The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 96

Episode 96: Golden Visas for The Golden Years

Get ready to laugh, learn, and ponder the mysteries of life on the Liquidity Event Podcast! We've got a FAFSA makeover, a new Attentive CEO, the dangers of youth social media use, and AIs doing paralegal work. On a lighter note, Shane and AJ have a lot to say about Portugal's golden visa program. Shane looks forward to welcoming you to his Algarve beach shack in 2024. Thanks for listening!

Links

• The FAFSA is getting a makeover later this year—here's what's changing

• Our Next Chapter: Announcing Amit Jhawar as Attentive’s New CEO

• The surgeon general’s advisory on risks of youth social media use could shift the conversation

• Money pours into AI startups that save countless hours of legal paperwork

• Here’s What Happens When Your Lawyer Uses ChatGPT

• Where It’s Cheaper to Build Than Buy

• Home buyers will now be able to put down as little as 1% on their home, Rocket Mortgage says

• Golden Visa Programs

• American Investors Turn to Greece as Portugal’s Golden Visa Scheme Ends

• You can now hail an Uber by calling a number

Airdate: 06/02/2023

Read the Full Transcript:

Presenter:

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

AJ:

Hello and welcome to the Liquidity Event, we're your hosts, AJ.

Shane:

And I'm Shane.

AJ:

And this is episode 96 being recorded on May 31st airing on Friday, June 2nd. This week, we've got a wonderful show for you folks. We've got robot lawyers, new CEO in at Attentive, the housing market update for you there, and it's a big week for boomers. How you doing, Shane?

Shane:

I'm great. Great. Got my bags packed. About to head on a little three month tour of the world. I hate it.

AJ:

Sucks to suck, right?

Shane:

Yeah, I'm in a sweet spot. I've been complaining about traveling a lot lately and nobody gives a shit when I complain about it. Like, oh no. Oh, I travel the world all the time. Boo hoo, world's tiniest violin. But living out of a backpack does come with health and sanity adjustments that are difficult, but yeah. Excited. I'm going to see you next week. I'm going to see you in Vegas for a big conference next week. You and I are presenting two times in Las Vegas at the AICPA Engage Conference, which is, in my opinion, one of the best conferences in the financial planning world, and that's because it's the most expensive one. No, I kid. But no, but I'm excited to speak about AI and investing with you, as well as some technical stuff around equity compensation next week that we have kind of our canned, this is how you do equity comp, other advisors, and it usually gets really good reviews. Our director of planning, John just did it at NAPFA and got rave reviews and got asked to come back. A lot of appetite for equity compensation education. So excited.

AJ:

Indeed. Yeah, I'm excited too. It's my first time at this conference. I couldn't go last year. I forget why or the year before, but I am pumped to hang out with our whole team in Vegas. So yeah, if you're attending AICPA, we've got a cabana on Monday at the Aria Hotel, so we'll see you there.

Shane:

This will air just in time.

AJ:

Just in time to catch me by the pool sipping on a mojito. What do you drink in Vegas by the pool? Mojitos, that's like tropical. What's a good poolside Vegas drink of choice? Vesper?

Shane:

Beer's kind of rough because you get the belly, vesper is way too strong for Vegas. It's like 110 degrees. It's more of whatever you drink on the Italian coast, because if there's anything that Las Vegas reminds you of it's Italia.

AJ:

Well, that is if you're at the Venetian.

Shane:

Yes. Yes.

AJ:

Or the Bellagio or the other four other Italian themed hotels in Las Vegas.

Shane:

I'll tell you what you should drink next week, AJ is Amaro and soda water with fresh lemon all next week. Fresh lemon juice.

AJ:

All right. Yeah, I had a great Amaro last night. Anyways, let's dive into some articles this week. Breaking news. The FAFSA is getting a makeover. Congratulations to the FAFSA. She's going to look great this year. The FAFSA is the form that college bound students fill out to get financial aid at the universities that they're attending. It's a form, it's a calculation of a mixture of income and assets from both the parents and the kids, and they are recalculating how that expected contribution from the family is going to be determined. This is kind of boring in the weed stuff, but TLDR, there's positive changes here for the most needy borrowers, meaning the families who cannot afford to send their brilliant kids to schools they've already gotten into. Hopefully this new FAFSA will favor those folks instead of the more, I don't know, well off folks who could potentially pay for college. Any thoughts here, Shane?

