The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 37

 

Episode 37: Celebrity Makeover: Roth Edition

There are big changes afoot in the retirement space and Roths are about to get a big glow-up. Our hosts discuss the SECURE ACT 2.0 and the implications for boomers and millennials alike. Student loans are back in the news with payments and interest on pause through August 31st which leads us to believe there may be forgiveness in the future. We’ve got a killer interview with French economic bad-boy Thomas Piketty who has some spicy things to say about income inequality. And finally, Yellowstone National Park is selling annual park passes for use 150 years in the future. This one is electric!

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

Shane:

What's up everybody and welcome to The Liquidity Event. We are your hosts, Shane.

AJ:

And I'm AJ.

Shane:

And this is episode 37 of The Liquidity Event, this year... This year.

AJ:

This day did feel like a year, honestly. I've lived many lifetimes in this day.

Shane:

It is April 6th, y'all. Tax day is in 12 days. It's already been a year. This week we've got a lot of 401(k) retirement, we've got some student loan stuff, we've got Thomas Piketty, he's got a new book coming out about wealth inequality and why we shouldn't be so pessimistic about it. We've got racist algorithms in the real estate market.

AJ:

Part two, I might add, because we talked about that two weeks ago.

Shane:

I was going to say part 79,000. And then, yeah, we got some real estate stuff on home prices surging and electric vehicles.

AJ:

Lot of good content today. Should we just skip talking about ourselves, because our lives are so boring during tax season?

Shane:

Yeah, I'm done with that.

AJ:

Great. Great. You're in Los Angeles. I'm in Brooklyn. Status quo. Not reading anything.

Shane:

I took Adderall today.

AJ:

Oh, good for you.

Shane:

The listener notices an even tone and a very focused addressing of the-

AJ:

Which is definitely prescribed legally by your psychiatrist. Moving on to our general financial planning and culture updates. You got this article in here, Your 401(k) Statement will Soon have Lifetime Income Estimates, What to Know. So there's a mandate that there's going to be an illustration in your 401(k) that'll show you how much income you can expect in retirement. Is this a good or a bad thing?

Shane:

Yeah, that's a tough one. So first of all, I don't think it's going to be every 401(k), I think it's just certain 401(k)s will now have the ability, essentially, you've got $50,000 in your 401(k). Everyone's question is what does that look in terms of retirement? How much money am I going to get out of that? And that's obviously based on a ton of assumptions, right? And what they're going to show you is, if you convert your 401(k) into an annuity on that day, which is a product that you can purchase from an insurance company, and then convert your lump sum of cash into a lifetime income stream.

Shane:

Which you can do on your own, you can just take money out of your account, or you can give all that money to an insurance company and they have insured your income for the rest of the year. There's a big price to pay for that, and Brooklyn FI generally does not advise that people purchase annuities, but rather use an advisor to pull from your portfolio every year. Because studies show that you'll get more money in the long term, there's a little bit more stress there. But what they're going to show you is if you converted it into an annuity, which has been pushed for by annuity companies, I believe.

AJ:

Surprise, surprise. Surprise, surprise.

Shane:

I mean, buying insurance is... People are familiar with that concept, right?

AJ:

Yeah. Some of the old 401(k)s I have, I've seen these illustrations before, and as a 30 something it's like, "You will have $200 a month in retirement to live off of. That's not enough." It's like, yeah, no, duh, I just started saving for retirement, give me some time to catch up. The naysayers in this article are like, or was this you? They were like, "Well, if you show people that it's not even worth it, because you're only have $200 a month, it's going to dissuade people from actually contributing to their 401(k)s," which would be the worst possible outcome of this, right?

Shane:

Well, yeah, I think yet again, this is designed to help boomers, this thing here. If you're 55 years old, it'll show you if you're under withheld, or not under withheld, tax season, dammit. If you don't have enough money in your 401(k) to buy enough lifetime income, essentially, because it assumes that you're converting this lump sum on that date. Whereas if you're 30, 35, you've got 30 more years to contribute to this 401(k). The theory is that it'll incentivize people that are behind on saving for retirement, and in their 50s, 55, they'll start contributing more to get more money in there, as a study for the final test, essentially. They're studying for finals and they're going to show you how underprepared you are.

