Part 1: Wasting Time With Analysis

T…

Read more

This one will be a bit simpler and high level related to kids. In addition to that, you can actually use some of this if you’re an adult. So. We’ll just jump right in from kids to teenage to later work years.

Part 1: Trump Accounts

There is really nothing negative to say about these accounts. Left winged people will hate the name and that’s about it. If you can get a free $1,000 worth of the S&P 500 for your child, just click sign up.

This will not make your kids rich, it will not make them spoiled. Even if you invest $200 a month you’re probably looking at ~$100,000 when they turn 18.

What It Is Not For: This is not a 529 plan. It is not an account where education based expenses can be paid for tax free. Instead it is (in simple terms) an IRA that starts at age 0 and grows until they are 18. At this point the Child now decides what to do with it.

Good Summary But Note 10% penalty on 529 if not used for education.

Source

Simplistically How to Use It

Since the absolute max is $5,000, assuming you can afford ~$416.67 a month, you just max it out. When the child turns 18 it is a traditional IRA anyway. This means you sit down and tell them “This is your pre-funded retirement account, don’t touch it unless extreme emergency. This allows you to take more risks and worry less about old age”.

Just max it out and forget it exists until the child turns 18. Only thing you should double check is the investment options. In general just dumping into the S&P 500 for 18 years is good enough.

For the Intense People

If you really want to get into the weeds. You could plan to roll this IRA into a ROTH IRA in the future. We’re not even sure what the rules will be in 18 years but we’re just making it up for now.

If this is allowed, you would set aside the taxes for that event. If you Have $100,000 in it and $40K is gains, then just assume that will be the amount taxed. You would then roll it, pay the tax and let it grow in a roth instead.

Since the Gain is not going to be millions of dollars, you can easily cover the tax bill with standard gift exclusion.

You send $19,000 to Jane/Jack and they roll it over. They take the $19,000 and pay the tax bill on the $40K of income they earned. Problem solved.

Final Note: No one can predict tax rates, retirement account rules or anything like that in 18 years. Just too difficult. Best to keep assumptions the same “It will just be a gifted IRA” and move on.

Part 2: 529 Education Plans

Every situation is different. If you’ve read us for a long time, you can imagine that we don’t think the 529 plan is as cool as others do. Why? We have our doubts related to the education system in general.

However, we’ll play ball and explain the way to maximize this.

The first rule is simple, you can roll over about $35,000 into a ROTH IRA completely tax and penalty free.

What This Means: Even if you have little faith in the education system (like us), it makes little sense to have less than $35,000 in the account by the time the child turn 18. If they decide to skip college and become your degenerate WiFi money protégé, they won’t need it.

That said, if you have $35,000 in the account with them as the beneficiary, you can just roll it over to a ROTH. Think of this as a small bonus on top of the IRA you build with the Trump accounts.

Small Money Planning: Since this would be much smaller, all you do is buy some boring bonds and line up the date to have $34,999 by the time the child is 18. Login, start transferring to the ROTH (Note: you’re subject to ROTH max limits, so you’d be clicking send $7K every year for five years)

TL;DR: This is what we’re planning. If you want to play the beneficiary game, you can do that as well which is below. For the majority baseline move is above, get it to $35K at 18 and move on. We’re treating it like another retirement account product.

If you are certain your child will need tons of education (trade, PHD programs, doctor, private K-12, etc.) then of course max it out. That’s the entire point of the product (tax free for education).

For Intense People

Many Beneficiaries: If you have a lot of kids or you want to play the beneficiary game, you can. This is where you slowly move the money out into various ROTH IRAs. The rule is you can move $35K per beneficiary. This means you could continue rolling down this money to grand kids.

Take a weird case where there is $100K in a 529. A child decides to have kids at age 22 after graduation. You know this is coming and simply move the beneficiary to their future two kids (just a simple example).

Private School: If you know that you’ll be using nothing but private schools then you would absolutely go wild for this. You can use the 529 plan for K-12. This means it is truly the best possible vehicle for education spending.

Life is messy so it’s hard to solve for exact education spending. Try to do your best to estimate and reduce your tax burden.

Certain on College: You’re sure that your child will need some wildly specific school/college for their unique talents, once again, max that thing out.

Super Fund: If you’re in this weird camp, you’d superfund it up to $95,000 once you know the bill is coming. Or. If life changes and you realize you will be paying for college this also applies. You can put up to $95,000 (today) with a super fund exemption. Usually the rule is $19K per person per year (gift tax rule), however, for this product you can put in 5x that amount.