Shane:

Yeah, a couple. One is I just, my nieces and nephew are both 17, so I'm going to be running through the FAFSA with them actually tonight. I'll land in Houston and go through FAFSA with them.

AJ:

Oh, you have a FASA date?

Shane:

Oh, I have a FAFSA date with my niece who wants to go to Harvard, so going to have a rough conversation with her tonight. I mean, she's amazing, but not quite there. But other thoughts are-

AJ:

She is amazing also. She is amazing.

Shane:

No, no, no. I mean, she's not the valedictorian that's the only reason she's not quite there.

AJ:

I'm a big fan of your niece.

Shane:

She's like top 20 in her high school, but not the valedictorian, so, that sounded rough. But anyway, that's what college conversations are about. I was like-

AJ:

They are rough, right?

Shane:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's about setting your expectations.

AJ:

It's funny, yeah. Monday was 5/29, which May 29th, which we call 529 day around here, which is the college savings account. So all of our clients who have college bound kids got an email. We're going to do some really in-depth college planning with them to be like, what schools are we talking about? Which schools based on your income and your assets, does your kid who has a specific interest in astronomy, which school should they go to where you're going to get the most bang for your buck, as they say.

Shane:

Yeah. Yeah. Just in the weeds stuff, I guess. Apparently everyone had an expected family contribution. It could bottom out at zero. So they had this really wide base of the pyramid, and now you can have a negative expected family contribution was essentially a euphemism for like, are you poor? How poor are you? So now you could be more poor, so some people could be more poor.

AJ:

It's like refundable credits in the tax code, right?

Shane:

Yeah. Now the pyramid can invert and you can be more poor and get more from the Pell Grant system here in America, which is the best college program we've ever come up with and have given a of bootstraps for young people to pull themselves up by. So a huge fan of the updates here.

AJ:

Awesome. Speaking of bootstrapping, we've got some startup news. One of our favorite startups, Attentive, which if you're texting with a brand, a brand sends you a text message, chances that was on the Attentive platform. So super exciting. I guess we don't want to really call them a startup anymore, they're pretty mature at this point. They've got a new CEO, which as we know, is typically a signal that they're getting serious about going public. So the former CEO Brian Long is out, new CEO Amit Jhawar is in. So we are, fingers crossed, hopefully we'll see an Attentive IPO in the next 18 months is what they're targeting, which is great news for a lot of our clients and potential future clients who are at Attentive. Yeah.

Speaking of social media, it's bad for you. Did you know that? Did you know that the Surgeon General has officially come out and said that the risk of social media and its effect on youths, teenagers and kids on their brains is potentially harmful enough that the Surgeon General is going to slap a big old warning on all social media?

Shane:

Thank you for the My Cousin Vinny joke always appreciated as someone that moved from New Jersey to Mississippi in the nineties. There needs to be a word for that sudden emptiness you feel when you delete all the socials from your phone. Have you done that, where you delete them all and then you pop your phone up because your brain has that dopamine requirement, and then you just scroll through the apps, like your screens. There's nothing here. What is that? What is that feeling?

AJ:

So I've never deleted, but I do get called out all the time by my husband for mindless... He's like, "Oh, we got to call the Uber to go to the airport." And I pull up Instagram without... And he's like, "What are you doing?" I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing." It's just such muscle memory, which is so fucked up. Sorry kids.

Shane:

Yeah, exactly. Well, that's kind of what I'm talking about. Imagine Instagram's not there, so you just keep looking for that nugget like the mouse on the wheel. Yeah. I don't know. Obviously this is saying that smoking causes cancer in the eighties. We know. Let's do something about it. Let's age gate it for kids, at the very least, please.

AJ:

Right. But I think this is a great first step because yes, smoking causes cancer in the eighties, what did we get? We got labels on all cigarettes. We got limited advertising. There were big sweeping changes that Congress eventually made. So hopefully we'll start to see some regulation in the tech space around, hey, you can't just click a box and say, "Yes, I'm 18," and get access to all of TikTok. Maybe we need some regulation based on how old you are and what kind of content you're seeing.