AJ:

Yeah, they're cramming. Yeah, cramming a week before.

Shane:

Yeah, you're cramming for the test. Whereas, if you're in your 30s, it's just going to be like, what's the point of this? Because my-

AJ:

Yeah. I'm so depressed. I got my student loans-

Shane:

I've got to get $125,000 in a year. I think it says in the article, if you had $125,000 in the account, you get $600 a month.

AJ:

That'll pay for what, a yoga membership to a fancy studio in Manhattan? That's about it.

Shane:

That won't even cover your rent.

AJ:

No, that's [crosstalk 00:05:26]-

Shane:

Where is that covering rent at?

AJ:

Nowhere.

Shane:

The delta in Mississippi, no, there's nowhere.

AJ:

Nowhere.

Shane:

And you could have been saving money for 10 years at that point, 15 years, to get that $125,000, so I don't know. Anyway...

AJ:

The part that really pissed me off is that the illustration will use a gender neutral mortality table from the Internal Revenue Code. So statistically women live longer than men. It's gender neutral, so they're going to be underestimating things for women who actually need a little bit more money, because they historically and statistically outlive men, so that sucks.

Shane:

Yeah, by about five years.

AJ:

Five years. So enjoy those last five years alone, ladies, without any money, if this goes into effect.

Shane:

I thought you were going to say, "Enjoy death, boys."

AJ:

Oh, that too.

Shane:

It doesn't take into account future earnings, which is a bummer.

AJ:

Speaking of future earnings, if you are defaulted on your student loans, Biden has pushed the turning back on of the interest payments for your loans. So if you're in default, your future earnings, your wages will not get garnished until August 31st, that's the extension. It's a bit more time to start those repayment plans, start that interest calculation, again. This is the seventh time borrowers have been allowed to pause the interest and not make payments on their student loans since the beginning of the pandemic.

AJ:

I mean, to me, this gives us more time to, potentially, for the president and both parties really, to get together a debt forgiveness or debt cancellation strategy just in time for the midterm elections. I think he just needed more time, wanted to give people a bit more of a break, but I think there's some political spiciness going on behind the scenes here.

Shane:

Well, I mean he got elected on the fact that he would forgive student loans, so it's kind of important for him to fulfill that promise. And he's going to need the House and the Senate through the midterms to help him with that. His chief of staff said that he's the first president ever, where nobody has ever had to make a student loan payment, which I think is pretty interesting. Right?

AJ:

That's a good way to put it.

Shane:

What have you done for me lately? He's actually done some stuff, he's done something. He hasn't fulfilled his promise to forgive at least 10K of student loans.

AJ:

Right.

Shane:

But you haven't had to make a payment, and there's been no interest on those loans that have been outstanding. Which, depending on the size of your loans, could have been $10,000 in interest, in two years.

AJ:

Could've easily been 10K in interest, and a defaulted loan of multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars, definitely. Throw some law school debt on there, oh, yeah, definitely, for [inaudible 00:08:10].

Shane:

That's amazing that there's no interest on the debt. The other thing that's really interesting about this, I've got two other things, is that supposedly the untamed inflation that we've got going on right now will be impacted on whether or not he forgives these loans, or if he requires payment on them. Because the problem with inflation right now is not that we have... it's due to very high demand and low supply of goods. So leaving money in consumers pockets instead of making them make student loan payments is just making it even worse.

AJ:

Worse, right.

Shane:

Yeah. So it would be better for the economy to have millennials and-

AJ:

To have you make your student loan payments.

Shane:

Make your student loan payments. Yikes, that's a-

AJ:

Yikes.

