The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 34

 

Episode 34: We’ve Solved the Housing Crisis!

In this episode of the Liquidity Event we’ve got inflation fears, interest rates spikes, 3D printed homes, another Grimes baby, gin martinis, and Dolly Parton. And that’s just the first ten minutes. With the IPO market a little slow, our hosts are left with the scraps of the internet. Wall Street is kvetching about a 0.25% interest rate hike and our hosts display their disdain for fear-mongering. But the high priestess of country music, Dolly Parton wrote a novel, so that’s nice. This one is a little bit country.

Read the Full Transcript

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, SPACs, founder wins and fails, crypto, and whatever else these nerds think is interesting. Learn more and subscribe today at brooklynfi.com.

AJ:

Are you going to start us off?

Shane:

We should figure this out. We should figure out how we're going to start off. It's episode 34, after all.

AJ:

Even episodes, I start off, on odd episodes, you start off. So it's even, so I will start off. Hello, welcome to The Liquidity Event.

Shane:

Wait, I'm the odds?

AJ:

You want to be the evens? Be my guest. Take it away, Shane.

Shane:

No, you do it. Fire us up. Fire us off one shot.

AJ:

Welcome to The Liquidity Event. We're your hosts, AJ.

Shane:

And I'm Shane.

AJ:

How you doing?

Shane:

I'm cool. I'm congested.

AJ:

I can hear.

Shane:

Dear listener, my nose, my head, my face.

AJ:

And your crack.

Shane:

[crosstalk 00:01:18] And my crack and my knees, my shoulders, and my back.

AJ:

My lower back, my wrists, my carpal tunnel, my cavities.

Shane:

That's what it is, actually. My wrists, my back, my eyes are under attack. It's tax season. I haven't stood up in 14 hours.

AJ:

Is there a hip hop song about that? The tax rap?

Shane:

I can see Weird Al coming out of retirement for the office worker for the COVID remote.

AJ:

Indeed.

Shane:

Probably not.

AJ:

Are you reading anything good this week?

Shane:

No, I have been reading to go to sleep lately. I've been living alone for the first time in a while and just been getting a good routine going to wind down, reading this book about the Comanche Indian, their final 100 years. It's pretty cool. Oh, it's the book we picked up when we were in Stanford together, when we were doing a... Remember, we did our college book tour?

AJ:

Of course.

Shane:

Our college tour of Stanford, like we were thinking about going to college for the first time, undergrad.

AJ:

We cosplayed as undergrads.

Shane:

That was a fantasy throughout my late 20s, to start school over again. I think everyone probably shares that fantasy, anyone that's been to college; run it back.

AJ:

I spent my entire therapy session last night just talking about how much I missed college and all the problems that it created for my adult life. I'm not reading anything. It's really hard for me to focus on reading right now and it's actually depressing me, so stop asking me this is what I put in our notes.

Shane:

You do seem to get depressed when you don't read sci-fi.

AJ:

I do. You're just drinking coffee. You're not drinking anything good?

Shane:

Yeah, no. [Westcott's 00:03:16] 230.

AJ:

Well, I have a treat for everybody. I'm going to teach you how to make a tax season martini on today's show.

Shane:

Oh, a taxini?

AJ:

A tax season martini, a taxtini, a taxtini that we're calling it. During tax season, if you work in our industry, if you prepare taxes, you have no time to do anything. You don't really shower, you don't really get up from your desk. It's just all taxes all the time. If you're like me and you enjoy a martini, you don't have time to get the vermouth, get your cocktail shaker out, so all you find yourself with, for those who are listening, I recommend the video, is gin and olives and olive juice. So all you need to do. First of all, I want to point out my really cool martini glass that has a glass olive already as part of it, which is very cool. So all you need to do is pour a little bit of gin; depending on how many returns you filed that day, you get one finger of gin per return that you did.

Shane:

In a martini glass, that adds up pretty quickly.

AJ:

Pretty fast. I actually only reviewed one return today so I only get one finger of gin today.

Shane:

So you only get one whole martini?