Because yeah, I mean, I don't know. Don't you feel grateful that you grew up without a smartphone? I feel so grateful. I mean, we had Facebook in college, but just barely, it wasn't on our phones. You had to log into your computer, you could message people. It was still very much... It still felt like a one-to-one communication, not I'm in inundated with millions of people showing me weird shit, everything from TikTok dances to extremist political views. So I'm grateful that I got to grow up without it. I feel for parents who are just trying to figure out how to navigate this, should it be limit it? They don't want to ruin their relationship with their kids and turn off their access to their friends. But yeah, this feels like a very scary slippery slope to go down.

Shane:

The Facebook poke was all I had to worry about. The original DM when I was 19. I didn't poke you.

AJ:

I had many, many, many friendships and relationships begin on Facebook, but it felt... The Facebook that I started with and made relationships with-

Shane:

Wait what? What do you mean?

AJ:

At college, you would be like, you'd see someone at a party or you'd message them, and then you would hang out with them.

Shane:

Wait, you would message them on Facebook and then go meet them in person, or you would say, "Hey, I saw you on Facebook," when you saw them in person?

AJ:

You would see them in person and be like, oh, who's that cute person? And then you would message them on Facebook and be like, "Hey, it's nice to meet you."

Shane:

Right, right, right. Yeah.

AJ:

Not to get into the gory details.

Shane:

No, I'm genuinely curious. What the hell.

AJ:

Anywho.

Shane:

I think that's still the case. We still do that on Instagram.

AJ:

Oh, do we?

Shane:

You've been married for a while. We call it DMing AJ.

AJ:

Right, right, right.

Shane:

Do you want to DM us over to this next article here?

AJ:

Yeah, let's slide in my DMs and tell me about AI startups and how they're saving time in the legal space. We've got this article here from Semaphore, money pours into ai startups that save countless hours of legal paperwork. Please lower my attorney bills. Anything that's going to do that, I am a fan of. This startup has the coolest name of any startup I've seen in a while, it's called Spellbook, and essentially it's, what is it? It's assistance for paralegals of law firms. And most stunning about this to me is that it costs $180 a month for a subscription, which seems like a pretty good investment if you're a law firm that can bill, I don't know, what, $800 an hour for a paralegal and potentially thousands of dollars an hour for a full fledged partner. So yeah, this to me seems like a good investment.

Shane:

Yeah. Well, it scales pretty quickly, and I think they've got a few hundred law firms on their platform now, and they've got a few thousand more that they are looking to add. And there's all these cool tools. I heard someone comparing this moment in time to the Apple, the App Store. We all have now the ability to download apps to our phones back then and now AI is creating all these new use cases. And this is like a specific, and there's the idea that ChatGPT and the tool, this isn't going to be the coolest use of AI. It takes a while for us to learn how to use these new tools.

But I do like this use case, something hyper specific. This could also just be a skin on top of ChatGPT. I'm not sure if they have their own LLM. I don't think it would be crazy for them to have their own LLM. There's a lot of open source LLMs out there, or maybe they've leveraged an open source LLM to build this and specifically keep it within the context of law, which allows it to be more effective. Yeah, I do want to... All right. They have 600 legal teams currently and 35,000 on the waiting list.

AJ:

35,000 on the wait list.

Shane:

Yeah. I'm sorry. I was looking at the next article already and skipped over these numbers. So a lot of lawyers in America.

AJ:

There's some demand for this. I think you and I may have listened to the same Pivot episode about the future of AI, and one of the interviews on there was with a guy named Joshua Browder, who has a startup called Don't Pay For That or something. And basically he used AI to write responses to parking tickets so people could get out of parking tickets because he was good at finding the excuses and matching them up with the ticket. But so basically this startup is really exciting, but there is this contingent of lawyers who are like, you can't do this. The law says it has to be a human, we know the law better than anyone. Don't introduce this newfangled technology that's wrong. It's going to give you the wrong answer. It's going to make up fake cases as we'll talk about in a moment.

And Browder had the best analogy, which is like, he's like, "This is like dinosaurs trying to sue the Ice Age. It's like it's coming." Innovation is coming to your industry. Shut up dinosaurs. This is going to save you time. You can still bill us whatever you want. Now you have, instead of having people actually sit there and read documents, you can actually have people learn things and support you in your arguments and talking to clients instead of just sifting through documents with the highlighter.