Shane:

... hard sell. The other thing that's interesting here is that for anyone that has had student loans, there's loan servicers, which are notoriously awful, because the government sets up your loans and they sell them to these different servicers and they get paid to do terrible job. And two of them have just decided to quit, which I find hilarious. Navient and FedLoan have said they're tired of dealing with all the shifting, Byzantine rules surrounding student loans, and all the legislation, so they just bowed out. Which makes me wonder, what the hell do they do besides this? Are these [crosstalk 00:09:24]-

AJ:

Right, what are these companies?

Shane:

What the fuck? They just decided they're not going to service student loans anymore, which is great, I guess, because they're terrible at it.

AJ:

Right, but who's going to be better?

Shane:

So that's good that they're out, I guess, because they're terrible. The bad thing is that they're shifting all of the loan servicers to another company, which means all student loan recipients have to, yet again, just figure out who owns their loans now. And make sure all those balances transfer, all the payment history transfers, if you're going for forgiveness, make sure that data all transfers, another nightmare for student loan borrowers.

AJ:

Sometimes I look at a tax return that's so complicated that has hundreds of rows of transactions, and I just kind of want to give up.

Shane:

You don't want do this anymore?

AJ:

I kind of just want to be like, "Wait, if you have more than a hundred equity transactions, I'm out."

Shane:

Do the listeners know that you put your two week notice in-

AJ:

Oh, yeah, I did.

Shane:

... six days ago?

AJ:

Y'all, I gave up.

Shane:

Yeah. AJ just-

AJ:

I put my two weeks in.

Shane:

... quit on me.

AJ:

Shane has four days to replace me. Just kidding, that's a yoke. A big yoke. Speaking of student loan payments. So the SECURE Act, which was a big piece of legislation that kind of changed the way that retirement accounts were passed on and drawn down from, now we have SECURE Act 2.0 that just passed the house, and is likely to become a law shortly. It's got a bunch of really interesting stuff in it.

AJ:

And one of the things I wanted to point out is, there's a proposal that you're paying back your student loans, but they would count as 401(k) contributions in order for you to get your employer match. So if your employer offers like a three percent match on 401(k) contributions, you're not actually contributing to your 401(k), but because you're are paying off those student loans, you would actually be able to receive that match from your employer. I thought that was a really interesting, unique way to incentivize people to get rid of their debt, improve their financial lives, while also saving for retirement, because the employer's going to make a contribution to that 401(k).

Shane:

It helps with both the student loan problems and the retirement cap, same [crosstalk 00:11:40]-

AJ:

It was a very creative solution, I wouldn't have thought of that, maybe I would've.

Shane:

Yes, as a 401(k) administrator, I'm really excited about receiving the student loan that-

AJ:

Oh, my god, yeah.

Shane:

... has nothing to do with payroll. But figuring out how to make contributions to our employees accounts, when they make student loan payments is going to be [crosstalk 00:11:59]-

AJ:

Upload your student loan payment here,

Shane:

Yeah, 401(k)s weren't complicated enough.

AJ:

Oh, boy. There's a bunch of really interesting, well, interesting for us, potentially boring for you listeners, but interesting stuff in here. 401(k)-

Shane:

Why do you listen to this, if this boring?

AJ:

... catch up contributions increased to $10,000 for those between the ages of 62 and 64. So currently, if you are over age 50, you get an extra, what is it? $7,000?

Shane:

65.

AJ:

6500-

Shane:

6500.

AJ:

... to put in your 401(k). That's going up to 10K that's cool. You're behind on retirement, let's give you a little bit more incentive there. What else do we have here? Oh, holy shit, this is the craziest part of this proposal.

Shane:

Want to marry it?

AJ:

There is going to be a national database for lost 401(k)s. So instead of you going, "I'm 35 years old, I had 16 jobs by the time I found my current career. I don't know where those 401(k)s are. I don't know who services them." There's going to be a national repository for you to log in and find those orphaned 401(k)s. I think that is so cool, so cool. Kind of like what we have for lost property now with the states, right? It's by your state's website. I found something in New York, there was an old cable bill that I was owed $40 for and they sent me a check. It's dope.

Shane:

Yeah. That's great. I mean, it's a lost and found for 401(k)s, right?

AJ:

Yeah. I think that's cool.

