The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 40

 

Episode 40: Scam-a-lama-ding-dong

In this episode of the Liquidity Event, we’ve got Shane on vacation and John in the hot seat. We’ve got tons of scams this week. Mortgage scams, NFT scams, bitcoin scams, 401(k) scams, and more. Brex made a very interesting acquisition of Pry, a financial forecasting company aimed at early-stage start-ups. Also in the news is that news organization CNN is killing their short-lived CNN+ streaming service, it only lasted a month. Sad face. We also discover the maniacal term “stresslaxation” which basically sums up the modern human condition. This one is on vacation.

Read the Full Transcript:

Announcer:

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

AJ:

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

John:

And John this week. Pitch hitting for Shane Mason.

AJ:

No shame. No shame.

John:

The Charlie Gibson to his Peter Jennings. The Brian [inaudible 00:00:45] to his Tom Brokaw.

AJ:

You're so old, John. You're so old.

John:

I know, I know.

AJ:

This is episode 40 of, speaking of being old, of The Liquidity Event being recorded on April 27th, 2022, airing on Friday, April 29th, 2022. How you doing, John?

John:

Doing good. I'm doing good. The weather's getting nicer, tax season's over. I'm going on vacation soon. I'm happy. I've got a Liquidity Event sweatshirt so I feel official. It's like when you get the robe on the Five-Timers Club of SNL or something.

AJ:

That's exactly what that is. Yes, we have Liquidity Event sweatshirts for hosts and John is our third host. We will soon have other hosts. We'll soon have some other folks in the hot seat, which we're excited. Hopefully they can match your wit. Anyways.

John:

And vigor anyway.

AJ:

Anyways, speaking of wit, you drinking anything these days?

John:

I'm drinking tea right now because it's like 45 degrees here again for some reason and I'm cold.

AJ:

Brutal, brutal. Yeah. I'm just drinking water. I'm hydrating. I have a long, a red-eye flight tonight. I don't do well on red-eyes, but I have to.

John:

Say, where are you?

AJ:

I'm in Palm Springs, California. My new happy place. My happy place.

John:

And we're swapping places because. Well, I'm on the east coast. I'm in Lancaster. I'm flying to Yosemite in a couple days and now you're flying back to the east coast and so zigzagging.

AJ:

Wild. The Brooklyn. The crazy, jet-setting lifestyle of Brooklyn FI, financial planners.

John:

Can I have the company jet for this trip or do I need to fly coach?

AJ:

I think Shane has it down in Mexico. And then Jason's got it next week for Paris. But after that, it's all yours.

John:

Oh, perfect. Perfect. Yeah. It's a write off.

AJ:

Wonderful. What are you reading this week?

John:

I just started reading The Sunny, am I saying this right, nihilist? Nihilist. Yes. The Sunny Nihilist.

AJ:

He glances at the English major.

John:

Which is by Wendy Syfret. Talks about nihilism and that's a concept that I wasn't too familiar with, more familiar with the existentialism, but interesting take on things and I'm not a nihilist but I think a little bit of nihilism in your life might not necessarily be a bad thing, I'm learning.

AJ:

A spoonful of nihilism helps the medicine go down.

John:

Exactly. What about you?

AJ:

I am 10 pages away from finishing a novel which listeners will know. I have been struggling to read novels this whole year, because I've been, I don't know, in a weird space. I just read The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. I feel like this is a book that came out kind of either pre-pandemic or in the very early stages of 2020. And I saw all my friends were reading it.

AJ:

I saw it all over the place, New York Times Best Seller list. And it's one of those books where you're like I should probably read that. And then a copy basically fell into my lap and I read it and I was like, oh my God, this book is even better than everyone said it was. So hard recommend if you're looking for beautiful prose, great storytelling. The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett. I'm two years late to the party on this.

John:

Look at the sales pitch.

AJ:

I should be a book seller. I should go back to my roots. Anyways.

John:

There you go. There you go. If Barnes and Noble is still open, maybe we can get you a job.