I mean, the best way, the only way that I understand what lawyers actually do is from the movie Clueless, where Cher's father is sitting around their dining room table with seven other, obviously very smart, highly paid people, literally highlighting things with Post-Its. And Cher gets trouble for highlighting the wrong things, the wrong conversation. So AI is [inaudible 00:13:29].

Shane:

What does she... My daddy makes $500 an hour. What do you think with inflation, Cher's dad makes now?

AJ:

Easily-

Shane:

That was '99?

AJ:

At least $3,000 an hour.

Shane:

Right, yeah. So yeah, shout out to the paralegals that are going to learn how to use these tools that have the ability to figure out how to engineer ChatGPT to actually help them with their job or Spellbook or whatever tool they end up using. But the ones that don't, I think are the ones that are at risk here of losing their jobs. So it will-

AJ:

Totally.

Shane:

Go ahead.

AJ:

I was going to say quick, quick wow from this article that I didn't know is that DocuSign earlier this month introduced agreement summarization, which was an AI tool that actually summarizes all the legalese in the document you're about to sign. Which is awesome because as we all know, when we get DocuSign, what do you do? You go click, click sign, and you don't read anything-

Shane:

Don't read anything.

AJ:

... And you assume that you're not going to sign your life away, but you never know. So I love this idea of, hey, here's six bullet points on the thing that you're about to sign.

Shane:

That's great. Especially terms of service that are like 4,000 pages long. This reminds me of somebody's great tweet that came up around AI, that said, "The future where the robots get to do all the painting and all of the creative fun work, and I have to do all the grunt work and take out the trash is not the future I was hoping for." Where all the robots are painting and writing plays. So I guess this is kind of like-

AJ:

The robot get to be the Picassos and we're stuck being the [inaudible 00:15:00].

Shane:

The plumbers and accountants. But anyway, so I guess this is a step in the right direction. Opposed to that tweet, it's actually cutting down on the legalese and the grunt work of making sure that the lubricant of legal work that needs to happen to keep our society running is getting easier for us. So, sure.

AJ:

Yeah. Speaking of making legal work easier, we got this guy, Mr. Schwartz. This is a New York Times article. What happens when your lawyer uses ChatGPT? This seems like a very anecdotal, funny criminal offense here. A lawyer basically used ChatGPT to write his argument and somehow ChatGPT spit up, what was it like 10 or 15 completely made up cases that just weren't... There was no precedent. And the judge was like, "I've literally never heard of any of these cases before."

Shane:

I couldn't find them.

AJ:

So this guy, older gentleman, probably like grandson was like, "Oh, you got to check out ChatGPT." And it was like, who knows what prompt he put in there to get all these fake cases. Side note, the lawsuit was between a passenger and the airline Avianca. Are you familiar with Avianca Airways? Which always makes me think of Aviato, which is Erlich Bachman's company in Silicon Valley, which just reminded me to go back and watch that show.

Shane:

No. It reminds me of-

AJ:

Remember Aviato?

Shane:

I got to re-watch that show. Super fun. But it reminds me of Vialto, PWC's spinoff for international stuff that is always wrong, as our clients know. But yeah, I've been on Avianca, I think probably Bueno Aires like a flight from somewhere... It's like a South American airline. But I do love that he... Like ChatGPT made up some other... I guess somebody pushed the cart into some guy's knee, like the drink cart and he said he was injured.

AJ:

On the airplane. Yeah, that was the-

Shane:

On the airplane.

AJ:

That was the lawsuit.

Shane:

Yeah, that was the specific thing. And so this lawyer, this boomer lawyer said, "Hey, ChatGPT, give me some other cases where this has happened." And they came up with Delta versus Mason and American Airlines versus Aires and then the judge was like, "The fuck are these cases."

AJ:

I've never heard of those.

Shane:

And so I love that a boomer was like, your generation is lazy and doesn't know how to balance a checkbook or write in cursive. And then also boomers, the quote from the article, "Mr. Schwartz who has practiced law in New York for three decades, told the judge that he had no intent to deceive the court or the airline, and that he apologized profusely and he was unaware of the possibility that it's content could be false." It's like the first thing it says when you open up ChatGPT, is I will generate incorrect information.

AJ:

Yeah, it's like, don't use this. It literally says, don't use this in a court of law, first of all.