Shane:

I mean, I think this is great. I mean, the people that is going to help the most is the people that can't afford assistance or professionals to help them find these old things. I mean, when we bring on a new client, sometimes they'll have five or six old 401(k)s that need to get rolled around and consolidated. Whereas, if you can't afford that, and let's say you jump from job to job, and with the new requirements to contribute to these 401(k)s, both employers have to put money in and employees are now defaulted to making contributions. Let's say, that you're at a job for a year or two, and you've got a 1,000 or 2,000 at all these jobs, that it's just, you're not skilled enough to do the paperwork. It all just rolls over on its own to this big trust fund. And then you can, potentially, just show up and collect your money. Very cool.

AJ:

Very cool.

Shane:

Thanks, Kanye, very cool.

AJ:

Wait, what does that do with Kanye?

Shane:

That's a Trump quote. That's a famous-

AJ:

My b, my b.

Shane:

That's what he said to Kanye. I think he tweeted it. Thanks Kanye, very cool.

AJ:

Cool.

Shane:

Do you remember?

AJ:

Cool. I don't remember that. I missed that one. Speaking of not very cool, shout out to ProPublica for doing the hard hitting journalism, great piece called How your Shadow Credit Score could Decide Whether You get an Apartment. So I was shadow inflation for Halloween last year. Should I be shadow credit score this year?

Shane:

Apparently. Yeah. We're already doing Halloween stuff. Okay.

AJ:

Anyways, great piece. It's basically about how the credit score that you see, your FICO score or you log into Experian and you see a number there, that's not necessarily what landlords look at. There's this whole other industry of shadow credit. So things like past bankruptcies, crimes that you committed, actually show up on the is other score that you don't have access to. It's all very opaque. So if you've got a good job, you have good income, apply to an apartment complex to rent, and a landlord may deny you and you may never know why. So this article walks through that.

AJ:

And basically the TLDR is that the algorithms, once again, are racist, and that they don't account for current income. They're a looking back too far. They don't give people a chance to say, "Yeah, some bad shit happened in my 20s. But I have a great job now. I've got a family, and I need a place to live in your expensive city. I'm here. I'm ready to pay the rent. Why won't you let me in your complex?"

Shane:

Yeah. I don't have a problem with expanded visibility on customers, for any business, especially when you're getting into such a litigious industry, with squatter's rights and everything. Look, I literally tried to look at this article, from a Republican or conservative point of view, from the landlord's point of view, and I just couldn't get it. I couldn't make it work. But, yeah, I get the expanded visibility and digging into alternative methods of finding backgrounds on people. Your credit score doesn't have anything about your criminal history. It doesn't have court documents, but I think these new shadow credit scores are going to court docs to see if you've ever been evicted before, if you've ever been arrested before, maybe even people in your family.

Shane:

And the big problem here is that's going to indirectly discriminate racially. And it's also a lot of that stuff might not even be... there's nothing you could do about it. Another interesting thing here is that there's four different... I just realized I'm just sitting here thinking about the credit score... The credit score system is already a black box, and then that's your personal credit for credit cards. And then there's your mortgage, your housing credit score apparently is a different thing, which I didn't realize until I talked to a lender recently.

Shane:

And then there's, our business has its own credit score, and we were not approved for-

AJ:

Or lack thereof.

Shane:

Yeah. And so you have to navigate those three, and now apparently there's a rental credit score as well. So you have to deal with four different agencies. It must make you feel quite helpless, and a lack of autonomy, when these algos tell you that you can't live somewhere.

AJ:

Yeah. Especially when maybe you messed up in your past because you were taking care of a loved one or you had to be the figurehead of your family at 16, because your parents weren't around and credit was tight. Now 10 years later, you've been a great earner for years and you can't find housing in a city. You have to go to alternative housing, or you have to move cities and have an unconventional rental agreement. It sucks. I don't know. The rich got richer.