Part 3: UTMA Accounts

Ah yes finally something more real. This is basically a brokerage account for your kids. Keep it simple and say you put in $10,000 a year into it. You can just invest in whatever you like and let it grow. We’ll once again use some boring S&P rules.

At this point you can see the math we’re running. We assume the gift tax rule is $19K and stays there. We’re assuming you’re not married (if you’re married its $38,000) and you want to optimize it.

It would look as follows: 1) Trump account $5K, 2) ~$2K for 529 per year and 3) Remaining $10-12K to UTMA. Adds up to $19K. This a pretty good upper middle class saver set up. It means that when the Child turns 18 they will have: 1) ~$200,000 in IRA, 2) $35,000 in a Roth IRA and 3) ~$400,000 in a brokerage account. Sum total of $635,000 and can’t even legally drink!

Hidden Problem with UTMA

Much like the 529 plan, unless you have as serious long-term plan with it, you might overfund it. You do not want it to grow exponentially to outrageous amounts of money. As an example take a married couple who maxes all $38K into the UTMA.

As you can see… this probably isn’t wise. Once the child turns 18 you have no access and it is entirely turned over (for the nitpickers 21 in some states but we’re keeping it simple as usual - source).

Quick Math: If inflation is 4% for 18 years, this means it will be worth half as much in 2044. Still ugly. Imagine handing $750,000+ to an 18 year old with no strings attached today. Wouldn’t end well.

To be clear on this. We’re happy to say the same thing about ourselves. At 18 if handed this type of money it would be non-stop nonsense and likely a death spiral of hedonism. Not great.

Summary

The simple set up is this: 1) max out the trump accounts have long convo about it being retirement only, 2) go up to $35K minimum for the 529, more only if you know you will spend it - don’t overfund in our opinion and 3) dance with the devil on how much you want the child to have at 18 years old in a brokerage.

Part of this game is psychological (beyond numbers on a screen). There is no guarantee you have grand kids. There is no guarantee your kid even goes to college or needs further education in 18 years. No one knows.

The best move is to typically max out the ideal benefits and move on. No different than our view of “401K plans”. You get the company match to the highest level and move on (typically 5% of whatever you make).

Part 4: Trust Planning Ideas

In the other post on tax strategies (source) we explained the basic mechanics. If you’ve gotten this far we’re pretty sure you already understand why gifting early to the trust is important. Instead we’re shifting now to esoteric trust fund “problems”

Jane and Jack: You have two kids who are fully funded with their Trump account, $35K Roth IRA money and make it up $100,000 in a brokerage account each (after inflation).

Since Jane and Jack are magically exactly 18 (fraternal twins). Both have their own talents and skills but 18-30 is a wild time of extreme changes. Many go off the rails, others become outrageously successful entrepreneurs.

How do you set up the trust correctly?

Step 1

If you’re wealthy, our basic opinion is you can give them either: 1) the down payment or 2) a basic 1bedroom condo in the city they will reside. This is a pretty fair deal. When you’re 21-29 trying to build businesses, rent is one of the biggest line items. If you can get rid of that, Jane and Jack will feel rich but it’s extremely hard to downward spiral off the savings. It’s possible but hard.

Step 2 - Contingent Distribution

If you’re still trying to get rid of money over time, you will need to set up standards and events to encourage good decisions. This is much more personal than it is a financial statement. Here are some ideas

• If they have a child they instantly receive a percentage of the trust fund. Would cover all the baby items, some nursing help and all the chaos that comes with having a baby

• You can do age based ones as well: 30, 35, 40, 45, 50. If you’ve done your research, you know that most Trust Funds are set up with a 35 year old cliff. We’re not sure why and don’t have anything for or against this arbitrary number. It’s an option

• You can try to match salary increases or business success. If they want to become vets or doctors, you could add a 20% performance bonus on their annual salary for each year of completion. Basically encouragement for making good decisions

• Annuity type trust, if you’ve learned that Jane and Jack don’t really save money you can give them an annuity. You covert the amount to a steady stream that never gets a sudden spike in wealth. IE. They get paid out $5,000 a month for 20 years instead of the lump sum

• Write in an emergency contingency. Anything health related is instant access

• Come up with something related to starting a business, if it is profitable and they need a loan, the trust can come in and keep the vultures out (outside money!)

Step 3 - Legacy

Basically Ego stuff. If you’re thinking beyond the kids and grand kids, you’re likely trying to play a bit of God. Life really doesn’t work like that. You can try to set up all these structures to set up 10+ generations of wealth.

In reality, there are too many changes to forecast 200+ years in the future.

We’ll definitely try. You’ll try. We’ll all fail. Good news is, none will be alive to see it happen!

