The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 50
Episode 50: Two Guys, a Girl and Some Financial News
Holy hell! The Liquidity Event made it to 50 episodes! If you stayed up for 24 hours straight, you still wouldn’t even get through all the podcast episodes! To celebrate, we’ve got three hosts! In addition to AJ and Shane, we’ve got everyone’s favorite ham, John Owens. In this episode, we're talking about the Elon Musk Twitter deal, the new CPA exam (yawn), the overall success of the PPP Loan program, and startup equity vs. 401(k)s. This one is for the books.
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:
Hello.
Shane:
Hello. Hey, welcome to-
AJ:
The...
Shane:
The Liquidity Event.
AJ:
Liquidity Event.
Shane:
We are your host, Shane.
AJ:
AJ.
John Owens:
And John.
AJ:
Whoa.
Shane:
That's right. We got a three for.
AJ:
Triple threat.
Shane:
Together we are BKFI strong. And today is a very, very special episode of The Liquidity Event. This is episode number 50. We're 50 weeks old.
AJ:
Wow.
Shane:
That's right.
John Owens:
I think 51 weeks old. I think you guys took a week off.
AJ:
Shut up.
Shane:
Wow. Well, I guess the first one was what, Episode Zero? What are we doing here?
AJ:
Yeah. What are we counting? Yeah. When did the numbers in the computer stop working? Y2K?
John Owens:
Y2K.
Shane:
Was the last year leap year?
AJ:
Ay yai yai. How are you guys doing?
John Owens:
We're good. We're all in Brooklyn right now, which is weird.
Shane:
Oh, true.
AJ:
It's also weird that it took us 40 minutes to set up the audio.
Shane:
Doing it in person is always a mess. For anyone that listened to our episode from the retreat-
AJ:
Messy.
Shane:
That was very awkward to do this in person as compared to remotely, but here we are.
AJ:
Yeah. I'm in my office and John is in my living room, even though we're in the same place.
John Owens:
Hi, AJ.
AJ:
Oh, that's the new painting I got. Love it. Love it. This is episode 50. We're recording this on July 13th and it is airing on Friday, July 15th. Hope everyone has a nice weekend. You're probably this listening to this Friday morning, maybe on a run or on your way to the pool or on your way to your job you hate. So thanks for listening as always. We got to a-
Shane:
Nobody hates their jobs.
AJ:
I don't hate my job. Actually, I do hate my job.
John Owens:
Mine is okay if I had better bosses, but anyway, different story.
Shane:
There it is.
AJ:
We've got a lot of stuff to talk about today. We've got Elon Musk and Twitter again. Who cares? A new CPA exam. Paycheck protection program, did it work, did it not? A bunch of other stuff. Should we just not talk about articles and just shoot the shit about what we're up to in money world today?
Shane:
Well, first of all, I'd like to reintroduce Mr. John Owens for folks that have missed the episodes that he's done in the past. He is our Director of Financial Planning here at Brooklyn FI. He has co-hosted... How many episodes now, John, have you done with us you think?
John Owens:
I think four or five. I got a sweatshirt. It's kind of like a five timers club thing. So this might be number five, but always glad to be here.
Shane:
Yeah. Yeah, always fun to have you. So yeah, we could... We don't have that many articles AJ, so maybe we can get through them and maybe just spitball, but I think we just have like seven. Oh, my Starlink article gets shifted to the back as usual. Have you guys heard enough Starlink stuff from me?
AJ:
Oh, there's new Starlink news. I can't wait. Let me guess.
Shane:
There's always new Starlink news.
AJ:
There's more Starlinks coming.
Shane:
Ha-ha. That's one article down, six to go.
John Owens:
Shane will be able to work even more remotely than he does currently if this continues.
AJ:
That is true. All right. So Elon Musk, just to recap anyone who's not familiar, put in a bid to buy Twitter. What was it back in May?
John Owens:
April.
AJ:
April.
John Owens:
April is when this all started to go down.
AJ:
Transactions, going through due diligence, ready to go, and then basically signed an agreement to purchase Twitter and now wants out of it. And is now saying that Twitter violated its terms, so Twitter is now suing Elon Musk in court. We talked about that before, but what is really interesting is not what's going on with Elon and Twitter, but this article about Elon Musk's fixer, this guy, who's basically Elon Musk's number one, right-hand guy who deals with his money, deals with his life problems. Did anyone read this one? Does anyone who this guy is?