AJ:

One finger, we'll call that one finger. And then you take your olive juice and depending on how dirty you want it, you just pour it right in. And there we go, folks, we have a tax season martini for you. Cheers.

Shane:

Well done. Cheers.

AJ:

It's already cold because my olive juice is cold. I don't even need to stir it or shake it. Pretty good. Ooh, botanical.

Shane:

Impressive, impressive. It's amazing what you can accomplish under Parkinson's law. For those of you that don't know, Parkinson's law is the law that says that a task will take as long as the amount of time you allot to it. So AJ has no time to shake up martinis, so she's just going to pour gin into cold olive juice in a martini glass and call it a taxini.

AJ:

Taxtini.

Shane:

Taxtini, sorry. Sorry. Cracking up. Charlie's face is against the window behind me like he's in prison. Help, dad. Bro, you're outside in LA. It's 60 degrees. You're good.

AJ:

By the way, we have no IPOs this week, if you want to stop listening now. We got some great articles for you today, this week though. Going to talk about inflation. We're going to talk-

Shane:

Come on, we're going to leave that for the end. [crosstalk 00:05:29] Got to get these numbers up.

AJ:

I don't want any bad reviews here. I came here for The Liquidity Event. No liquidity events happening this week, folks, but yeah, lots of cool stuff to talk about today. But you've got something fun that you want to talk about before we dive into the articles. What are you up to?

Shane:

Oh, my skincare routine?

AJ:

Haven't you talked about this for the past three weeks?

Shane:

Have I?

AJ:

I think so. It's okay. You're excited about it.

Shane:

New developments.

AJ:

That's okay. Tell me about the new developments.

Shane:

I'm excited that you're excited. I do things for other people sometimes in the sake of curiosity and just to see the smiles on their face, like contagious happiness is a part of my identity.

AJ:

I'm going to interrupt you for a second. I came to the realization recently that you and I need to have, not dumb things, but things that are not related to work that we have in common to maintain our rapport as business partners. For example, for the past year, we have had Pokemon GO, which I don't think either of us is really that into, but because we both play it, it's something that you and I can riff on and talk about and text about that's fun, that's absolutely not related to work. Because running a company is very stressful and constant big decisions have to get made six times a day.

AJ:

Whereas I can text you about an Exeggutor of Pokemon that I caught and that maintains our partnership. So in my business book about how to maintain great business partnerships, chapter one is going to be all about Pokemon GO. And that was our... I haven't thought of the word for it, but it's like, you need something that you share together. I guess, historically, it's been golf for most financial advisor partnerships.

Shane:

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. Or cheating on their wives.

AJ:

Jesus Christ. Oh, my God.

Shane:

Sorry. The darkness came out for a minute.

AJ:

I'm going to go with Pokemon GO, and your skincare routine is also that, because I have a great love and affection for my skincare routine, so that's something that we have in common to talk about.

Shane:

Well, yeah, we stopped playing Pokemon GO so what's our next thing that we're going to use to build rapport? I think it also comes back to those... When you talk to people that specialize in feedback, about how to provide good feedback and how to encourage negative feedback within a company, I think the ratio is like four to one on positive to negative feedback that you need to provide to somebody. So for you and I, we need like four texts about Pokemon GO, and then the one text about how you fucked up that meeting that you were running, and that way it's balanced out.

AJ:

Right, exactly.

Shane:

Right. Or about how one of your business ideas is... I'm not saying this about you, this is bidirectional. I'm not pointing any fingers. I fuck up meetings routinely.

AJ:

Yes. I agree that skin care's-

Shane:

No comment?

AJ:

No comment.

Shane:

I got a mud mask yesterday. I'm going to slather it on. I'm going to send you a silly photo of me in a mask, laying in bed.

AJ:

Love that for you.

Shane:

Reading a book. I don't know what any of these things are.

AJ:

You're learning.

Shane:

Guide me.

AJ:

You're such a good learner.

Shane:

Let's get to the articles.

AJ:

Let's get to the-

Shane:

Shut up.

