The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 64

 

Episode 64: We're Well-qualified to Represent the ESG

Today, we're hanging with Shane and Kurtis, one of Brooklyn FI's financial planning associates! This week, Texas Pete's hot sauce may be in hot water. A Californian is not loving that the product is manufactured in North Carolina. We’re conflicted by our interest in this story. Intel is set to lay off thousands as PC sales lag, Amazon Prime Day 2.0 fails to impress, and first-time marriages are up for people in their 40s and 50s! The Wall Street Journal says more than 20 percent of federal employees trade stocks in the companies that. they. oversee. Gross! Next up, you'll hear all about YALL, y'all! That's the newest portfolio called the God Bless America ETF. After that, you'll hear about the bubbly, but non-alcoholic Liquid Death, the low-key way to hydrate on a pub crawl, being valued at an impressive $700 million. Finally, you'll hear what's up in European tech as Vodafone seeks to sell off Vantage and a quick rundown of a promising upcoming biotech IPO.

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.

Shane Mason:

Hello, Hello, hello, and welcome to the The Liquidity Event. We are your hosts, Shane Mason.

Kurtis Rohlf:

And Kurtis Rohlf.

Shane Mason:

How we doing, Kurtis?

Kurtis Rohlf:

We didn't do last names the last time, Shane. Sorry, you threw me off there.

Shane Mason:

I started doing that recently, I just want people to get first and last names in here. This is Episode #64 of The Liquidity Event. We are recording this on October 19th, 2022, it'll air on October 21st, 2022. Today, we have news about Intel cutting jobs ahead of the slowdown in global PC sales, fed officials have been trading stocks, surprise, surprise, a little insider trading from the government, and the world has its first anti-ESG ETF. Wow, that's a mouthful. We'll explain what the hell that is. And then we have a look ahead to Q4's IPOs, see what type of Liquidity Events are coming up on the horizon. Kurtis, how we doing today, buddy?

Kurtis Rohlf:

I'm doing excellent. It's been a really good day. It's sunny here in California, not too hot, so it's been really enjoyable. How about you?

Shane Mason:

You're telling me it's sunny in the Golden State right now, in California?

Kurtis Rohlf:

Shocking, I know.

Shane Mason:

Nothing but sunshine over that shoulder, I see, buddy. Thank you for wearing your fancy, exclusive Members Only Liquidity Event sweatshirt that you only get if you become a host or a guest on The Liquidity Event. We love to see it.

Kurtis Rohlf:

Yeah, it's my new favorite sweatshirt.

Shane Mason:

It is really comfortable, isn't it?

Kurtis Rohlf:

It is, yeah.

Shane Mason:

I brought that with me all the way out here. I am recording from Portugal today. I am on vacation, but I love The Liquidity Event so much that I'm recording this after a handful of beers and a red eye from New York, so let's hop in. We have a ton of articles today, Kurtis. I think we have some carry over from last week, I think AJ and I did a little deep dive into just a handful of articles. So, what do you say we just hop into something light to start us off? We have here a hot sauce brand in hot water, an article from LinkedIn. This is definitely from AJ, the LinkedIn crusader. I can't really handle LinkedIn's fake professionalism. Are you a LinkedIn browser?

Kurtis Rohlf:

I'm not a LinkedIn browser. I have LinkedIn because that's how people find me sometimes, but other than that, it's pretty dormant on my side.

Shane Mason:

I'm a little bit of a too much of a devil's advocate for LinkedIn. I like to stir the pot and it's probably a bad place for me to exist. But anyway, this article is coming from LinkedIn. It's about a lawsuit over Texas Pete's hot sauce. I used to live in Texas, big fan of Texas Pete... I'm actually not a huge fan of Texas Pete, it's not spicy enough for your boy. But apparently, Texas Pete hot sauce is made in North Carolina.

Kurtis Rohlf:

Apparently, they also put that right on the bottle, so it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.

Shane Mason:

Wait, is that true, they print it right on the bottle?

Kurtis Rohlf:

They don't put it like, "Texas Pete's, made in North Carolina," but if you look at where it's made, it's definitely says, "Produced in North Carolina," kind of thing on it.

Shane Mason:

How do we feel about a lawsuit? So, the premise is that somebody is upset that Texas is being misrepresented or that Texas Pete's legacy as a Texas shooter, cowboy, builder, man, ranger is being besmirched by these North Carolinian factories. Who really cares?