AJ:

Oh boy. Yeah. Barnes and Noble came out of this thing looking like the good guys.

John:

Yeah, I know. That's kind of crazy to think about.

AJ:

Your fun is that you're going to Yosemite and you're taking some time off.

John:

I'm going on vacation. Yeah. Yeah. Unplugging, going off the grid which means I'll be available by phone if you need me. If anything comes up, just conference me into the podcast next week. Happy to pitch hit. I'm just kidding. Yeah.

AJ:

We'll talk about stress lacking here shortly, right?

AJ:

Only slack you on, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Just kidding folks.

John:

What about you?

AJ:

Well, so Shane is on true vacation this week and I've definitely been very careful to not even, like things that don't matter that I want to talk about when he gets back, I'm just saving them. I just think it's important, as for anyone, when your colleagues are on vacation, just really respect that. There are very few emergencies in financial planning. We've had a great team in place, but I was just thinking about, you have responsibility to your colleagues to respect that time. And I don't think I've done a great job of that in the past. So here's my on air apology to you, Sean.

John:

I was going to say AJ's the person who sends me Slack messages at 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday.

AJ:

We're not doing that anymore. We're not doing that anymore.

John:

We'll see how long lasts.

AJ:

We'll see how long it lasts.

John:

You're buying furniture. Is that what you're doing for fun? Is that fun?

AJ:

It is fun. It's actually not fun. It's actually not fun to buy furniture.

John:

It's a huge pain the ass. It's going to be in what like a year for now. It's on some container.

AJ:

Pain in the ass. Expensive. You don't know what it looks like. It takes six to eight weeks ish, maybe, if you order the bright yellow color instead of the silver that you want. It's a nightmare. So yeah, I need some new furniture. I don't don't like the furniture here. Rip it up and start again.

John:

There you go.

AJ:

No deep dives.

John:

Oh, sorry. I was going to do a segue there.

AJ:

Segue, segue.

John:

Speaking of nightmares, Bitcoin in 401ks was the headline yesterday. This is Fidelity that's going to start offering. AJ was going to say we're skipping the IPO deep dive because it's just a bunch of biotech crap we don't really care about or understand. But, Fidelity's going to start offering Bitcoin in 401ks. And I feel like you and I had the same take on this, which is, this is the dumbest thing we've ever heard.

AJ:

Yeah. So Fidelity the larger provider of 401ks, right? Like in the country. If you have a 401k chances are it's probably with Fidelity. And they're going to open up the offering for 23,000 employers that use fidelity to administer their 401ks.

AJ:

I don't like this. The only way I could see this working is if they put some serious restrictions on it. Meaning like you've got a 401k with Fidelity. That's fine. Let's make sure you're in a diversified, safe-ish, something like a target date fund that's going to follow you as you age and adjust the risk appropriately as long as 95% of your portfolio is in that. Sure. You want to, you want to play around with some crypto. 5% at the most 10%. So I hope they're going to do that. And I would imagine they have to because there's some sort of duty there to guide folks to make the right choices with investments.

AJ:

And Bitcoin is one of those things or crypto in general that you have to be very educated in it to even dip a toe. And most investors are not educated in crypto. Not to say that there aren't people that are, it's just, when we're talking about 401ks this is everybody, right? This is not just those who have taken the time to learn about this stuff and actually do some trading themselves.

John:

Well, I think the only thing to keep in mind is that because crypto is traded, unlike Coinbase or on blockchain and stuff like that, I don't need to worry about out my uncle who doesn't know how to use the computer, making a mistake and losing a bunch of money in Bitcoin because like he just can't figure it out.

John:

But if we put it in the 401k, if the guy who's 58 years old, who's like crap, my retirement plan's borderline. I see a lot of people make money in crypto, so I'm going to load up the truck on that and do something and make a big mistake. So it's scary. It's for the same reason we don't really see gold or commodities funds in 401ks very often because they're speculative, because you need to know what you're doing, because they're alternative investments. And so, I'm just very worried about this and what it can mean for people making. When you give people more choices, we learned this from behavioral finance, they tend to make poorer decisions. And are we heading down that track?