John Owens:
Should we explain what this is? Because I don't know if any of our... None of our listeners probably have their own family office. And that's kind of what this is getting at here. And what is a family office and how that works? And basically, it's like, if you're rich enough, instead of hiring a financial planner like Brooklyn FI, you'd just be like, "I'm just going to build my old financial planning firm to deal with all this stuff for me," which is kind of what Elon Musk does. And lots of wealthy people, Bill Gates, Bezos, all of them.
AJ:
Right. This guy is the head of Elon Musk's family office. He's running not just his personal investments, he's running all of his real estate investments, his foundations. I believe he sits on boards at Tesla and I think a few other companies that Elon is part of. It's basically one... This guy is like the CEO of Elon Musk's money is a good way to put it, I think. And he's a guy. He has experience in the money management space. He was at Morgan Stanley. I think he was fired for cause or something or for some minor slipup. What happened?
Shane:
Try to look that word up. Yeah.
AJ:
You looked it up?
Shane:
I think he got fired from... He went to Goldman after going to Brigham Young. His name is Birchal, by the way, or Birchal. He graduated in 1999. He's the head of the family office. He worked in private wealth at Merrill where he was fired for sending correspondence to a client without management approval.
John Owens:
Compliance issues.
Shane:
John, you're more compliancy. What do you think that means?
AJ:
Officer Krupke have to say about this?
John Owens:
Yeah. Officer Krupke. Working with Officer Krupke, basically what that means is that any type of client deliverable in many of the investment spaces needs to be reviewed by the CCO. There's lots of rules around marketing and the SEC's definition of marketing is very broad. And so a lot of times things just need to be approved. You're saying it's multiple clients. And it sounds like this guy broke the rules or said something you shouldn't have said. And they got them. And that side of the business, the broker-dealer, the big bank side of the business has a lot of tight regulatory rules of FINRA, the SEC. And so you busted, but it seems like he landed on his feet.
AJ:
Yeah.
Shane:
At Morgan Stanley. So this guy has worked at Goldman, Merrill, and Morgan Stanley. Probably one of the coolest people you've ever met.
John Owens:
I bet you he has a Patagonia vest.
Shane:
Nobody, nobody. Okay, anyway.
AJ:
A little bit of sarcasm emoji coming off Shane over there. What if he-
Shane:
But they just...
AJ:
What if he sent a birthday card to a client and that was the unapproved correspondence?
John Owens:
I doubt it.
Shane:
A birthday card?
John Owens:
What if he slid into a client's Dds?
AJ:
Yeah.
John Owens:
And that was the unapproved correspondence?
AJ:
Anyway, now he's managing a bunch of money for Mr. Musk and apparently he's-
John Owens:
Yeah. I think he landed on his feet.
AJ:
Yeah, he's fine. He's going to be-
Shane:
Do you have to be Mormon to go to Brigham Young?
AJ:
It's a Mormon University. I don't think you have to be explicitly Mormon, but you might feel a bit place.
Shane:
I think so.
John Owens:
But you have to follow the rules, like three feet on the floor type stuff, way more.
Shane:
What's three feet on the floor?
John Owens:
Like if you have a guest over your dorm room, there needs to be three feet on the floor at all times if you know what I'm saying.
AJ:
No problem.
Shane:
Oh. Yeah. I've seen something like that. I don't get that rule. I usually keep-
AJ:
Anyway, moving on. Speaking of three feet on the floor. The blueprint for the new CPA exam is out for those of you-
Shane:
What? It's kind of a segue.
John Owens:
I wasn't done with Elon. I wanted to read about his lawsuit.
AJ:
Oh, all right. All right. Fine.
