's not just a, which I think benefits us to a degree, especially when we work with so many people, but yeah.

AJ:

Potent, potent. But yeah, if I have kids, you're going to cybersecurity or you don't get any treats after dinner.

Shane:

Anyway, getting back to this article of what I was saying earlier is typically recruiters will get 20% of someone's salary if they land them a job. In this case, so if someone lands a job at 100K, the recruiter gets 20,000 for going through all the hard work of placing that, putting that person in the seat. And as an employer that's looked for people, I've considered doing that. But during the great resignation was when I first started looking for folks. For tax managers and tax people specifically, they wanted 30%, which is a 50% uptake in the cost. And now this article's talking about people paying 40% to find engineers, especially within the cybersecurity space and all the people won't take calls and they'll only respond to the recruiter with three requests, remote, salary, flexibility, or I forget what it is, but they're just...

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

No one's entertaining moving jobs and they get the pick of whatever they want. And even recruiters are having difficulty in the tech space as opposed to a lot of others. What else you got?

AJ:

That's all I got on that topic. You want to talk about crypto?

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

We've got...

Shane:

Sure. Excellent segue.

AJ:

Yes. I don't have a segue. In celebrities and billionaires, we've got some Russian billionaires who have had their assets frozen. In Russian banks and banks that they have internationally where they have deposited currencies recognized by governments, those assets have been frozen. However, assets that are on the blockchain have not been frozen because we don't know how to do that, right. Because we have-

Shane:

Because there's no central [crosstalk 00:21:38].

AJ:

Because there's no... We have decentralized and deregulated this sector of the monetary system. Look, Bitcoin and crypto is doing exactly what it was supposed to do. It's supposed to operate outside of governments, right? We have Bitcoin enthusiasts who need to recognize that this is an outcome. This is what's supposed to happen. Our arms should not be up in the air if we're going to deregulate and not have to report transactions. Bad things are going to happen.

AJ:

Bitcoin is often used for criminal activity. And in this case, we see these oligarchs who, they're not all oligarchs, but just wealthy folks in Russia who are maybe fleeing the country, don't want to be harmed by sanctions.

Shane:

Also oligarchs.

AJ:

They don't have to be. And oligarchs, sure. Most of which are oligarchs. They're hanging out on their yachts and because of the Bitcoin and crypto market, they can live on what they need. You can buy things that they need to live with cryptocurrency. What do you got on this one?

Shane:

Well. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, it's pretty rad that first of all, that we live in the base currency country, the United States, everyone uses United States dollars as a medium of exchange, which provides a lot of power when it comes to sanctions. And a lot of threats to folks that don't get in line with the world. And luckily it's a democracy that we live in that mostly does nice things and mostly uses the rule of law to protect private property and enforce justice, but obviously there's a lot of problems with that in the United States, but also in Western Europe and other NATO countries. But yeah. I mean, I'm also just thinking about the cost, not just to criminal activity, and to providing these oligarchs with ways of avoiding banking sanctions, but also how this impacts the global climate emissions that are needed to support cryptocurrency.

Shane:

It's not only do we have people able to use a decentralized currency to commit crimes, but it also murders the planet at the same time. It's like, okay, this is a lose lose in this scenario. Now, I have heard that it's so expensive to move money around the cryptocurrency networks and to launder money this way, that it's actually less of a threat, it's not just as easy as we think it is. I mean, if you're taking 5% off the top every time you move money and you're moving millions of dollars, that is incredibly expensive as opposed to a wire. We have to remember that the IRS, 97% of its illegal activity seizures in 2021 were of cryptocurrencies. Our government does have the ability to get onto the chain and track this money down so it's not totally traceless.

Shane:

I mean, it is all public information, supposedly. I'm not going to pretend I understand it. Something to keep in mind is a cashless. Society is a less criminal society. 26% of all payments in the United States are still made in cash, which is crazy compared to Europe, which has a lot to do with people not trusting banks and not getting their freedom stomped on and don't tread on me and all that fun stuff. In reality, cash promotes illegal activity. I mean, think about briefcases full of cash. This is how the mob works because it's untraceable. If any listeners have a stack or a list or a ranking of the most difficult de-launder types of payments, whether that's wires, Bitcoin or cash, I would love to see that list. But these are all the things I have in mind on this model.