Kurtis Rohlf:

My thought was like, don't people have better things to do? I don't know. It's a guy from California, so it's not even a Texan-

Shane Mason:

Oh my God.

Kurtis Rohlf:

... is mad about Texas Pete's, it's a Californian is mad about Texas Pete's. It just seems a little-

Shane Mason:

If there's one thing Texans don't like more than gun control, it's people from California.

Kurtis Rohlf:

Exactly.

Shane Mason:

I'm a huge hot sauce enthusiast. I'm going to go top five hot sauces, Crystal, Tabasco, Louisiana, Yucateco, Sriracha. How do you feel about that list?

Kurtis Rohlf:

I feel like it's a pretty solid list. Definitely, I'm not an enthusiast, I do enjoy my hot sauces, but that's a solid top five. Again, it's hard, then, to be like, "Oh, I love this one specific hot sauce that you can only get wherever, because it's a mom-and-pop shop hot sauce." But that's a good mainstream hot sauce list, I approve.

Shane Mason:

If you had to drink hot sauce directly from the bottle, which hot sauce would you drink?

Kurtis Rohlf:

So, ease of drinking, it'd have to be Sriracha, because it's a squeeze bottle, but flavor-wise, I'd go Tabasco. I don't want to shake a bottle in my mouth for 45 minutes to drink the bottle of Tabasco-

Shane Mason:

We pour Tabasco into the cap of the Tabasco bottle and take shots of it in middle school, because I grew up in Mississippi.

Kurtis Rohlf:

That's pretty awesome. That's real hardcore, Shane.

Shane Mason:

That's right. Everybody needs to know how badass your boy is. Let's move on to an actual article with meat on the bone, still a spicy meatball. Intel plans on cutting thousands of jobs. In face of a PC slowdown, Intel, led to greatness by Sir Andy Grove, or Mr. Andy Grove, I shouldn't call him Sir, he's from California, not from Cornwall, is cutting probably a few thousand jobs ahead of the upcoming global PC slowdown. It looks like there's going to be big cuts, according to sources, in the sales and marketing department, we can see up to 20% of those departments being cut. They have an earnings call coming up on October 27th, and it looks like these cuts are intended to buoy the bad results that are expected, according to that upcoming call. What do you think about these cuts? How do you feel about the overall macroeconomic environment and how this is impacting Intel?

Kurtis Rohlf:

People losing jobs always sucks. That's never fun for the human beings that are behind these numbers. It feels like it's par for the course from what we're experiencing, high inflation, a downturn in the tech market, supply chain issues, specifically. I know that we've been having problems with a chip shortage from all that stuff, so if you can't get your chips here to put in your computers when everyone was buying, now you have a surplus of all that stuff and it's going to be harder in a recession, when people don't have the cash or desire to replace their personal computer as often.

Shane Mason:

I'm looking at Intel stock over the last one month, down 12%, six months, what would you guess?

Kurtis Rohlf:

40.

Shane Mason:

45. Not looking good. Year to date, down 51, last year, down 52. Yikes. Come on, fellows. Supposedly, they've seen a lot of competition from AMD, as well, which is actually innovating. I don't know if you build computers, I feel like you've built computers in the past, you and I should-

Kurtis Rohlf:

I feel like I should build computers, but I've never built a computer.

Shane Mason:

Why don't we build a PC together at our upcoming retreat in LA? I think that would be-

Kurtis Rohlf:

Perfect. I'll bring the parts and you slot the time off.

Shane Mason:

Cool. But I haven't seen that AMD, one of their big competitors, has been innovating in the speed and price department. I know that there's also ARM, in the UK that we talked about, might go public. That's one of the biggest private companies out of the UK, chip manufacturers, is also looking to compete, as well. So, Intel is struggling, like other tech giants recently over the past year. So, what else do we have? Speaking of struggling to make an honest buck, we have federal officials trade stock in companies that their agencies oversee. This is a Wall Street Journal article. This is a deep dive investigative journalism. This headline sounds nefarious, but when you actually realize that they looked at over 31,000 transactions across thousands of employees over years and years, it turns out that over 20% of federal employees trade stocks in the companies that they manage. By managing, we're talking about the EPA overseeing oil and gas companies, we're talking about the Treasury Department overseeing the purse strings of the economy. How do we feel about people in the government trading individual stocks when there are perfectly good alternatives?