John Owens:
Because he's getting ripped. If you want something, if you're a nerd and you're boring, like me, go read the lawsuit that Twitter filed against Elon. And you can read any of these points. They're all great. But number seven is, "Musk's exit strategy is a model of hypocrisy." The reason why he wanted to buy Twitter was to improve the user experience and defeat the spam bots. And now he's saying there's too many spam bots basically and that Twitter lied to get out of it. They spend like 65 pages here ripping Elon Musk in this filing of the Delaware Chancery Court, which is where all this corporate gets litigated. But yeah. It's like if you want to like pour yourself a cup of tea and read this, I highly recommend it. They have screenshots of his tweets in it and how he violated it.
AJ:
Yeah. It's like legal briefs don't typically include memes, but they're actually using his memes against him-
John Owens:
Exactly.
AJ:
... because they're like, he never took this seriously and this is evidence that he was never serious in the first place and misled Twitter, which is part of their lawsuit.
John Owens:
Yeah.
Shane:
It's pretty informal. Yeah. You can get this documentcloud.org. You just search for the Twitter versus Elon Musk complaint. The beginning of paragraph seven, for example, is, "Musk's exit strategy is a model of hypocrisy."
John Owens:
Yeah.
Shane:
It's just the first sentence on page three. And then there's a lot of more fun stuff to follow it up.
John Owens:
And there's screenshots of the text message in here. It's kind of like you were having a fight with your ex or something like that. You'd be like, "All right, but you said this on this day to me, here you go."
Shane:
Some people think he's on the hook for the full damages, not just the billion dollars, that was the price to back out of the deal, but also the damages, as in the difference between the offer price and the current price. Which he offered, what 55? And what's the-
John Owens:
$16 billion.
Shane:
Yeah. Even more than that. It's 20, 30 billion, I think at this point, with where Twitter is at. That's a tough one.
John Owens:
I think the total price he was going to pay was 44 billion. I think the market cap around now is like 28 billion. And so the thought was that if you don't want to buy it, that's fine. Just give us a check for $16 billion. We'll do it all-
AJ:
Call it even.
John Owens:
Which if somebody wants to give me a check for $16 billion, I'll leave them alone. That's for sure.
Shane:
It's not a bad strategy to accept that buyout deal. It's like insurance against the value of your company going down like, "Hey, this guy wants to buy us. If it goes up in value, all right, we got it for a fair price. If it goes down in value, then we're guaranteed to receive." I guess there's no guarantee here.
John Owens:
There's no guarantee.
Shane:
It depends on whose lawyers are smarter. Anyway-
John Owens:
You'll find out.
Shane:
Awesome Succession meme where somebody was talking to Elon's lawyers like, "Who's your lawyer, Mr. Fucking Magoo?" It was one of the greatest scenes from Succession. It just got nominated for an Emmy by the way.
AJ:
Like 20,000 Emmys.
Shane:
Deserves every ounce of that award. Yeah, that show on TV.
John Owens:
You guys are going all out of order. What's next? More Elon stuff?
AJ:
No, I want to talk about the-
John Owens:
No, she was talking about the CPA exam.
AJ:
... the blueprint for the CPA exam.
Shane:
What the hell? I have no idea what's going on.
John Owens:
Yeah. Sounds riveting. What do you got?
Shane:
I didn't even post this. You posted this.
AJ:
Well, basically, in a nutshell, the CPA exam, super easy, really easy to become a CPA. You just pass a few tests, not a hard licensing exam at all.
Shane:
I see. Okay. Wow.
AJ:
They tried to make it a little bit harder for all those accountants out there by adding in some-
Shane:
Keep staying on a speed Episode 50.
AJ:
... by adding in some financial planning in the exam.
Shane:
I'm doing the Arthur fist right now under the table.
AJ:
So super easy exam, they're auditing, tax, accounting, easy stuff for most people to pass. They needed to raise the barrier of entry a little bit higher so they added in some financial planning questions to the exam.
Shane:
I see. Okay.
AJ:
It's basically what happened.
John Owens:
That's LiquidityEvent@Brooklynfi.com, name and town, name and town, keep it short and sweet our CPA listeners who have something to say.
Shane:
All right, I'm hijacking this thread. So yeah, the CPA exam is notorious for teaching CPAs how to do a bunch of that they don't need to learn how to do because you either go into audit or tax and you have to learn both of them to become a CPA, which is unfortunate. Most of the stuff I learned on the exam, I have not used over the past 12 years of practice. And what a cool thing about... Well, one thing about the CPA is it's becoming more and more irrelevant and that's having an existential crisis within the AICPA is that fewer and fewer people are becoming CPAs because the credential isn't as relevant as it used to be. And accountants are notorious for being conservative and slow to move. This is good news that they're updating the exam to include more things that impact your day-to-day consumer.