AJ:

Right. And why I'm so against this is not because I hate crypto it's because we need people to save more for retirement. Right? And whatever we need to do to make that happen as financial planners, we're always talking about that. But with crypto, even if it's 5%, even if it's 10%, we see such volatility. That we could start to see investors who are investing for the first time or maybe the 401k's their only investment and they see a big dip in their 401k they're going to get spooked and say, I don't like investing. This is terrifying. I don't want to see these crazy swings in my account that's my future.

AJ:

Like, no, thank you. So it will poison the well of, Hey, investing doesn't have to be this scary, we don't have to have these stomach churning drops when we're not investing in alternatives.

John:

Yeah. I think the TLDR is make 401ks boring again.

AJ:

Mm. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, boring investing. We need a better word for boring. I say boring to potential clients all the time. And I'm like, well, I'm really doing good job of selling this.

John:

Boring's good. March of 2020, boring sounded great. I wanted some more boredom in my life. Going back to that.

AJ:

Being bored is nice. I struggle with boredom personally and I get it. I get it. People are always looking for, it's that FOMO. And I think this Fidelity move is FOMO. They're trying to be first. We want to say, Hey, you might think of us as like stuffy fuddy-duddy Fidelity, but you know, we've got some crypto traders to help you out.

John:

Well, it seems like there's a lot of people that are bored because fraud and scams are running rampant these days. By the way, I worked on my transition game since the last time I was on the podcast. If you couldn't tell, I just...

AJ:

I see that.

John:

Want to shout out myself.

John:

I took a long weekend, last weekend. I took a couple days off. I've just been talking to myself, preparing for this.

AJ:

Preparing your transition.

John:

But we've got one here with Zelle. And for those who aren't familiar, Zelle's kind of like Venmo payment transfer app. Have you used Zelle pay? I've never used it.

AJ:

I have, I have, I have used it. I actually used it last night because I was sitting with someone who could not figure out Venmo. So we switched to Zelle. Oh, yeah. So Zelle, does Chase own them? Did Chase buy Zelle?

John:

So it's a consortium of banks that like has funded Zelle to make it easier to transfer money between people. But apparently, there have been 18 million Americans that are defrauded annually with digital wallets on these payment apps in 2020, according to research. And essentially banks are required under something called regulation E. If a transaction's fraudulent, they're required to make you whole. But if you approved the transaction because you're being duped into approving it, we're finding out, is that some of these banks are denying. Not making you whole. And so Senator Warren, some other folks have kind of raised a stink about this after The New York Times had an article on it. But I'll be honest with you, call me a [inaudible 00:11:22], but I don't use them. I don't Venmo. I don't Zelle.

AJ:

I Venmo, I Zelle. I use it all the time. I think it's great for small businesses, especially for service businesses, if you're a, I don't know, a personal trainer, a therapist, a gardener. It's just a great way to get paid. And a lot of these companies. My devil's advocate and my, pro for Zelle and Venmo is that this is where small business is happening. This is where businesses are getting launched. It makes it easy to get started. You don't have to have a fancy payment system.

John:

And they're not taking a cut. If Zelle doesn't card anything, unlike Amex, that's going to take what 3, 4% of it.

AJ:

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like a scammer. I feel like scams are always a threat. Right now they feel more prevalent because people are home more, they're reading more, they're clicking more links. It just seems scary.

John:

It's just gotten so much more sophisticated. The scamming, the spear fishing, those sorts of things where it seems real, but it's not so. Caveat [MTOR 00:12:24] . Buyer beware.

AJ:

Yeah. I mean, I'm a new homeowner and you know, the amount of junk mail that I've gotten that looks like real mortgage information or real home warranty information or real title insurance information. You have to really scrutinize these postcards. I mean, I got a postcard that looked like it was from the USPS that said call you have a package. Here's your second notice. It wasn't. And as a financial planner I don't trust anything. So I Googled the number and turns out here's a Reddit forum about this mail scam.