AJ:

Let's go to the articles. Why the Fed is poised to raise interest rates. We've got a New York Times article. That's just one of hundreds of articles today written about this decision. The Fed met for two days, debated constantly, and then they announced just today, on Wednesday, March 16th, that there would be a rate hike on the Fed funds rate, which is the overnight lending rate that banks can quickly loan each other money. That rate hike is, drum roll, please, 25 basis points, one quarter of 1%. And this tiny little fraction of a percent sent shock waves through Wall Street and financial markets today.

AJ:

Yeah. Even my mortgage broker sent out... As soon as the news hit, within 30 minutes, she was in my inbox with a newsletter about how this is going to impact lending and all that. I know as financial advisors we're supposed to think this is a big deal, but isn't the take on this just it's about time? Of course. This is the natural behavior when we're in a period of inflation, and we've been at historically low interest rates to account for the slowing of the economy we had back in COVID for two years.

Shane:

Is that a question?

AJ:

Yeah. I know you agree with me. I'm passing the ball to say, who cares? Right?

Shane:

Yeah. Yeah. It is funny to see Wall Street explode, like the cover of The Wall Street Journal was Zelensky pleading to Congress, in a Star Wars moment where a rebel planet is begging for help from the rest of the Rebel Alliance. And then Wall Street Journal bumped that down to below the fold to talk about Jerome Powell's urging the Federal Reserve to raise the interest rates by a quarter of 1%; from 0% to a quarter of 1%. So yeah, it's like, why are they losing their mind? I'm trying to understand it as well. It's been a while since we've raised interest... We did it in 2018 when the economy was recovering and then it didn't go much higher than that, and then COVID hit. It's just like trying to kick the ball to the runner of the American economy.

Shane:

You're not always going to do it perfectly and it's really hard to steer a whole economy, but they're doing their best. And I guess it's more of an indication of... To me, why they think it's such a big deal is it's trending upwards at this point. It went from zero to 25 bits, right? So it's trending upwards. So is it like a ball that just started rolling and it could start rolling a lot faster? And I think it also stems from everyone's obsession with inflation, which is one of the two bogeymen right now, it's inflation and the Russia-Ukraine war. So this is intended to slow down inflation; for those of you don't know, that's the way that the Federal Reserve, why it was created, was because inflation typically causes havoc within an economy.

Shane:

We have a chart here about some of the leading indicators of recessions, and typically within the past six, seven recessions, there is period of high inflation and then a period of a recession and then prices come back down and then we head into economic expansion. So while the stock market is not... I'd like to reiterate that the stock market is not the economy, a recession as defined as two quarters of a shrinking of the economy, that does not have anything to do with the stock market. The stock market generally tries to... Prices are attached to how valuable things are in the economy, but they are just prices and it is not the economy, so just want to separate those two things out.

Shane:

And in a recession, typically stocks go down, but that's not how we define it. So there's recession woes, like, are we raising interest rates fast enough? Jerome Powell says in this Journal article that he does not see a recession in our near future, which means that we are going to continue on one of the longest expansions of the US economy in our short history relative to the rest of the world, but for post-industrial world, a few hundred years. So I think we're still in good shape despite some shaky fundamentals right now.

AJ:

Yeah. We also can't forget, historically, interest rates are not 0% or 1%. We look at historical interest rates throughout since the Fed was invented, people are so anchored, especially millennials. We graduated college into a recession, we are anchored to that 0%, that 1% Fed funds rate. So even a tiny bit of movement makes us terrified. And as we're shopping for houses, our lenders are making us terrified, but it's-

Shane:

Love selling fear, love when people sell fear.

AJ:

But remember, a rise in interest rate like this has reciprocal effects. For example, if you log into your high-yield savings account at Ally Bank or Marcus or wherever, for the past couple of years, you've probably seen it below 1%. As interest rates rise, that rate will also go up. So if you're holding a bunch of cash, this little rate hike will actually help you and earn more interest in those accounts where you're saving cash for the long term. So economy is really complicated. We can't pretend to understand what's going on. We leave it to the economists. But sometimes the economists just scare everybody and make us worry for nothing. I think we have a lot to worry about in life right now. I'm not too worried about this 25% hike.