Shane:
They're adding stuff around small business retirement plans, understanding how IRAs work, Roth IRAs, 401ks, annuities, a bunch of financial planning stuff as my esteemed colleagues just said. People don't know that CPAs... They think they know everything about finances just because they're CPAs or accountants, but I've seen some of the most horrendous advice-
AJ:
From CPAs-
Shane:
... come out of CPAs' mouths because they know just enough to be dangerous and recommend whole life insurance to people in their mid-twenties with no kids as an example. This is really cool though that we're going to get some more literacy distributed through the CPAs that are already really well-trusted as a trusted advisor, they're actually going to get the data or the information that CFPs know is actually good advice. So more power to the board.
AJ:
Yeah. This is a huge consumer win because most people don't have a financial planner, but most people who have taxes that are complex enough, meaning they've got some complexity, they have a CPA. So if that CPA knows a little bit about retirement accounts, that advice is just going to be a lot more widespread. I think just generally in terms of nationwide financial literacy, this is a win. You know that a bunch of CPAs are going to complain about adding the module and the test prep and all that.
Shane:
Yeah. Well, what can you do? People don't like change. Speaking of accountants-
AJ:
Especially accountants.
Shane:
Speaking of non-changing accountants, the study came out of the St. Louis Fed about the impact of the paycheck protection program. Some of you may remember that from the year 2020, as a giant package targeted at business owners to help keep people on the payroll. Instead of giving individuals money, the government decided to filter that through businesses and pay them to keep people on the payroll. In order to have your loans forgiven from this program, you had to keep people on payroll, which is a very novel plan from the government. In addition to the economic injury disaster loans, as well as the unemployment insurance payments and the economic income payments, AKA stimmy checks or Trump bucks if you're my friends that went on unemployment, that's a really funny name for those. It was one of the many packages and policies that was implemented to help keep America afloat.
Shane:
Some would argue it's also one of the reasons that we're seeing high inflation rates right now because the fed was just pumping out dollars. There's this really cool study that's actually written in plain English about how impactful the program was. Apparently for every roughly $4 for every $1 of wages and benefits received by workers in saved jobs were paid by taxpayers. So that's not great.
AJ:
That's not good.
Shane:
You had to pay $4 to keep $1 of wages. The TLDR on here is that we did... I mean, the other impact or the other stat that sticks out is that for every $4 issued, $3 went to business owners and only $1 went to the actual workers at the businesses that received these funds. And that it was a really important program, but it was just really terribly targeted and didn't go to people that actually needed it, unlike the unemployment insurance programs and the stimulus payments, which only 20% of that went to the top 20% of income earners in the United States. So essentially it was a giant handout to business owners to the tune of $800 billion.
John Owens:
It's great. You know what I mean? This is obviously lesson learned. There's things to do better here. I think a couple of things that people forget in all this is number one, in normal times if you're a business owner, you can't collect unemployment. So there isn't that backstop if you own your business. Now it was unique in COVID times, there was a little bit of a benefit there, but not much, only on the federal side, most states didn't do it. It was the federal supplement. I think the other piece is that here we are two and a half years after COVID, we did not go into a depression. The economy is still functioning. Obviously, we've got some issues, but we landed the plane. And so it's like, okay, yeah, maybe we learned something for next time, but if you could go back and you're sitting in our offices, when we used to sit in offices in March of 2020, and the sky is falling down, it's like, yeah, let's throw a couple trillion dollars at it and see what happens because what's the alternative.