AJ:

And you get all of these things in the mail that appear to be something else. Our clients all the time will say like, Hey, I got this weird notice from TV Ameritrade was that you guys? And we'll say, yes, and by the way, please always feel free to reach out to us to make sure it is us. So I don't have a hot take here other than tread lightly folks, Google phone numbers, Google websites before you give anybody any personal information of any kind. And remember, they will never ask you for your password on the phone.

AJ:

Speaking of scams, speaking of no one is safe. No one is safe. Board, Ape Yacht club, popular makers of those, I find, hideous NFTs, were hacked via an Instagram phishing link. And they stole about, some people were reporting a million dollars, some people were reporting $3 million, in other folks' crypto wallets. So I don't know.

AJ:

It should be hard to move money around. Right? It should be hard to move money around. That's why banks exist.

John:

Like, yeah.

AJ:

Someone can just pop in there liquidate your wallet because you clicked on an Instagram link?

John:

Yeah. Grabbed your ape, NFT. And you're screwed. You're screwed. I don't know. I'm not even going to pretend to understand. I'm single these days. I'm just trying to have to catch an NFT. That's that's my concern.

AJ:

That was a throwback to my favorite tweet of all time. Anyways, what else do we have leaving the exciting future of the internet and returning to the...

John:

To the past.

AJ:

The origins of the internet. CNN+, the short lived subscription streaming service is dead.

John:

RIP.

AJ:

After just one month. I didn't realize that. Yeah. I didn't realize that.

John:

And they hired some big names. Chris Wallace, Casey hunt, Scott Galloway, Professor Scott, who we follow. But I mean, I don't know who thought this was a good idea. Who the hell is sitting around saying, I need more CNN in my life and I'm going to pay $5.99 a month for it.

AJ:

Yep. I mean you.

John:

No, I mean, I don't. No, thank you. I read my news. It takes the emotion out of it.

AJ:

I agree. I mean, I miss cable, I'm so sick of. The Netflix news last week, which we actually are not talking about here which we should, which is pretty big news. Netflix reporting a big drop in subscribers, stock price plummeting, layoffs, kind of chaos at Netflix as they raise prices, that people are sharing passwords. For the first time ever they saw subscribers drop. People are kind of sick of it. Last night I wanted to watch Diamonds Are Forever, a James Bond movie and it wasn't on Netflix. It wasn't on HBO. It was on Amazon prime or whatever. And I paid $4 for it. And I was like, yeah, no, that's fine. That feels like cable though. Right?

John:

Netflix Used to have so much. Used to have The Office. It used to have The West Wing. Now I have four different, five different streaming services that I have access

AJ:

[inaudible 00:16:02]

John:

None of which I pay for.

AJ:

This is the Milloomer mafia, by the way, folks, a Milloomer is the Brooklyn FI I term for a millennial who displays Boomer-esque tendencies. Like not being able to print a PDF or complaining about the cost of streaming services. So no offense Boomers. We love you. You make fun of us, so we make fun of you.

John:

Yeah. And thanks mom, for keeping me on the Netflix account, I appreciate that if you're listening. The Netflix news doesn't surprise me. And the whole point of Netflix is that you can share your password with a whole bunch of people and share your account and do that. And if you're going to shut that down you're going to a bunch of people off. If you ask me.

AJ:

Yeah. I think Brooklyn FI has a Netflix account that I think Will. One day we found out Will, our controller and who is our client accounting services. We found out that he didn't have Netflix. We were like, what the hell? I think I might have been a little drunk and Shane and I were like, here you go. We got a Brooklyn FI Netflix account. So maybe that'll get shut down, unfortunately.

John:

The whole streaming thing. I've just set up my credit card here. You get a new smart TV, you got to set it. I don't know. I feel like I'm a Milloomer complaining about nothing, but asking people to pay $6 here, $8 there, $14 there.

John:

It gets expensive.

AJ:

It gets expensive and annoying.