Kurtis Rohlf:

I'm disgusted, but not surprised was my feeling when I read this article. This has become more and more to light, and unfortunately, the senators decide if they can do this or not, currently, so why would they cut off their ability to trade stocks, basically? It's dumb. There are ETFs out there, it's easy to be diversified in your millions and millions of dollars, but that takes you out of the pocket of lobbyists, so it doesn't seem like there's much upside for senators or government officials to curtail this behavior.

Shane Mason:

It's so hard to pick stocks, probably hundreds of mutual funds go out of business every year because they can't pick stocks. Why would these individuals that work with the government think that they could pick stocks any better than them, unless they're benefiting from inside information-

Kurtis Rohlf:

Exactly.

Shane Mason:

... when ETFs and mutual funds easily provide diversification at much at almost no cost to these holders of these stocks? I find it very funny that the Treasury, of all the departments, is the most egregious. They think that they understand what's going on. The EPA was surprisingly the second most egregious of the departments that was trading on oil and gas stocks as they lobbied. Well, they didn't lobby, but controlled them. Speaking of environmental investments, we have our world's first anti-ESG portfolio. It's called the God Bless America ETF and its ticker symbol is hilarious, it is YAL. What do y'all think about this ETF?

Kurtis Rohlf:

Oh my gosh, it's priceless. It's so extra woke, or anti-woke, I don't know?

Shane Mason:

It's anti-woke.

Kurtis Rohlf:

It's anti-woke. It's hilarious because I was looking through the holdings of it and I don't know what their definition of anti-ESG is, because it's renewable energy companies. Tesla is the biggest holding in this with almost 8% of the portfolio, I don't get it. I don't understand how it's anti-ESG if they're doing electric vehicle companies and steel recycling companies. It seems like someone's trolling them, almost.

Shane Mason:

Interesting point about Tesla. Tesla has performed very well over the past 10-ish years or what have you. But when we build, because we build ESG portfolios for our clients all times we do, it is funny that sometimes Tesla is excluded from certain portfolios that are, quote unquote, ESG. Just a reminder that ESG is simply looking at a basket of stocks and deciding which ones not to include or which ones you want to screen out of your specific ETF for whatever reason that you choose, whether that's gun control or environmental reasons or oil and gas, or not enough women on the board, or not enough diversity at the company, in general. That reminds me of Tesla, because they are, while they're great for the environment leading the charge in electric vehicles, trying to kill the internal combustion engine, they have terrible diversity at Tesla. There's almost no women in the board and it's mostly white fellows, I believe, at the company in general.

Kurtis Rohlf:

The G in ESG governance is so not hot at Tesla.

Shane Mason:

So, I just have to read y'all's prospectus. The subadvisor eliminates companies that, in the subadvisor's assessment, have emphasized politically left and/or liberal political activism and social agendas at the expense of maximizing shareholder returns, so I think that's fun. It is featuring a 65 BPS expense ratio, so you're almost paying a full percentage point just to hold this ETF, to hold Tesla and Nvidia and Amgen, which are giant S&P 500 companies. It holds a basket of about 30 to 40 stocks and it's actively traded portfolio. Cool. Well, if there was a portfolio that was anti-sin stocks, such as port tobacco or alcohol, then Liquid Death would definitely be involved in that ETF. We have this Liquid Death.

Kurtis Rohlf:

Absolutely.

Shane Mason:

Have you heard of Liquid Death? Tell our audience what Liquid Death is. This is Bloomberg article, Liquid Death.

Kurtis Rohlf:

Liquid Death, it's a sparkling water company, but they don't do any flavors. So, it's literally this can, a black and silver can with a skull on it and at 16 ounces, it looks badass, but it's just fucking water. Their big push is they've been getting into a lot of different music venues and all that, so it's a nonalcoholic alternative that still looks like alcohol. Again, I don't understand why people have to do this, but assholes out there being like, "Oh, why don't you have a drink?" Who cares? It's my life. So, it's a nice alternative to get harassed less, basically, too, at events, seemingly.

Shane Mason:

I think America, in general, is trending towards moderation. I don't have any data in front of me here, but anecdotally and personally, I have been trying to trend downwards, as well, heading into my mid-30s here. But you can see it in the growth of companies we've talked about, Athletic Brewing Company, everyone listening to this podcast, if you listen to podcasts, you've probably heard an advertisement for the alcohol-free Athletic Brewing Company and Distillery that won a beer tasting championship, a global beer competition, even though they don't have any alcohol in the beer.

Kurtis Rohlf:

That's awesome.