Shane:

And I guess he didn't have a paralegal. I mean, this could be a really... A lot of people sue big companies all the time. I bet this was just like a harried lawyer that's got an upstate office. Who was just like, "Oh yeah, sure, I'll take your case." There's a moonshot that you'll get a million dollars and I'll get $300K out of it and doesn't have a paralegal to review anything that kicked out of ChatGPT. It's like, I don't even blame the guy, honestly, but it's very funny.

AJ:

No, I don't either. It's funny. That's what I mean, it's this is just like, let's trot out this example of this is why it's dangerous. It's like this is not dangerous. This is someone who didn't do any... Who's the term paper was due at 5:00 PM and needed a shortcut is what happened here.

Shane:

And I bet his client uploaded something at the last minute.

AJ:

Yes.

Shane:

So he didn't have time. Classic.

AJ:

He was like, "Come on man, you got to tell me what happened." He is like, "Oh, whatever. I'll just, I'm showing up to court, got to grab my shit, let's go."

Shane:

Super busy on vacation. I'll get back to you later.

AJ:

Oh boy. Anyway, should we talk about the housing market?

Shane:

Let's ride.

AJ:

Cool. Would you ever build...

Shane:

What?

AJ:

Neither of us had a good segue.

Shane:

Oh yeah.

AJ:

Would you ever build your own house? Is that something that interests you?

Shane:

Yes, for sure. Even though it's a nightmare. So my family built their own house in Mississippi in 1999, maybe 2002. And my mom picked me up from school and took me to the house that was under construction every day after school. So instead of going home, doing my homework, I had to walk through this house under construction and review tile placement and fireplace. My mom is such a scrooge that she would argue with the contractors every day. It was my nightmare. So that's my personal anecdote around building a house. With that said, it was a beautiful house. It's a cheaper way to do it. Go for it. What's up?

AJ:

No, I was just going to say I want to give a shout out to your buddy Harrison, who lives in-

Shane:

Yes. That's why I would build a house.

AJ:

Yeah, tell me about that.

Shane:

Yeah, so Harrison builds, he used to build... What are they called? Earth ships.

AJ:

Earth ships.

Shane:

Which were totally off the grid houses. Actually, that's who I'm going to see next week or in two weeks. Part of my tour was going to live with him in his earth ship in Western Ireland. I was there last summer for his wedding. Looking forward to seeing him. So yeah, he builds earth ships. If I was going to build house-

AJ:

Wasn't that two summers ago?

Shane:

Yeah, it was. I would... Thank you. Time flies when you're-

AJ:

Time flies when you're having fun kids.

Shane:

Time flies when you're an entrepreneur.

AJ:

How old are we? I'm 26.

Shane:

Time's fun-

AJ:

How about you?

Shane:

Time's fun when you're having flies. Kermit the Frog.

AJ:

Flies.

Shane:

So if I was going to build a house, yes, I would build it on his land in Ireland. He's invited me. We could build it together. He could show me stuff, he's taught me how to weld. A lot of personal stuff there. But did you know that Ireland is high on the list of if the earth was to melt down, if climate change was to go off the grid, go rampant, we didn't stop it, Ireland is top five places to live for post apocalyptic climate change.

AJ:

Dude, you got to get into climate change spec fic. There are so many good novels about this shit right now.

Shane:

I'm talking about actual facts. But anyway, what are you... I don't read as fast as you.

AJ:

Anyways.

Shane:

So listener, AJ will send me a book a week and be like, "Oh, you have to read this book. It's incredible." Like, "Dog. I'm still reading Harry Potter."

AJ:

Wait, you haven't read Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow yet? Oh my God I could literally kill you.

Shane:

No, dude. Leave me alone.

AJ:

You have to read this book. You're going to come to me and you're going to call me at two o'clock in the morning you're going to be weeping and you're going to be like, "Oh my God, AJ."

Shane:

I like to drink. I don't-

AJ:

Anyways.

Shane:

What are we talking about?

AJ:

We're talking about building houses. Is it cheaper? So look, the housing market right now, if you're trying to buy a house in, I don't know, literally anywhere, it's expensive. So folks are like, okay, hey, I'm not going to buy this shitty house that would've cost, I don't know, $200,000 years ago is now a million dollars and it's shitty construction and it's in a weird neighborhood. So why wouldn't you just buy a piece of land or a tear down in a neighborhood that you want and build your own house?