Shane:

Hmm. Again, selling fear. I find it very funny that the first person to email you about the rise in the interest rate is a real estate agent that's trying to push homes.

AJ:

Well, a mortgage lender, but yes.

Shane:

Whatever. Sure. The lenders are back out. I don't know. So a mortgage lender just emailed you, just cold emailed you?

AJ:

No, my mortgage lender, I'm now on her email list, sent out her... That's biggest news in her world, it's like, rates are going up. As your lender, I'm going to let you know how this is going to impact you, if you're shopping for a home now, if your loan is in process, your interest rate could be higher than it was three weeks ago because this rate just went up. So that's the immediate, overnight impact.

Shane:

Are we going to email our clients?

AJ:

Well, no, we're not. That's what we're talking about is like, it really only impacts very specific parts of the economy. This is not a huge impact for our clients. We are definitely not emailing them about this. Although, I would-

Shane:

I love your comment here. I just noticed your comment here that you skipped this class in college, thus the passing of the ball to me, who has a minor in economics.

AJ:

That was a joke, but yes. But yeah, it's like, you don't need to understand advanced economics, you just need to not read these headlines and let them affect you emotionally.

Shane:

Yeah. Interest rates are going up because we need to tamper down the economy. If we let it run rampant, then things are going to be a lot worse than a quarter of a point on your home mortgage.

AJ:

True dat.

Shane:

Yeah. You got a Dolly Parton article in here? Let's [crosstalk 00:15:41] of the interest rate [inaudible 00:15:42]. What do you have for me on Dolly?

AJ:

Dolly Parton and James Patterson are teaming up to... They have written a novel about an aspiring country singer. The book is out already. It's entitled Run, Rose, Run. James Patterson, multi, multi... I was going to say platinum, but platinum is music, not for books. They wrote a book together, which I think is amazing. I love, as listeners will know, and as Shane knows, I love everything that Dolly does, so I'll be reading this. Should we have a Brooklyn FI book club? Should our entire team read this book and talk about it?

Shane:

Why? So you can be depressed when you don't read the books and you skip the meetings.

AJ:

What? No.

Shane:

You're depressed that you're not reading.

AJ:

Oh, yeah. I am depressed. Yeah, exactly. To motivate me to read something, I need this.

Shane:

Hello? That's called a callback to an earlier episode.

AJ:

Right, right, right. Throwback. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha.

Shane:

Come on. Hello?

AJ:

Hello. Sorry. My taxtini has already gotten to my head. The novel focuses on Rose, a young country singer and songwriter from Nashville who is keeping a secret that could ruin her career. I'm in.

Shane:

What do you think Dolly contributed to this? Is this like a Trump licensing thing where she throws her name on it?

AJ:

No. I bet that they actually collaborated, and I bet she was like, "I want to tell a story." I bet she went to her manager and was like, "I've got all these stories and I've got all these great things that I don't really want to..." I'm sure she's written an autobiography. "I got to find someone who could help me bring these to life." And then the manager was probably like, "Why don't you write a work of fiction?" And she's like, "I don't know how to do that. Get me a great writer, I want to have a partnership." Walk in James Patterson and now they've got this great bestseller.

Shane:

Yeah. Are you into country stories, country music stories? I'm being sincere.

AJ:

I'm going to say not no, because one of my favorite movies is Country Strong with Gwyneth Paltrow and Leighton Meester, which is about a country singer.

Shane:

Right, right, right. Well, in that case, I have a podcast for you called Cocaine and Rhinestones that has 10 episodes about some of the craziest early country music in like the '50s and '60s. And I wonder if Dolly is going to use any of that material at all because she lived through that. He talked about Dolly Parton a lot in that. It's like the son of... I forget the music. I forget who it is, but throw it in the show notes for the listeners, anyone that wants to listen to some old country stories.

AJ:

That sounds very much up my alley.

Shane:

Well, reader beware. There is some domestic violence, including a murder back there. Old country is not very positive. It's a lot of alcoholism and the trains actually did kill their wives and their trucks and their dogs and all that.

AJ:

Noted. Noted.

Shane:

All right. Anyway.