Shane:

I have a personal story here. My dad worked at casino in 1993, took an offer at this new job, a new venture. Got promoted, moved to Mississippi, moved across the country. Got cancer, the same year that the casino went bankrupt, and lost his health insurance and gets a invoice for $400,000 in his late 30s. So our family had a medical bankruptcy back in the mid '90s that impacted them for 10 years, throughout the late '90s and early 2000s. Our system fucking sucks, I'm tired of it.

AJ:

Yeah. And it's like, families dealing with cancer, no one's helping, jobs not helping. Where are you supposed to turn to in this country? There's no safety net anymore.

Shane:

Moving on.

AJ:

Moving on. How about them apples?

Shane:

Speaking of wealth and equality, we have our monster article here. This is a really cool one, if you're really into wealth and equality and income tax and wealth tax, like we are. Thomas Piketty, the author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has another book coming out.

AJ:

Also, shout out to Josie who bought me a copy of Capital. This is her favorite book ever, and it's her birthday today. So happy birthday, Josie. Thanks for listening.

Shane:

Happy birthday, Josie.

AJ:

Anyway, sorry.

Shane:

I feel that book is really huge with hipsters. It's the infinite jest of financial books for hipsters.

AJ:

I mean, it's fascinating, because-

Shane:

I've seen it on some the artist [crosstalk 00:19:11]-

AJ:

... as we will discuss, it's very historical-

Shane:

It was written by a French guy.

AJ:

Yeah, French guy. He's like a [inaudible 00:19:18] of economic thought. He's a badass.

Shane:

No, you didn't.

AJ:

I [inaudible 00:19:24] you brah. You done got [inaudible 00:19:28].

Shane:

The unbearable smugness of that comment. I'm excited for the Nick Cage movie coming out The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. It's where he just plays himself, essentially.

AJ:

Oh really?

Shane:

And Pedro Pascal, yeah.

AJ:

Cool.

Shane:

I'm looking forward to it.

AJ:

So look, it's a long and beautiful... It's an interview. The interview are almost as good as the interview responses. And basically, what's going on is, the TLDR is that Piketty says or Piketty, Piketty, French.

Shane:

Oh, I don't know. Yeah.

AJ:

Piketty, anyway.

Shane:

I'm prime for a deep YouTube dive into Piketty a la-

AJ:

Oh, yeah.

Shane:

Yeah. I'm about to go Joe Rogan on Thomas Piketty's lectures.

AJ:

,How do you pronounce it? Yeah.

Shane:

Also that, yeah, that'll be the first thing I'm looking for. And I'll look up four hours later, and I'm on Christopher Hitchens' lectures.

AJ:

Oh, no. What's the Reza Aslan, Why is God? Or Is There a God? Anyway, moving on. Books we read in college that forgot the entire contents of, but were meaningful back then. So the gist here is, so he is got a new book coming out that says that actually things are actually pretty equal right now. And that if you zoom out, history has shown that we've been pretty progressive. And that before we were, a 100 years ago to now, society actually does have income equality despite what we are mostly experiencing, and what we complain a lot about on this here podcast.

AJ:

Other things that it talks about out, if you look at opinion polls about a billionaire tax, most people want a billionaire tax. But I thought there was this really interesting, he's kind of goating you, he says, the lesson from history is that, so people want a billionaire tax. They're sick of billionaires. The system is rigged. The political system, according to these polls, is not working. So Piketty says that in history, if you have a rigged political system, at some point you have a reaction, you have a mobilization. So he's saying like, there's going to be a revolution. People are going to be fed up with these billionaires, and they're going to react. They're going to mobilize. I don't really see that happening anytime soon.

Shane:

Yeah. I mean, if you have enough control to keep people happy, just give them a slice of the returns on your capital. I mean, the whole gist of his original book was that the return on capital exceeds is greater than the growth of the overall economy. So the wealth of billionaires of snowballing faster and the capitalist is snowballing faster than those of your everyday citizens. And the way to fix it, the TLDR, is to tax the rich via high income tax or wealth taxes. And this book is about how, hey, while that has been true, that's a very negative thing to point out, over the last 200 years, things have gotten a lot more equal, both racially in the United States with civil rights, compared to 200 years ago. Yes, you are right. And how Sweden was in 1910, the more money you had, the more votes you got in their democracy. Which is hilarious to me, and reminds me of the Larry David Bitcoin Super Bowl commercial, where he goes, "You're going to let the stupid people vote. Even the stupid people."