So this New York Times article is actually doing a survey of which states it's actually cheaper to build your own house than it is to actually buy your house. And what was the answer is that, oh, in California it was actually $200,000 cheaper to build new houses because housing stock in California is so low at the moment. And in New York, building from scratch was the least financially advantageous as I have been telling our clients for 10 years, and no one ever listens to me. But anyways, I think I would potentially build my own house. I don't know. I also love architecture, so I love the idea of buying something that an artist has conceived in a way that I could never think of. I mean, I like the idea of working with an architect, but I also love historical architecture, mid-century to be specific.

Shane:

Yeah.

AJ:

Anyways.

Shane:

I mean, my takeaway is that essentially, whatever, it's cheaper to build wherever home values have skyrocketed due to very high quality of life like Hawaii, I imagine. And California people want to live there. So the cost, especially during the pandemic. And I've been complaining, by the way, for, I don't know, 15 episodes. I don't know why cost of living has gone up in New York with everyone leaving, which is an article we're not going to get to today. Maybe we'll save it for next time. But I don't know why I didn't realize people just want as much house as they can get. Even if New York is emptying out, the people that are staying, they just want as much houses as they could get. So the rents are going up. So no surprise that in Hawaii and California costs are going up. I bet you can't get somebody. Getting a contractor in Hawaii to build you a house, I bet that's like a five-year process, by the way.

AJ:

Yeah. That's what this article is just like, to me, misses out on the cost of these projects. What happens when your contractor leaves? What happens when you're on your fourth contractor and you're in a lawsuit with your first contractor for $50,000? Building a house is a fucking nightmare.

Shane:

It takes years, especially... I've been in Hawaii, it's a... Yeah. Are you already living in Hawaii, by the way? Or are you living in Nebraska and you're on a four hour time difference and you're not paying attention to the contractors so they don't-

AJ:

Or a six hour times and also you're in island, so if you need materials, they need to be put shipped over on a boat. So good luck with that. Anyway.

Shane:

Yeah, everyone knows getting stuff off a boat has been super easy the past three years.

AJ:

Speaking of super easy, Rocket Mortgage will now let home buyers put down as little as 1% on their home. Look at that. Unqualified buyers can buy houses they can't afford. What does this smell like to you, Shane?

Shane:

I really didn't know where you were going with that segue. I was concerned about this, speaking of super easy. Yeah. I mean, what could possibly go wrong? People that can't afford houses, buying houses, where have I read this before? Checks, notes. Biggest recession since 1929.

AJ:

Biggest financial crisis that sunk the global economy. And anyway, yeah, I mean, look, I am generally pro allowing folks to buy homes that don't have access to them because of credit mistakes they made in their twenties or temporary income loss or whatever. But generally borrowing for a home, if you're only putting down 1%, that's a big ass mortgage you're going to have to take care of. If you can't come up with 20%, chances are you probably haven't been able to save over the years, which means you're probably not going to be able to make that mortgage payment because we probably don't have an emergency fund. This just scares the shit out of me. And Rocket Mortgage is going like this isn't like last time. This isn't like 2008. It smells a lot like 2008 to me.

Shane:

I'm going to take the other side of that argument.

AJ:

Oh yeah, go for it.

Shane:

And say I'm psyched about the program because apparently... I mean, it is a private company, Rocket Mortgage, I don't think you have to pay mortgage insurance here, which I love. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are involved and are going to pay and Rocket Mortgage will pay 2% of the borrower's loans and maintain strict credit standards. I love the idea of increasing the ability to get into a home. And I don't think that these are subprime mortgages. I think these are people with very high incomes. They just haven't been able to save up for the down payment. I hate that 20% down payment on a conventional mortgage. I know the average down payment is only 6% or 7%, but the 20% conventional mortgage requirement to avoid mortgage insurance is restrictive, especially in today's market.

AJ:

Yeah, why don't we just get rid of mortgage insurance.

Shane:

Why don't we get rid of the FDIC? Why don't we just let the libertarians take over and see who wins the blood revolution?

AJ:

No, I didn't mean to be anti getting folks into homes.

Shane:

No, I know. I know. It's cautionary.