AJ:

Speaking of...

Shane:

You get so freaked out when I'm negative or slightly dark.

AJ:

I don't know how to pull you out of it. I don't know how to bring us back.

Shane:

What do you mean?

AJ:

Speaking of bad partnerships, go read this Vanity Fair piece about Grimes and her secret baby with Elon Musk. Did you read this piece?

Shane:

Not the whole Vanity Fair piece because I started prepping about 45 minutes prior, and that's probably a two-hour read, but there is a video of her going through old photos. And that is an awesome video, especially for millennials that remember Hipster Runoff, because she tells a story about how Hipster Runoff tried to cancel her in like 2012, and she DDoSed the website. She's like, that was a hacker moment for me. Yeah. You're a big fan of Grimes, right? Isn't there a personal connection for you and Grimes?

AJ:

Sort of. My husband has worked at the label that put out her first couple records, but they no longer have a contract. But yeah, he has met her personally several times over the years, but I've never met her. I saw her play at Pitchfork Fest in Chicago in... I don't know, many years ago. I don't know if it was 10 years ago or five years ago. I've lost track of time.

Shane:

Yeah. She played at my buddy's house party in college. We had a place called the Dude Ranch just outside of town.

AJ:

Of course you did.

Shane:

My buddies helped her.

AJ:

Wait, this was your place that you created, called the Dude Ranch?

Shane:

Not my place. No, no, no, but I pretty much lived there for a while because all my friends lived there. And they used to have big shows there: JEFF the Brotherhood, Grimes. Grimes was the last show because the rednecks that lived around the house finally had enough after the Grimes show because we helped her load in this giant sound system. And there's legendary stories of people in the basement having to hold up the floorboards because people were jumping and partying so hard, they were like, the house was going to collapse. So there's stories of guys with two-by-fours propping up the floor.

AJ:

Love those-

Shane:

For the sake of the party.

AJ:

I love those near misses with death that we can all laugh about now from our wild years. Remember that time you almost got crushed by a house, but didn't?

Shane:

Which time? Wait, is that real?

AJ:

You just said.

Shane:

Is that like a Buster Keaton?

AJ:

No, you just said that there were was-

Shane:

Oh, yeah.

AJ:

You could have been in the basement.

Shane:

I thought you were talking about the time the house burned down.

AJ:

Oh, no. That other [crosstalk 00:21:06]

Shane:

Yeah, there's been a few. She's a billionaire now. I mean, do you consider her a billionaire now that she's...

AJ:

I don't know. I haven't seen the prenup.

Shane:

She's just a girlfriend.

AJ:

They are no longer together. They're not together. That's that's why this was sort of shocking is because they have broken up and they had a second child. She did not deliver the child, it was through a surrogate, and it was discovered by this... This writer was interviewing Grimes for this Vanity Fair piece and the writer hears crying in the background and she's like, there's obviously a baby in the house, and she can't ignore it. And she's finally, like, "I have to ask you, is there a young child in your house?" And she's like, "Yes, this is my other child."

AJ:

So it's shocking to the world and an amazing moment of journalism that it was discovered through this interview. But yeah, they were never married, so Elon is a billionaire hundreds of times over. Is Grimes... Does she have a piece of that? I don't know. I would imagine so, considering they have two children together now. But Grimes has moved on. She's actually allegedly dating Chelsea Manning, the soldier who leaked all those documents from the CIA and was sentenced to 35 years in prison, who's now working in tech.

Shane:

Wait, so... Oh wait, Chelsea Handler is out of prison?

AJ:

Not Chelsea Handler.

Shane:

Is not in prison?

AJ:

Not Chelsea Handler, Chelsea Manning.

Shane:

I'm sorry. Chelsea Manning is not in prison?

AJ:

I don't think she's in prison.

Shane:

Damn, we got to check back in on that.

AJ:

Yeah. I don't think she is. How is she dating Grimes?

Shane:

Well, you could date someone in prison.

AJ:

I guess you could.

Shane:

It's just, yeah.

AJ:

It is Chelsea Manning.