AJ:
Yeah. Right. And what the alternative... Okay, fine. Let's say all of that money didn't go to business owners, let's say only 15% of the rest went to the employees, well then what happens to those businesses? The business owners still need that money to keep the... There's no income coming in the door. Maybe the reporting requirements weren't stringent enough. Maybe it wasn't managed as well as it could have been. But those businesses would've gone away anyway. It's like which evil do you choose? And this was the one that we chose. And I'm imagining that the next time this happens because it will, there will be some kind of program that needs to get designed that accountants are going to have to figure out and Congress is going to have to jam through quickly that's going to be mostly well thought out, but there's going to be big blind spots in it. We've done it. What did we learn first rodeo? Well, I guess it's not technically the first rodeo considering all the other rodeos before, but the modern age of the new millennial first rodeo in handouts to business owners.
Shane:
Yeah. I think economists fall on two sides of the camp here as like, do you embrace austerity in terms of... What we got with the Great Depression and after the recession, a lot of people think we didn't pump enough money into the economy. And this is the other side where it's like, don't even target it, just pump it out into the economy as quickly as you can. And hey, if it doesn't work out perfectly, let's say 75% of it goes, quote, unquote waste, at least it's out there and we didn't have a repeat of the Great Recession with massive layoffs that were long-term.
John Owens:
I remember reading Ron Manuel and I think David Axelrod talked about like in Obama when they were coming out of the recession. It's like, oh, if we don't get a trillion dollars in our stimulus spend, no big deal because we have a supermajority in Congress with the Democrats in the Senate, we'll just come back for another bite at the apple. But that's the thing with this. We've learned like there's not necessarily another bite at the apple so you just jam it all in.
Shane:
Yeah. Our presidential system is totally flawless here in the United States.
AJ:
It's timing. Who gets to be the hero in the timing? It's like playing dice with the American worker who needs that paycheck to feed their family.
John Owens:
Helicopter money.
AJ:
Yeah, exactly. What else we got? What else we got here?
Shane:
We have a startup article from the times that doesn't have a ton of meat on the bone in terms of us, but it's a fun one. Do you want to talk about this one AJ?
AJ:
I would love to.
Shane:
Oh, sorry to put you on the spot.
AJ:
If I had-
Shane:
You've already had a busy week. Do you want me to take this one?
AJ:
If I had read it, I would love to.
Shane:
Here we go.
AJ:
Can I guess what it's about? I'm going to guess. Okay. Tell me the title and I'm going to tell you the content. This is a fun game. What's the title?
Shane:
Oh, no.
John Owens:
Oh goodness. Someone didn't do their homework.
AJ:
What's the title? Startup equity is a great retirement plan if you can pull it off. I'm going to guess this article interviews a bunch of startup founders or employees who put their equity in their 401k and hit it big. And they had millions and millions of dollars and somehow they were able to have a self-directed 401k and they put that in there and they're super rich and happy. And then someone else is coming here and saying-
Shane:
Colder, colder.
AJ:
Not good?
John Owens:
Oh dear god. Change fellas, this is getting confusing.
Shane:
She was getting colder. It's way less interesting than that.
AJ:
What's it about?
Shane:
Although that sounds really fun. It's literally just interviewing people that work at startups and how they've hit it big and how most startups don't have 401ks.
AJ:
Oh.
Shane:
And then yeah. And it's just like, instead of work having a 401k, they have equity, which has always struck me as incredibly silly. Like-
John Owens:
Why not both?
Shane:
Why not both? Yeah. Like our-
John Owens:
It's not that hard.
Shane:
It's not hard at all. Our 401k costs $50 a month and then $8 per participant in addition, which means it costs Brooklyn FI under $1,000 a month. And that means our employees get to save hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's not an expensive thing.
John Owens:
Right. And that's-
Shane:
... especially if you're venture-backed or even-
AJ:
To even just have the thing, fine, you don't want to do a match because you have equity. That's fine. That's compensation. You don't have to do a match to have a 401k. You just have to offer it. Damn, that sucks.
Shane:
Yeah.
John Owens:
Make it easy, set up the automatic enrollment, do all that stuff so you help your employees make smart decisions because otherwise there are people that are just going to get caught up in the fact, like all these options and they're going to be my ticket. We're a company that makes VCRs, it's 1990s. It's like, oh boy. This is not going to be good.
AJ:
Yeah. Or just like, what if you leave? What if your circumstances change? In some cases, you can't take that equity with you because it hasn't vested yet. You haven't been there for four years, for whatever reason. Your 401k, you absolutely get to take that with you. It's your money. You know? I don't know. I like my article better.