AJ:

There's a good reason why it's hard to wire money, right? There's a good reason why it costs a few dollars. People complain about wire fees, I just paid $25 to do a wire. And that pissed me off. But it's good that it's hard because you're literally sending a payment that cannot be recalled at all that's going into the metaverse and who knows where it's... I don't know. That was a dumb segue, but I'm happy to pay for my wire fees is all I have to say.

Shane:

Okay.

AJ:

Speaking of taxes. Tax season 2022, I know you and John did a big deep dive last week.

Shane:

Yeah. This is just one more item on the tax befuddlement that's happening during tax season 2022. There are some updates to the tax returns. There is a new line item on the tax return on schedule one, for those who care, just called income from stock options. And it's such a funny line. I mean, we wouldn't bring it up with such an obtuse thing if the purpose for that line on the tax return wasn't so funny. Line h-a of schedule one is specifically for income that was accidentally excluded from your W2. Apparently this is happening so often that the IRS was like, you know what? We need a new line item on the tax return for stock option income that was just totally left off W2s because stock plan administrators, payroll, and legal don't know how to accurately report W2 income from equity compensation.

Shane:

I mean, it was just the other day, just yesterday that I removed $700,000 of income from one of our client its tax returns because it had already been picked up elsewhere on their return. And if we didn't know them intimately, none of this is on the tax. I mean, most tax repairers get a W2, put it in the return, get a 1099, put it in the return. That's it, we're done, you send it to the IRS. But in this situation, and a lot of the situations that we deal with with our clients, you have to go off script and go pull information from dossiers that we keep on them, in depth interviews, ongoing relationships, to make sure that... I mean, this is 350,000 of tax that this person would have paid extra. Even if they paid us $10,000 a year, what is that? 350 years of our fees? Not to self promote too much, but this is actually happening all the time.

AJ:

I mean, I literally want to shake everyone I know. If you have stock options, if you have non-qualified options or incentive stock options, you need a tax preparer who knows what they're doing. You cannot use TurboTax because as Shane was saying, what's happening is that TurboTax is just asking you to upload the forms. You're uploading the forms, but you're often double counting that income. You have made a mistake, you didn't know you made a mistake because you're just reporting what's on the forms that got sent to the IRS, but you're literally double reporting income. If you don't have a tax preparer or a CPA or an enrolled agent who knows what they're looking for and knows your situation, you're going to end up paying potentially what, hundreds of thousands of dollars of unnecessary tax. And these are not outlier cases, right, Shane? This is the norm. This is most tax returns with equity compensation, where we as tax preparers have to make a manual adjustment just because we've asked the client a bunch of questions.

Shane:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, hopefully we'll all be in a scenario where we have an extra 700K of income that we need to tell our accountant about, but.

AJ:

Anyways.

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

That was a downer. I feel we always get on our soapbox about that, but it's tax season. And if you're listening to this, you probably have equity compensation. I'm getting back on my soapbox. Let's end on a little funny high note here. We're almost out of time. Amex introduced this feature where within Venmo, you can actually move money from your Amex credit card into Venmo. And Shane, you were testing this out. Well, you could tell the story, because this is a story about me getting pranked. Go ahead.

Shane:

Yeah, no. Well Venmo is notorious for not talking to anything else, including accounting software, which drives me nuts. But they finally introduced some way for you to split transactions because it talks to Amex or somebody buys dinner to make it easier to split the transaction. MX that you paid for dinner with will talk to Venmo and allow you to request the money from other people that were at dinner. I went to the liquor store and bought $500 worth of liquor for tax season and just hit AJ up for a $250 reimbursement. A little 50% off [crosstalk 00:30:03].

AJ:

Anyways, this has been the Liquidity Event. You can email us liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com. Leave us a voicemail, we'll play it on the air at podinbox.com/liquidityevent. Show notes at brooklynfi.com/episode32. Thanks for being cool and filing your taxes on time. Peace.

Shane:

Peace.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening to the Liquidity Event, hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI. Head on over to brooklynfi.com where you can subscribe to the podcast or YouTube channel. Or if you want to learn about their full service financial planning tax and investment firm, specializing in tech professionals and creatives on the path to financial independence. We'll see you next time on the Liquidity Event.