Shane Mason:

So, as the growth of nonalcoholic beverages, trends upwards, Liquid Death has been valued at 700 million, which is an incredible valuation for this company that hasn't been around all too long. I first heard about it when our Director of Ops, Miss Alexis San Ramon, started drinking it. She's never had, this is crazy to me, an alcoholic beverage in her entire life, and then she started rocking these Liquid Deaths on the Zoom calls.

As someone that frequently goes to social events, I wish there was less obvious nonalcoholic drinks. I can tell an Athletic Brewing drink, I can tell a Heineken that has 0%, they have that giant 0% on the bottle, you can tell that Liquid Death is also nonalcoholic, so you're almost asking for the conversation about why you aren't drinking while you're doing it for the numbskulls that have to have the conversation with you. So, I wish there was a little bit more discrete packaging on nonalcoholic beverage. I guess you could just drink soda water and then it looks like you're drinking a gin and tonic.

Kurtis Rohlf:

Sure. Throw a lime in it, no one knows the difference between that and a gin and tonic or something. Sure.

Shane Mason:

But then the bartender looks at you like you're crazy, and how much do you charge for that?

Kurtis Rohlf:

Right, exactly.

Shane Mason:

Life's conundrums, these are the things that I think about late at night.

Kurtis Rohlf:

That haunt me at night.

Shane Mason:

Speaking of things I don't know what's going on with, this next article's all you, Kurtis. We've got a Reuters article about Vodafone's active investor relevant to their stake in Vantage. Give us the rundown here.

Kurtis Rohlf:

So, Vantage is a cellular tower company that's a portion of Vodafone and apparently, there's a French-

Shane Mason:

This is the voiceover internet company, or do they do regular cell phones?

Kurtis Rohlf:

They do regular cell phones and stuff, too, as well, I think they do both.

Shane Mason:

It's a European thing?

Kurtis Rohlf:

It's definitely a European thing, 100% a European thing. But a French billionaire came in, got a 2.5% stake in the company, and basically started throwing around his weight. So, this has very much Carl Icahn vibes to it, someone coming in with a lot of money saying, "Hey, you're doing a crap job at running your business, this is how we should do it instead." So, the idea that there's the November 15th deadline is this guy's, his name is Xavier, it's his deadline of, "Hey, make some moves" and part of that is apparently selling a stake in Vantage, which is apparently becoming somewhat challenging for them, because there's really not a huge market for it. The people that are interested don't necessarily have the funding to come up with it and the big giants in Europe aren't interested in the stake that they're willing to sell, so I don't know. It's an interesting time with seeing more and more billionaires come back to this idea of, "Hey, I have a lot of money, but I don't want to start my own company, so I'm just going to tell this public company how to run their business.

Shane Mason:

Do you think that the US market is a triopoly or we have enough competition in the US market when it comes to cell phone service, that we're getting good deals from T-Mobile, Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, et cetera?

Kurtis Rohlf:

I don't think we're getting a good deal, because again, we look, it is... That's a great point. It's absolutely a triopoly, because again, even if you get Cricket or whatever subsidiary of AT&T or Verizon or whoever, it still goes back to those parent companies. But it's also that issue with, if we look at the allowed monopolies of electricity providers or the normal utilities that we obtain, there's nothing to do about it, because it's so egregiously expensive to get in on that infrastructure that you're stuck with what you've got, for the most part.

Shane Mason:

Well, with that said, speaking of seeing what we've got, we have Q4 coming up. It is only the second to third week of Q4 and hopefully, we're going to finally see some sizeable IPOs coming down the pipeline for the year 2022, making it out of a total flop, so to speak. Tell me a little bit about what we're looking at in the upcoming IPO space.

Kurtis Rohlf:

The upcoming IPO space, it's the first $100 million-plus IPO of Q4, we've got that. There's also an IPO, it's another spinoff, and I'm blanking on who's doing it, do you remember, Shane?

Shane Mason:

You talking about Mobileye?

Kurtis Rohlf:

Yeah.

Shane Mason:

Oh yeah.

Kurtis Rohlf:

The self-driving car company.

Shane Mason:

We've been talking Mobileye over the past couple weeks, so it looks like they will be cleared to launch this IPO in the next few weeks ahead, so we will be watching that closely. The ticker symbol on Mobileye will be MBLY. And then it looks like Prime Medicine is out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, they do gene editing therapies for various diseases, let's hoping that CRISPR can fix my issues. I saw an article recently that the founders of Biotech are looking at vaccines for cancer, I think that they're close to breakthroughs in that cancer space, although I don't really have-

Kurtis Rohlf:

That's interesting.