Shane:

Speaking of fact checking, I think the writer for the article-

AJ:

Obama pardoned her. That was a thing. Yeah. A couple years ago. I remember that. Yeah. He was like, it's fine. You were upset.

Shane:

We're good.

AJ:

We're good.

Shane:

We're okay.

AJ:

We're okay.

Shane:

We're not canceled? All right. You have to ask.

AJ:

You have to ask.

Shane:

She talks about cancel culture a lot in the article, by the way. So if you're into that, there's a lot of that discussion in there. Speaking of getting canceled...

AJ:

I feel like you and I are low energy and stressed out right now and this is a bad podcast.

Shane:

You say that every time.

AJ:

What do we do to turn this around? Let's talk about taxes.

Shane:

Oh, boy. There's the segue-way. We're filing our own taxes right now, right? And we're both nomad millennials so you have... I'm asking you, I was filling out our business tax return and asking you the hell you were during 2021. How long did that take you to figure out?

AJ:

It took me about 45 minutes because I went through emails.

Shane:

Like day by day of where you were on each...

AJ:

Yeah. Because the way that I did it was, you were like, I need all your days. And I was like, eh, shit, I didn't do this. And I went through-

Shane:

As in, days in New York, days in Texas, days in California?

AJ:

Yeah. State by state where I was through all 365 days last year. And what I did, I started with my email inbox with airports, like JFK, LaGuardia. That was a great cue to fill in some things. And then I did go through my credit card statements month by month and just looked for where I was. That was also a great tracker. The red herring was that there was one weekend where it was all these farm purchases. I was like, oh, I must have gone upstate. And I was like, no, I didn't, not that weekend. It was the farmer's market. It was me using my credit card at the farmer's market from all these upstate farms.

Shane:

Wow.

AJ:

So that was fun.

Shane:

Is that the end of that story?

AJ:

Yeah. Why are you being so mean to me today? I'm telling a story to our listeners who may have similar issues about tracking their days.

Shane:

All right.

AJ:

Anyway.

Shane:

Farmer's market.

AJ:

Anyways...

Shane:

What did you get at the farmer's market?

AJ:

Shut up.

Shane:

Did you get some honey?

AJ:

Anyways, what I decided was that's a stupid way to do that. There has to be a solution for this, like something that has to track you. My phone tracks every single move and everything I buy. And turns out there is, there are two apps. There's many apps. The two that seem the best are called TaxBird and TaxDay. Some New York Times reporter already wrote this article about the different apps you could use to literally track your location. So I'm going to do an experiment over the next month during which I have travel to a few different states and I will report back on which app is the best for tracking your location.

Shane:

Yeah. I find it funny that our apps track us, or our phones track us nonstop, like literally every single latitude and longitude destination I've ever been at in motion, and I can't get the information when it's time to figure out where the hell I've been, like when I've lost an article of clothing or AirPods, or I need to track what state I was in on every given day of the year. And that's insane that they have that information every single day of the year where you've been probably since you got an iPhone back in 2012 or whatever.

AJ:

Yeah. I mean, they'll tell you where you parked your car without asking. Like, oh, you parked your car here. You're like, oh, thanks. When did I see spend time in California last year? I don't remember. I have no idea.

Shane:

Yeah. I'm sure somewhere in the end user license agreement, you sign off on them tracking you wherever the hell you've ever been, but you can't get the data, and the ULA, or however you pronounce it, is 150 pages long, which reminds me of a real estate article. We've been talking about real estate a lot over the past few weeks. I think work should do a real estate deep dive, because it turns out Wall Street has been buying up a ton of single-family homes, and they've got these 60-page renters agreements that make the... They're terrible landlords, apparently. Of course, private equity, owning single-family homes. They push all of the responsibilities onto the renters, like if there's mildew in your house [crosstalk 00:27:08]

AJ:

That's your problem, and you signed off on it, according to them. Oh, that sucks.

Shane:

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm just trying to figure out where all the homes are. We have this other article here about 3D printed homes debuting in Texas for South by Southwest. Are you going to South by, by the way?

AJ:

I am not.

Shane:

Or that already happened?