John:

Yeah. I'm more of a fan of the whole, I use YouTube TV instead of cable. Which I'm a big fan of. Because that's easier to kind of take with you, but yeah. It's all over the place. If you want to watch a variety of things, you've got your Peacock, your Hulu, your HBOMax, your Netflix, your Amazon prime. Those are just the ones I have.

AJ:

Yeah. It's interesting though, because it's why do they shut down after a month? Well, actually, because there was an acquisition and the new CEO has a different vision for the company. Which is that they want to put all the company's brands onto one streaming service, which is another streaming. It's so hard. The average consumer doesn't care if you're CNN or CBS or Netflix or HBO they just want something that works and is easy. My hypothesis of why Netflix was so successful is that Netflix is, shout out to their hundreds or thousands of engineers. Netflix is has incredible user experience. You play. You fast forward. The next one plays. All of these other streaming services suck. Like they're terrible.

John:

And to be honest with you, I mean, I've been using Netflix for, I don't know, 10, 15 years now. And it hasn't changed. It's just as easy to work. It looks the same. And there's something to be said for that you don't need to reinvent the wheel. It just kind of happens.

AJ:

True. True. True. All right. Give me an A+ segue.

John:

So, I don't have a good one for this. Speaking of big companies. we've got one here. The Trade Desk CEO just got an $830 million stock grant to basically try to take down Google and their dominance of the advertising space. And so basically equity compensation tied to growing the price of the Trade Desk. We actually have several clients that work at the Trade Desk. We're familiar with the company. Their stocks over, historically, has done, kind of crazy.

AJ:

Smashed, smashed it, I would say. Smashed it. Split.

John:

A ten for one split last summer. But the CEO stands to make 5 billion if he hits all of his targets. And I do think that this, talk about the excesses of executive compensation and corporate greed, and all of that. I mean, good for them taking on this David and Goliath Trade Desk versus Google thing, but also just obscene.

AJ:

Yeah. And also my critique of this article is a grammatical one. The title is Billionaire Trade Desk CEO get it's 830 million in pay to fight Google. It's an award. It's just a performance award. It's compensation. It's not like he won a lawsuit or lost a lawsuit. It's just [inaudible 00:20:03]

John:

Do well in his fight against Google for it to pay out. But for some reason, these executives always tend to land on their feet. I don't really get it.

AJ:

Yeah. It's so crazy. Yeah. I mean, if he doesn't, if he doesn't hit those, I think he'll probably still be okay.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we can get him some, some relief funds, a stemmy check or something.

AJ:

But at the end of the day I agree a thousand percent with you that corporate the pay is way, way, way, way off the charts. However it is standard operating procedure to have a new CEO and set lofty goals and reward them for doing that. That's fine.

John:

The Trade Desk is one of the largest companies in the country, if all this stuff happens. And so that's the thing. And it's designed to incentivize people and have them participate, but yeah.

AJ:

Right. And he gets 5 billion, but if he achieves all the things that would allow him to receive that 5 billion, the Trade Desk gets a hundred, 200, 300 a thousand X that in shareholder value

John:

[inaudible 00:21:00]

AJ:

So yeah. I mean, I read this as like no cool corporate America. Good. Glad to see that you're alive and well.

John:

So thinking about trying to get a company to grow.

AJ:

No, I bot a better one for you.

John:

You got a better one? Go for it. Go for it.

AJ:

Let's take a Brexit.

John:

A Brexit.

AJ:

Yeah. This company Brex.

John:

Brex. Are we going back in time of the 2016, again?

AJ:

That's our segue. Sorry. I don't think we're funny to anybody, but that's okay. Brex sort of started as a providing funding and capital and payment cards to startups growing very quickly. They just paid 90 million for a 10 person software company called Pry P R Y Financials. I thought this was very interesting,

John:

So what's the goal here? What are they trying? They're trying to?

AJ:

So Brex originally they were a startup focused on startups. That's their thing. They provided basically corporate credit cards to small and medium businesses. That's where they started. Now they want to be the replacement CFO for a startup. Like you're a startup.

John:

Got it. So they're going to leverage the analytics with the spending data and all that stuff that they have.

AJ:

Exactly.