AJ:

Cautionary. I mean, look like VA loans. If you're a veteran, there's fantastic federal borrowing program. So if we could just take that model and expand it a little bit. To me, the government's got to get involved in this, and I'm nervous that a private company is leading the way. But as we know, a lot of innovation has to come from the private sector. So maybe we'll see some changes to policies. Speaking of changes to policies, are you familiar with this golden visa program in Portugal that everyone's been taken advantage of for the past couple years?

Shane:

I am.

AJ:

Well, it's over.

Shane:

Oh.

AJ:

It's done.

Shane:

You got me.

AJ:

You done.

Shane:

Great, great, great.

AJ:

You're shit out of luck, Shane.

Shane:

Yeah. So I know that... Yes, there this... Well, go ahead.

AJ:

Sorry, we're calling this section, by the way, big week for boomers because a lot of the things we're about to talk about are going to be able to be taken advantage of by people who have exited the accumulation phase of their life and have a bunch of money and are trying to figure out how to retire comfortably. So golden visa program is basically the idea that you can make an investment in a country. Typically it's a cash investment or you're buying property or something. And by bringing your dollars to that country, becoming a tax paying citizen, they will reward you with citizenship.

So basically you can say, "Hey, I'm 65, I got some money, I want to retire to a beach villa in Portugal." And Portugal will grant you citizenship if you spend some money there. But basically, too many people did that and too many people took advantage of the program. So they shut it down as of this month. So sorry. But when one door closes, another opens. So Greece is next on the list. So gr for those of you looking to retire abroad, Greece is the next target for a lot of these golden visa schemers. Would you do this? I bet you would. This is a very Shane Mason thing. This has Shane Mason written all over it.

Shane:

It's funny you say that. Because I'm in the middle of it actually, right now. I've already filled out my application-

AJ:

For Greece?

Shane:

... And I have a meeting with my attorneys. No, with Portugal.

AJ:

Portugal.

Shane:

So there's a ton of different quote unquote "golden visa" programs.

AJ:

I can't keep up.

Shane:

I know. It's fine. So I got my Mexican visa, I'm finally living the dreams of my 19 year old version of myself of living abroad. So I believe that parts of the golden visa program in Portugal are shutting down. There's different ways you can go about it. One is like you can just do a direct injection of a bunch of cash and you don't even have to live there that long. And you only have to learn a minimal amount of Portuguese, and then you get a European passport, which means you can live in Greece, you can live in Ireland, you can live in Germany, whatever. So that's like the big, if you got money, it's a no-brainer if you want to go over there. And there's like another version of this where you actually live there, work there, own a company there. And that's what I'm applying for. So I think that is still available. I'll talk to the attorneys about it, but I just want to remind everyone that-

AJ:

PTFI?

Shane:

Lisboa Fi.

AJ:

Lisboa. [foreign language 00:29:02].

Shane:

Yeah [foreign language 00:29:05].

AJ:

[foreign language 00:29:08].

Shane:

Yeah. Oh, [foreign language 00:29:09]. Got to learn the Portuguese word for octopus soup.

AJ:

[foreign language 00:29:14].

Shane:

Good God.

AJ:

Okay. All right. Sorry.

Shane:

Yeah, that's Brazilian. Anyway, almost out of time here.

AJ:

So yeah, I'm goofing off. You were saying?

Shane:

Yeah. I want to remind everyone that every country has a similar program. Even the United States has a similar golden visa program. It's just like the level of a capital that you need. I think you need $2 million US dollars to inject it to a real estate program, and you can get a visa in the United States. So that's why like a lot of folks in the Middle East... Yeah. Anyway, what's up?

AJ:

I'm going to slide one more in here and then we're going to wrap it up.

Shane:

Okay. All right.

AJ:

Breaking news. You can now hail an Uber by calling a phone number, which is great news for you boomers who have not been able to figure out the Uber app. Now you can treat Uber, which is one of the greatest innovations of the past 10 years. You can get a taxi by calling a phone number. So that's great news for all of us. My family in particular.

Thanks so much for listening folks. You can email us your financial problems at liquidityevent@brooklynfi.com. You can leave us a voicemail memo.fm/liquidityevent. We'll play it on the air no one ever has done that. Show notes can be found at brooklynfi.com/episode 96. Stans can leave us a review if they want to be weird about it. Love you guys. See you next week.

Shane:

Bye.

AJ:

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.