Shane Mason:

Just reading headlines out over the podcast is a great idea, I'd actually back it.

Kurtis Rohlf:

It's the best thing ever.

Shane Mason:

Some guy the other day at the bar was telling me that we live in the Matrix. Speaking of the internet, Amazon Prime Day 2.0, did you participate? This was last week, early last week. No?

Kurtis Rohlf:

I did not participate. I don't know, I've been turned off from Amazon's Prime Day or whatever, Summer Spectacular stuff, because most of it, I don't need, and a lot of it that's a deal, apparently is no longer a deal. They hike the price before a Prime Day and then say, "Look, 40% off." You can find it elsewhere for the exact same price, not on sale, basically.

Shane Mason:

Classic. Have you ever used that website, is it CamelCamel, where you can find the price of things historically?

Kurtis Rohlf:

I've never used CamelCamel. That sounds cool.

Shane Mason:

Yeah. Well, if you build computers, Kurtis, like the nerd that you are, like I am, then you would've used CamelCamel to get the best price on graphics cards, monitors, CPUs, et cetera. I think it's called Camel, it's been a little while. But if you CamelCamel those Prime Day items, I bet you can see the spike, you can see them flat. Just like when you look at Google flights and it shows you the history, so you can see when you could have bought the dip and bought the bottom of that flight. Google Flights is great for traders and investors.

So, I've never been excited about Prime Day either, even since the first one. I think it's interesting that they're now doing two in a year, they do one in the summertime and then they do one just prior to the holidays to try to get a jump start on the holidays. Maybe this is due to the global supply chain issues that we've been seeing over the past few years, they figured they would push out sales a few months, maybe get some of that just accelerated a bit, make sure we make it by Christmas. Speaking of getting things ahead of the holidays, I picked up my Halloween costume a few days ago. I'm going to be Dr. Shots for the fifth year in a row.

Kurtis Rohlf:

Excellent.

Shane Mason:

This is the doctor that has syringes you fill with Jack Daniels and you diagnose people's sobriety. Kurtis, what are you going to be for Halloween this year?

Kurtis Rohlf:

I'm not a huge Halloween person. Again, people will freak out. I've got nothing against Halloween-

Shane Mason:

Are you an anti-Satanist?

Kurtis Rohlf:

Yep, I am. Well, I was raised in St. Louis, Missouri, buckle of the Bible Belt, so you can't have any of that demon stuff going on. No, it seems like a lot of effort. I've never really gone to a ton of parties, so there's never really been the need to do costumes. I hand out candy to the kids in my neighborhood the one night a year-

Shane Mason:

You don't build computers, you don't dress up for Halloween, that's two strikes, buddy. Let's see if we make it to the end of the podcast without-

Kurtis Rohlf:

I know, I'm never doing this again.

Shane Mason:

Enjoy it while it lasts, you've got six more minutes. Speaking of things that don't last forever, The Wall Street Journal here has an article about first-time marriages are on the rise for people in their 40s and 50s. I'm not bitter about not being married, I promise. First-time marriages are on the rise for people in their 40s and 50s, this is a cool article. It's a really long piece. It's a profile piece about people that are just statistically getting older before they get married for the first time. So, we've got the latter piece of the Gen X generation and the older millennials, people in their mid-40s, like my big sister who do not get married until maybe she was 39, and I'm not married at 35, so anecdotal, but here we are. You got married younger than these folks, Kurtis, talk to me about your marriage.

Kurtis Rohlf:

Well, I was 27. Talk to me about your marriage, this is therapy-

Shane Mason:

We got five more minutes, so now-

Kurtis Rohlf:

Five more minutes.

Shane Mason:

... this is free.

Kurtis Rohlf:

I was 27. My wife had just graduated undergrad, so she was 22, so she definitely got married on the younger side of things. I think this is a common kind of shift. Again, the more traditional values that mine and her parents ascribed to, we didn't force the marriage, but we expected to have a big wedding and all that stuff. We probably would've gotten married sooner, because we were ready for it, but we were waiting for her to finish college and us to move together to California before we tied the knot there. There's a lot of cultural stuff that goes on with weddings and marriages and why you do it. I think that it's funny when we talk to clients and they're like, "Well, does it make tax sense for me and my partner that I've been living with forever, for 10 years, to get married?" It's yes and no, depending on the situation, of course, but that was definitely not where we were at for making that decision.