John:

I'm assuming this will probably help companies raise more money too. What's their burn rate?

AJ:

I love this. I love this because if they can pull it off, it allows founders who don't have a financial background to rely on tools where they don't have to use money to hire a CFO or hire a consultant. Everyone should have an accountant, of course, folks, right? Everyone needs a CPA.

John:

Yes, exactly. Stay on brand.

AJ:

Yeah. This kind of like financial modeling, I feel like it puts a lot of people off. I'm going to go ahead and say, it puts a lot of women off. They're kind of, Hey, I didn't study this in school. I don't know how to do these financial projections. Bring on Pry. You can load into your data. It'll put together a report that you can use to then go raise capital. So I'm very pro this. I looked at Pry briefly. It looks like cool software. It looks a lot like the financial projection software we use. Happy to have another.

John:

More targeted towards a business audience and business cash flow.

AJ:

And targeted towards people who don't know how to do startup financing and targeted towards a raise.

John:

Which is most people.

AJ:

Which is most people. Right. Exactly. Exactly. What are you trying to accomplish with this projection? Are you trying to raise a hundred million dollars? Are you trying to show a path to profitability?

John:

Got it.

AJ:

Probably all the above, honestly. But yeah, this is cool. I'm into this. Brex is a very cool company. I imagine we'll be hearing a lot more from them over the next two years.

John:

Ninety million dollars for a 10 person company? Must be some lucky folks there. With a nice exit.

AJ:

It's a nice liquidity event. You could say. I would imagine they have to stick around for a while to make sure it works. You don't want to pry them away from there.

John:

There we go. I want to talk about relaxation or stresslaxation about this article, which I think is one of the ones you couched from last week, from your conversation with Shane, when he sounded like he was half dead.

AJ:

Yeah. Also listeners you for your concern about Shane. He was fine. He was just hung over after. [inaudible 00:24:18] He was fine.

John:

I was a little concerned. I did not watch the video version I only listen to it on the road.

AJ:

Do not watch the video version.

John:

Do not watch the video.

AJ:

Well, poor Shane. We always talk about him when he is not here.

John:

So this is how do you learn how to relax is basically the whole thing. Because like we can't because we can't be mindful. We can't disconnect from work and it's always with us [inaudible 00:24:43] at us. And then we don't enjoy our time off. That was kind of the TLDR here. And like the is a toolbox for how we stop stresslaxing.

AJ:

Yeah. This it's a Fast Company article.

John:

Which rhymes with Ex-laxing. So I don't really like that.

AJ:

Don't do that. I mean whatever floats your boat. The title of the article is Stresslaxtion is Real: Science explains why it happens and how to get past it. So whenever I see an article like this. I immediately write it off because I'm a jaded. It's going to be a article. But this article actually walks you through what's happening in your brain. What you can do to fix it and gives you tips. I bookmarked this on my phone. So when I'm up at three o'clock in the morning, running around my brain, running circles trying to solve problems. I'm going to go read this article.

John:

Well, I liked how I talked about decision fatigue and , we have to make so many decisions over the course of the day. You and I, especially, there's so many different things you need decide, to respond to emails, to respond to team members and your brain's just constantly going and how to really relax is to stop making some decisions and let yourself recover a little bit. Which I had this thought, is this why all inclusive vacations are appealing? So it's just all there. I don't need to decide anything. I don't need to figure out if I want to pay for something extra. I've never gone on all inclusive vacation, but it's done. It's over.

AJ:

I think it's really the only way to not have a fight with your family on vacation. Because when you travel with your extended family. When I was kid, we went on an all inclusive vacation.

John:

Or just don't travel with your extended family which is another option.