Shane:
Yeah. They reference the Student Loan Hero acquisition as well. Did you know the guy that owned the Student Loan Hero AJ? I feel like that was your bud.
AJ:
A different-
Shane:
Or was that a different one?
AJ:
... student loan paying-it-off app is my good bud.
Shane:
Rats.
AJ:
Student Loan Hero, great product. That's a fantastic resource by the way. If anyone listening has student loans, Student Loan Hero, lots of great calculators and articles, and just plain language explanation for complex government websites.
Shane:
Indeed. Speaking of startups, there's this great article that you found AJ in Business Insider about creating home libraries for celebrities. As soon as you posted this, for some reason I knew Gwyneth Paltrow was going to be in this article.
AJ:
Well, first of all, I was-
Shane:
This is a business and stuff.
AJ:
I was crying reading this article. I was like, why didn't I think of this? I grew up in bookstores. This is my career for most of my twenties.
John Owens:
This is the business AJ actually wanted to launch instead of Brooklyn FI.
AJ:
Yeah.
John Owens:
This was her all back.
AJ:
Yeah.
Shane:
I ruined her life.
AJ:
Had I had any background on my podcast, it would've been a whole different trajectory. I'd have been picking out yellow books for Gwyneth Paltrow right now instead of talking to you idiots.
Shane:
John would still be talking about RMDs or vintage.
John Owens:
At least I got into a retirement plan.
AJ:
No, this is an awesome business. Books, most people read them, but if you've got a huge-
Shane:
Wow, insights. That's why y'all come here.
John Owens:
Really getting out stuff to everybody.
AJ:
Hold on, I'm getting there. If you got a big old house with a library in it, you got to fill it with books. And if maybe you're a busy celebrity or busy running a company, you want to fill it with good books. So you hire this guy who knows a lot about books to fill it with all... you get to tell him what kind of books you want, whether they look pretty or they're a certain subject. I think this is an amazing business idea. And he says, it's like, he'll do you know a small little shelf for you, and then there's seven-figure commissioned libraries for celebrities.
Shane:
Oh.
AJ:
So here's my two weeks.
John Owens:
It seems like your background is already set there AJ so you don't need to worry.
AJ:
Oh, that's true. All right. I have a question for the team, the group.
Shane:
What's that?
AJ:
What are you worried about in your financial life right now if anything?
Shane:
I have too much stuff for somebody that moves around so much. I have a car, a boat, a dog, a storage unit, and no home, no permanent home. I've got a bunch of winter clothes. So just every time those monthly fees hit, I'm just like, what am I doing? Transitioning into being a full full-time nomad. I think life is set up to be sedentary... not sedentary but have a primary residence.
AJ:
Follow-up question. Do you think there is a tool or product or person out there who can help you?
Shane:
Oh, probably. There's a guy for everything. Quote, unquote, not to be sexist.
John Owens:
YouTube video. You watch some Marie Kondo videos to get a little bit more organized there Shane, figure out, "Does this bring me joy? Does this parka bring me joy? I'm spending my winter in Mexico."
Shane:
Does the guys' stuff that I sub-leasing from bring me joy? No.
John Owens:
No.
Shane:
Throw it out the window.
John Owens:
Throw it out. Get rid of it.
Shane:
Oh, do these 17 Amazon boxes full of painting supplies bring me joy?
AJ:
Negative.
Shane:
Negative.
AJ:
What about you John? What are you worried about?
John Owens:
Yeah. I don't know. I don't get too cut up and worried about the market or the inflation situation. I think both of which are transitory. I think that one of the things that is on my mind is... I don't want to say lifestyle creep, but lifestyle adjustment post-COVID, this is like the first real summer we've had in almost three years. And so when somebody says you want to do something, I've just said yes and done it, not really thought twice about it. I'm pretty austere in terms of my budgeting, but it's still one of those things that 2022 is going to be a higher spending year not only because costs have gone up, but because we're coming back to being able to have a life and being able to do things, which isn't a bad thing, but just something to be mindful of.
AJ:
What's the solution out there, tech or person that's going to fix that for you?