AJ:

Oh my God.

Shane:

Essentially, the capital... Anyway, so, I mean, if we get entrenched capitalist influencing politicians, then things will move a lot slower, such as Joe Manchin and his, I keep coming back to Joe MAnchin and his $500,000 salary that he pulls from a coal company in West Virginia, and how that holds up climate change in the United States, as just the biggest polluter in the entire world. And we're going to lose this opportunity to make big climate movement with 50 senators due to one coal company and $500,000 a year that flows to Joe Manchin. So, yeah, I don't know.

AJ:

What do you think Joe Manchin's effective tax rate is at the federal level?

Shane:

Probably 22%.

AJ:

Yeah, right.

Shane:

I don't know. What's the tax on the whole world that he's not moving forward climate change?

AJ:

We all die in 2050.

Shane:

Trillions? Quadrillions? What's past trillions? Quadrillions of damages across the United States and the world.

AJ:

Speaking of environmental damage and the future, Yellowstone National Park wants you to plan ahead for the year 2172, they are-

Shane:

Ooh, soft landing for this podcast.

AJ:

... selling annual passes to Yellowstone National Park for $1,500 that become valid in the year 2172. So what is that? 150 years from now. 150 years from now your descendants, or potentially you, if you get frozen in carbonite or whatever, will have free access to the park. I think it's a very creative way to drum up donations to preserve one of our nations most beautiful parks. Have you ever been to Yellowstone?

Shane:

Not yet, but I will be driving past it in a few weeks on the way up to Oregon.

AJ:

Awesome.

Shane:

I don't think I'll make it, but...

AJ:

Wait, Yellowstone-

Shane:

Have you?

AJ:

I've been to Yosemite, which is not Yellowstone. So, no, I don't think I've been to Yellowstone. I do confuse the two sometimes.

Shane:

Yes.

AJ:

But I'd love to go.

Shane:

This is my first time on the West Coast, so I'm still learning the geography. I do not know which one is in Northern California versus Wyoming. [crosstalk 00:24:46]-

AJ:

Yellowstone is-

Shane:

... in Wyoming.

AJ:

... in Wyoming. Because Yosemite is definitely in Northern California, that's the one I've been to.

Shane:

Oh, there we go, so maybe I will see it on my way back to New York.

AJ:

Yeah.

Shane:

Maybe. I'll buy a pass.

AJ:

So yeah-

Shane:

Oh, wait. They're $1500, nevermind. I am not... Fuck my kids.

AJ:

Your kid's, kid's, kid's, kids. 150 Years, that's how many generations? What's the generational math? Anyway, we could do that offline.

Shane:

I always do 20 years in my mind, which is super wrong. Like every 20 years people have kids, so there's five to a century. But I think in like 1920s terms for some reason.

AJ:

So it's to your generations [crosstalk 00:25:25]-

Shane:

I mean, what's the average age of birth? 25? 30?

AJ:

No idea.

Shane:

Of a mother, what's the average age of a mother when she... And it's going to change, because if you have multiple kids. So it's going to be some number 27.2, just like there's two point five kids in a nuclear family.

AJ:

Right. Right. Right.

Shane:

Speaking of the future, you have this EV article. Do you want to...

AJ:

Yeah. So there's a Wired article, It's a Perfect Time for EVs. It's a Terrible Time for EVs. Short little article that basically says-

Shane:

Oh, electronic vehicles, by the way, for those who-

AJ:

Oh, yes.

Shane:

... don't know what the hell we're talking about.

AJ:

EV, electronic vehicles, if someone who has one, it's very easy to tell, because they'll tell you all about it. The look there's a supply chain-

Shane:

As opposed to a ICE, which you see on Reddit forum, which stands for internal combustion engine, these are EVs. Yes.