AJ:

No, Nabil just left this morning. My husband left this morning. He's actually delivering the keynote address this year, which is very exciting for him, but I'm not going.

Shane:

Oh, cool. So he can go check out this home in this Real Deal article that was the first 3D printed luxury home on the East Side of Austin.

AJ:

I told him about that, and apparently, it debuted like yesterday, I think was the real estate portion of South by Southwest. South by Southwest is just like, you got an idea, come on down to Texas. We'll give you a panel. It can be anything you want it to be.

Shane:

Yeah. I lived in Austin for three years in my early twenties, and for me, it was the Lone Star Beer Festival, essentially. Friends in town, there was no real estate or film viewing, it was just shows. So it's funny to look at this as an adult. And 3D luxury printed... There's like a tech festival attached to it.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

As well.

AJ:

So for sure. Yeah. So this company-

Shane:

Kara Swisher goes and talks about tech every year.

AJ:

Yeah. This company ICON is... So they originally started out to bring affordable housing, but then they realized their tech was so good that they could actually, or not actually, they could pivot and make some money by selling upmarket. And they've actually, this home that just got printed is a beautiful million dollar home. I did some light Googling, I don't know if this is true or not, but it said that these 3D printed homes start at $750,000. So I would imagine if you add any bells and whistles, you're talking about upwards of a million dollars for your 3D printed home. I guess the idea is you buy some land or you buy a tear-down so you can get your dream home for a lot less in a super-competitive market like Austin right now.

Shane:

750, like, what? For 3D? What's the point of a 3D printed home if it's going to cost the same as a regular home?

AJ:

Well, the idea is that it's going to go up faster. It's so hard to build homes right now because of material shortages and labor shortages that if you want a custom house, 3D printing might actually be cheaper and will get your house built faster.

Shane:

Here's a theory.

AJ:

Oh, boy.

Shane:

If you're so desperate for a luxury home and you have 750 grand laying around for it, maybe you don't need this. Maybe we need to pump the brakes on the real estate market here. Like what? Like whose problem is this solving? I guess we put it in the podcast or in the article, we're talking about... I was just really hoping that this would help solve the supply and demand issues around real estate, because everyone's complaining about rent and everyone's complaining about home prices. How is everyone pissed off and the prices are so high everywhere in the country? Something's got to give, right? I mean, can we just convert all of these old office spaces into condos?

AJ:

That has to be-

Shane:

When do we come to that?

AJ:

That has to be the next move, right? Or what about all these churches? There's churches on every corner that no one's going to anymore. These are beautiful buildings. I'm going to get canceled for this. I don't mean stop going to church.

Shane:

I've already been canceled for that.

AJ:

I don't mean stop going to church, I just mean unused land that could really benefit the communities around them. The church was supposed to be the center of the community. It has served its purpose. People aren't going anymore. So let's turn it into affordable housing. And on that soapbox, I end.

Shane:

And that is the last episode of Brooklyn FI that we will be allowed to produce. Wow. See, I say all these dark things and you just look at me with a blank stare and then you come in here and say "appropriate the churches," and we can just keep rolling, baby. No problem.

AJ:

I don't...

Shane:

Huh?

AJ:

I think there's a lot of public land that could be repurposed. I'm not saying stop going to church. I'm just saying...

Shane:

Well, the churches are not public lands. They're privately owned.

AJ:

They're not public, they're private lands that are... There's no tax revenue.

Shane:

They just don't pay taxes.

AJ:

Yeah. There's no tax revenue for the schools around them. And when you're in an area like even in Brooklyn, there's churches everywhere and those valuable plots of land could be contributing to schools, hospitals, public care, all the things that are going to make the community better. Anyway, that's one...

Shane:

We solved it, y'all. We solved-

AJ:

Fixed it. Solved all your problems. Urban planning 101. Here we go.

Shane:

Next week on the pod, someone who knows what the fuck they're talking about.

AJ:

Thanks for listening, folks. This has been episode 34 of The Liquidity Event. You can find us online at brooklynfi.com/episode34. Email us at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com. Shane is typing a memoir, apparently. Later.

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.