So, I think for us, a lot of things are shifting later and there's that memory of, "Well, my parents didn't wait this long to do that. Isn't my life over already," type of thing. I don't own a house, I don't think I'm going to be in a position to do that, necessarily, anytime soon. A lot of folks our age, Shane, a lot of our clients our age do own houses, because they work in tech firms and have had liquidity events, but a lot of folks are renting now. That's just our expectation and reality because of everything that's gone on. Living through multiple once-in-a-lifetime events financially is always interesting and sometimes frustrating, but I think we adapt and continue to move on with our lives and roll with it.

Shane Mason:

A couple comments. I agree, our clients are exceptionally blessed to have financial stability, more often than not, than your average person that would be sampled in this study or your average Gen X, Gen Yer, or Gen Zer. And then we're struggling to reach certain milestones and marriage is just one of them. I have a pet theory that, I'm going to call it the Fruit Roll-Up theory, and it has more to do with life expectancy than intergenerational solidarity around our woes, and that is if you stretch out a Fruit Roll-Up, there's just more of it. So, maybe you just push back things that happen on that timeline, you've just got more time to hit certain milestones. I think that's fine, I think it's all good. So, essentially, since we're living 10, 20 years longer, maybe we push back marriage 5, 10 years, no big deal. Is it, a big deal? Where's the divorce rate at relative to these later marriages?

Kurtis Rohlf:

In 10 years, I think that'd be an interesting follow-up article of all these people who got married in their 40s and 50s, what percentage of them stuck together and which percentage fell apart?

Shane Mason:

Stay tuned next time, on next week's episode, in the year 2040... I don't have a good segue here. John Owens, our Director of Financial Planning, slipped in an article about the town that he lives in. Apparently, Lancaster, Pennsylvania was listed as the best small city in America, according to John Owen.

Kurtis Rohlf:

ABC Channel 7 Local News?

Shane Mason:

No, it's this website WalletHub, which apparently looked at thousands of small cities and looked at the school zones and the tax rates and engagement and crime rates, and it looks like Lancaster hit the top of the list. I thought that was cool. I wanted to see the demographics of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as well, because I had expectations. It turns out Lancaster's only 58% white, 20% black, and the rest are made up of various ethnicities, so I find that very cool. Shout-out to John Owens as a member of the Lancaster, Pennsylvania populous. Oh, let's talk about student loan debt relief, this is kind of cool. We've got the mechanics on how to request... Well, we're going to bury this all the way, 27 minutes into the episode.

Kurtis Rohlf:

You've got to wait till the end for the good stuff.

Shane Mason:

We're calling this Biden Student Loan Relief. Apparently, we have a preview on how you are going to be able to request debt relief. Apparently, you can do it on your phone.

Kurtis Rohlf:

Yeah, I could.

Shane Mason:

What are your thoughts on the ability to request relief?

Kurtis Rohlf:

It's not as simple as it's on your phone. I clicked the NPR link and they had updated the article. Basically, it's a web page that you fill in your personal information and say that, "Yes, I made less than $250,000 in these certain periods of time," and send it off before December 31st. So, it looks like the page is live now to get forgiveness for your student loans.

Shane Mason:

Great. It looks like you have until December of 2023, as well, to apply. You don't need any documentation, you just need to verify or validate or attest that you make less than that income threshold. I guess they'll tie your Social Security number to your tax return with this validation, I'm assuming this also going to be on the IRS's plate to deal with this, just like everything else, and they'll be able to see if you lied or not. But best of luck to those of you that are trying to get forgiveness on your phone. I could not even buy tickets to a concert on my phone the other night, so getting $10,000 from the government, good luck, everybody.

Wow, we've got through a lot of articles today, Kurtis, thanks for hanging in there.

Kurtis Rohlf:

We did, we crushed it.

Shane Mason:

That was a speed run of articles, trying to catch us up ahead of next week's, clearing it. Thank you, listeners, for listening to Episode 64 of The Liquidity Event. You can email us at liquidityevent@brooklynfi. If you have any questions, we will read your answers on the air. If you leave us a voicemail, we will play it on the air. Show notes are available at brooklynfi.com/episode24. Brooklyn FI's stance, you can leave us a review on your podcast app, if you want to be weird about it. We appreciate it if you do. Thank you, everyone.

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.