AJ:

These are EVs, electric vehicles. In an ideal world, we would've started the transition decades ago. So the problem is, is that there's supply chain issues. The parts that are needed to make electric vehicles are not available, due to supply chain issues. Unfortunately, we're also in the middle of a gas prices. Gas prices are really high. So it's kind of this big cluster fuck of supply chain and rising gas prices. It's expensive to buy cars, whether they're electric or your traditional gas guzzler. There's this proposal in the Build Back Better bill, which as we know, our friend Joe Manchin, also just killed, but is maybe going to come back.

AJ:

Build Back Better has a $12,500 credit for electric vehicles, which is pretty cool. I learned over the weekend, I learned from my sister actually, a bit more about current electric vehicle tax credits, specifically, for certain manufacturers.

AJ:

Basically there's a quota, so the first 200,000 people to buy a certain model, at a certain company will get the credit. And if you're the 201st thousandth person to buy the vehicle, you don't get the credit. So there's this big to buy Teslas, because the credit's going to run out once they sell a certain number of vehicles. I didn't realize it worked that way. Because I've always heard people, "You've got to rush, the credit's going to run out." I always thought it was a time based credit, but it's in fact a quota.

Shane:

Yeah. I'm not a big fan of cliffs or waterfalls of that nature. When it comes to tax incentives, I prefer a progressive, phase out, even though it is a little bit more complicated. So that people get less of a rush, they feel they can... After the first 200,000, the next 50,000 get a 50% credit, and all that, that phase out. But, yeah, interesting. And are all those done? Can you still get any credits for any other EVs?

AJ:

Yeah, there's one that I was looking at, I think it was, I don't remember, it was a Nissan, I don't remember which one it was.

Shane:

Is it per car company gets a quota for-

AJ:

It's not even per car company. I believe it's even per release.

Shane:

Model?

AJ:

Yeah. But don't quote me on that. Don't quote me on-

Shane:

Check it out.

AJ:

... that.

Shane:

Yeah. Not quoting you. Not quoting you-

AJ:

Thank you.

Shane:

... on that.

AJ:

Thank you. Would you get an electric car?

Shane:

Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

AJ:

I really want one. I've been thinking a lot about it.

Shane:

One of our clients drove from California to New York City in a Tesla.

AJ:

Wow.

Shane:

If you can do that, then...

AJ:

You can do anything.

Shane:

I guess. It's time, let's go. Let's be early adopters. I mean, in California, there's a billion Teslas in LA. Yeah. It's like every fifth car is a Tesla, feels like.

AJ:

That is true. Any parting wisdom for our listeners this week? Any no-brainers from you?

Shane:

I don't have any no-brainers without sounding pedantic.

AJ:

I have a good no brainer.

Shane:

Yeah?

AJ:

Yeah. Just remember your friends' birthdays, find a way to remember them. I feel in college we had Facebook. I was always on Facebook, so I always knew when everyone's birthday was. Now that I'm out of college and I literally never look at Facebook, ever. I don't know when anyone's birthday is. And then sometimes you see it on Instagram, that's a good indication, because people repost the stories. And it's like, "Yay, it's my birthday." But there's nothing better than just getting a happy birthday from a friend you haven't talked to in a while. So my no-brainer is that I'm going to start keeping a calendar of all my close bud birthdays.

Shane:

Oh, yeah. I've got one of those. My goddaughter and my godson are on there. Yeah, put like 10, 15 people, you're closest-

AJ:

People, yeah.

Shane:

Put a week or two reminder, ahead of time, and same day. A text, yeah, I'm with you on that. Good no-brainer AJ.

AJ:

Happy birthday. Happy birthday, everyone. Thanks for listening. This has been-

Shane:

Oh, Josie's birthday comment today.

AJ:

Yes. Yes, exactly. I took her out for a [crosstalk 00:29:59] birthday dinner last week, so we're good. This has been The Liquidity Event. You've been awesome. You can email us at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com. Show notes at brooklyfi.com/episode37. Peace out, y'all.

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.