John Owens:
Yeah. I think I just need to track my spending a little bit better, which I do in my custom Excel sheet. And then think about not in an app or anything like that, of course, because that wouldn't be [inaudible 00:25:39], but yeah, I don't know, I think I just could go have fun. YOLO.
AJ:
That's the solution is YOLO?
John Owens:
Yeah. Sorry. This isn't an advice podcast.
AJ:
No, I was actually curious. I think a lot of people right now are-
John Owens:
What are you worried about AJ?
AJ:
I'm worried about complexity and I have anxiety about missing deadlines and payments. Now I have a mortgage and I have property taxes and I have cable bills. I have this looming anxiety that I'm going to miss a payment and they're going to take my house away or turn off my electric bill or water. And I have everything set on autopay.
Shane:
Well, it sounds like you need a family office.
AJ:
I need a family office. Everything is on autopay.
Shane:
May I suggest-
John Owens:
Maybe virtual. Maybe virtual will give you another client.
AJ:
I'm done.
Shane:
Mason family offices?
AJ:
I've done all the due diligence. I've checked all the boxes, but it's just kind of like you Shane, when it's this we all work from home, it's awesome. But I am moving around a lot. I am traveling a lot. There's a lot of like little things that I just constantly feel like I'm forgetting about something big and it's going to bite me in the butt in the future. But yeah, a lot of our clients I think are worried about the market, just the market in general, but also the performance of their company, because they have ownership in that company and they were maybe counting on that for their retirement or their home down payment. I've just been having a lot of conversations with clients about worry and how to separate out worry and address that feeling, accept it, welcome it, but not actually make big, huge life decisions based on those feelings because ultimately, they are feelings.
AJ:
What, three of us just described things in our lives that John, you were talking about spending too much. I'm like, I haven't even thought about that. But that's taking up so much head space for you. I don't know. I guess I'm just getting at, it's worry. That's all it is. We shouldn't make decisions based on emotional feelings.
John Owens:
Yeah. I think it's like you said, this is a broader life lesson takeaway here, which is if you're thinking irrationally about something and you can at least recognize that, you can just go talk to somebody. It doesn't matter who. Be like, "Hey, am I crazy even thinking like this? Is this not"... Like, "Yeah. Hey, let's bring it back down a notch. John, you go out once a week, it's not a big deal. Your budget is probably fine. Okay? You live in Amish Country. I think it'll be right. And AJ, you're very organized." But I think we can get in our heads, and we can make stupid decisions when-
Shane:
What, nothing positive to say about me?
John Owens:
Shane, if you got a parka to get rid of, I could use a new parka if we have another one of these Northeastern winters. Let me know. I'll try it.
Shane:
I actually do.
John Owens:
Is it Canada Goose?
Shane:
I actually will give you all my winter clothes.
John Owens:
Is it a Canada Goose? I hope it's a nice... I would never buy one of those, but they're pretty slick.
Shane:
I'm imagining you-
John Owens:
Especially more of the Patagonia vest, bro, I was thinking.
Shane:
All my clothing prior to COVID is second-hand. I don't think you're going to want that stuff.
John Owens:
I got a question for you guys. 50 episodes in, how do you like this? Are you guys still having fun? Are you still enjoying this?
AJ:
Definitely.
John Owens:
It was an experiment.
AJ:
It was an experiment. Definitely having fun, definitely love doing the podcast 75% of the time.
Shane:
60% of the time it works all the time.
AJ:
Super jazzed like, oh, that was a great episode. And then sometimes I'm just like, I don't want to do this. I have other stuff to do. I want to go home. I want to take a nap, over it. But no, it's been a lot of fun and I think it was a success. We've got a lot of amazing listeners. I talk to clients all the time that listen to the pod. People who want to work at Brooklyn FI listen to the pod. People in bars come up to Shane and tell him how great of a podcast it was so we can do well on the Brooklyn dating scene, which we talked about in a previous episode.
Shane:
It's the only reason I do the pod.
AJ:
No, here's to 50 more my friends. Thank you for listening to Episode 50 of The Liquidity Event. You've been a great, great, great audience. You can find the show notes at Brooklynfi.com/episode50. See you next week. Bye.
Shane:
Bye.
John Owens:
Bye, everybody.
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.