AJ:

Yeah. It my grandparents who were getting older, last hoorah, let's bring the whole family, went down to Cancun in Mexico. And I'm being the teenager. I was like, I don't want to got on an all inclusive vacation. I want to go explore or whatever. And it was awesome. It was like, no one had to make any decisions. The only thing we had to say was what time is everyone having breakfast tomorrow? We got to go to this adventure. We got to decide. And someone doesn't want to do that. I agree. I find that I'm stresslaxing on my vacations though. So how do I stop doing that? You're saying all inclusive resort is how to stop doing that

John:

I don't know. I'm just guessing. I'm just guessing. I'm willing to try it. You know? If Brooklyn FI wants to send me on one and I'll report back my findings, I'll come back in the podcast by all means. Yeah,

AJ:

Sure. Yeah. I'll send you on a bunch of cruise ships, right? That's a great place. You don't have to make decisions, but yeah.

John:

Get COVID and be stuck up on them forever. Great.

AJ:

But it's a real thing, right? It's you're trying to relax, you've set aside time. You're trying to meditate. You're trying to calm down from the day and all your brain is doing is, I got to solve this problem. Here's this email that I'm worried about. Here's this friendship problem I'm worried about. And we just, we can't relax. And apparently this happens to between 30 and 50 of people when they try to do anything relaxing and stress symptoms can be.

John:

I thought that percentage would be higher. to be honest with you.

AJ:

I know, right. That does seem a little bit low. Yeah. Who are those people? Yeah. I make up most of them. Yeah. And stress symptoms such as rapid heartbeat and sweating. Yeah. I do a bit of that.

John:

I like to call that Tuesday. No, just kidding.

AJ:

Oh boy.

John:

I'm kidding. I'm kidding,

AJ:

Boo. Ooh. Let's bring back a fun feature of podcasts of yesterday. The no brainer. You have a no brainer for me.

John:

I do. I do. I am all about the whiteboard these days. And so for Christmas.

AJ:

This is the worst no brainer.

John:

I got a 3x5 whiteboard. It's on my wall right over here. I'm not going to turn the camera because it, I look like the Pepe Sylvia scene from It's Always Sunny, but track your goals and your wins and what you're working towards. Have something to look at, put it in your home office. They cost like 50 bucks. You drill a hole in the wall, whatever. And I am team whiteboard. If you want to do it virtually, I recommend Miro, we love Miro. But there's something cathartic about checking things off on there and having different colors. I don't know. But maybe it's just a phase. Maybe it's a Milloomer thing.

AJ:

You like to see your goals there. I mean checking boxes. I don't know what the research is there, but anytime where you get to say I did that, or you cross after your to-do list. We use a tool at Brooklyn FI called Carbon where clients check a box when they've done something. And I've heard folks complain about the checklist, but a lot of folks were like, wow, I love that checklist. I did at all this you asked me to do. I uploaded all my stuff. Can I have can I have a gold star in my homework now? Yes. You absolutely may have a gold star on your homework.

John:

And the annoying reminder email stop when you check those boxes so that's also the little dopamine hit. What do you got? Do you have a no brainer?

AJ:

Yeah. Go on a vacation, John.

John:

I am. Bye.

AJ:

No, I mean, this is a cheeky one, but yeah. It's especially for, if you work in a seasonal business, like we do, it seems like our season lasts from September to April. With year end tax planning and then actual tax filing. But yeah, just taking time off recharging, getting away from your colleagues, no matter how much you adore them and love spending time with them on Slack, it's just important to do your own thing. Not think about work. We all have stressful jobs. Anyone who does not have a stressful job, I think they would be lying. Every job is stressful.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. No, I think it's so important to unplug. We shut down the office last Friday, give whole team the day off to get a little break and it's so, so important. So this has been fun.

AJ:

So happy to have you on the pod, John, always a pleasure.

John:

Love the sweatshirt. Love that I've made the, I think it was my fourth time, the four timers club. So glad to be here.

AJ:

I was going to try to think of a contest where you could send someone a sweatshirt, but I'm not ready to do that. Stay tuned for that in future episodes for a very exclusive three, there are only three in existence right now. Thanks for listening. This has been The Liquidity Event. You can find us at Brooklynfi.com/episode 40. See you next week.

Announcer:

Thanks for listening to the liquidity event, host by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn FI and 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 of financial independence. We'll see you next time on The Liquidity Event.