On that note, go out there and start doing your math! Once you get past the 529 items, the questions get real serious. Enjoy the ride!

We’re always here to answer paid sub questions. As long as not abused we’ll be on the look out for anything related to these topics.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

Read more

We’re going to once again focus on some stock comments then move to Q&A and give you guys a quick overview of how we think the rest of the year shakes out.

As usual, this is primarily the time for Q&A which happens every month.

Read more

Most people will read this and say “well $10,000 can’t afford a Ferrari”. That is true and actually proves our point. Who is richer. The guy who has to work 60 hours a week because he has a massive mortgage and a super car. Or. The guy who wakes up at any time on any day? Pretty easy to see where we’re going with this.

The Race to Being Time Rich

The aforementioned paid off home and $3-5M conceptually makes you time rich. If you hit this level of wealth, even if you’re earning less than your investment banker friends pulling in $800,000 a year… You won’t have a speck of jealousy.

You: Wake up go make a coffee. Hit the gym at 11am. Go back to the house. Go do your passion job/income stream for 4-5 hours. Go to sleep.

Banker: Wakes up well before market open. Commute. Checks to see all bills are paid. Puts on his “calendar”, one week vacation August 10-17.

Doesn’t take a lot of energy to figure out you’ll be happier and healthier in the first position. If you get bored of the time freedom, you can ramp up the work hours. If you get bored of the work as a banker… sorry, no one cares.

Time Rich Before Status Goods

Last week we suggested a simple way to increase your status good purchases (source). We do not care how you spend your money. Just be smart about the order of events.

Time > Status Goods

Until you are time rich, the other stuff will prevent you from becoming free.

Read that a few times if you have to. No one. Absolutely no one who makes it as an entrepreneur would trade in their time freedom. That’s exactly why they end up leaving the corporate grind in the first place.

What successful person enjoys being told what to do?

Source

Defining 2026 Version of Getting Rich

While we gave you a numeric set up, here’s the way to think about it. Before you can say you’re rich (based on wealth), you need to answer yes to all of these questions

Entry Level Rich

• Outside of rare events (significant meeting, doctor appointment etc.) you can wake up with no alarm clock

• You can dedicate your best hours to what is most important to you. Someone else isn’t deciding when you work. You decide

• Any time you need to take time off, you can do it without asking anyone

• Any family friend event? You can decide if you want to go or not

• You can say no to work without causing you an ounce of stress (if you don’t like the person, or the Company, rationale doesn’t matter)

• You can decide where you live

Conceptually, if you have a high net worth but fail to answer yes to all of this… we don’t think you’re particularly rich. The exception to the rule is you absolutely love what you’re doing.

The nitpickers will point at these questions and say stuff like “what about a huge deal” “what about a huge contract for a month of work” “what about family emergencies”. These are all one time events. None of them are consistent. If you get an offer to do something you want to do and know that it will be a grind… well you decided to do it. Extremely different from “I have to take this deal or else I might lost the house”

Where Can You Go at 11am on a Tuesday? Coffee shop/Beach/Park = Entry level rich. Regular golfing/tennis club? = Mid level Rich. Country club? = Definitely rich.

No where in here is “Have a $5M house with massive mortgage and a leased Lambo”

2026 Version Hits a Lot of Nerves

If you explain that to people in retirement age, they will look at you like you’re insane. In their world it was all about how many people you managed and who you knew. It had nothing to do with being Sovereign. Being sovereign is the present and future.

High Income W-2: Intuitively they know this. If you talk to a person making good money in a W-2 (say $500,000, higher up middle aged), they will say they don’t feel rich. It’s because of the above mechanisms: 1) they are time poor - best hours of day go to the Company, 2) at that level you’re always on and expected to respond to messages, 3) you can’t choose where you live - location poor, 4) negative health impacts and 5) limited friends/family as a percent of your daily hours

In a nutshell? They are lifestyle poor.

Don’t be the meme!

Source

If you look at the meme closely, it’s missing an important piece. Money buys time. Time is money = old fashioned concept. If you understand that Money buys time, the entire goal is just getting “enough” as fast as humanly possible.

Both time and Energy are going to follow the same trajectory. You will get older. You won’t have as much energy at 20 vs. 80. No amount of peptides, HRT and biohacking will turn that clock back.

This Isn’t FIRE or Coupon Clippers

Don’t take the prior sections to the financial extreme. If you are going to live in a studio in Thailand for life, you’re missing the point.

The paid off home and $3-5M creates a baseline quality of life.

Simplistically, we have a hard time seeing a person spend $10,000-$16,000 a month + live in a RV clipping coupons.

Source

The above post is a good enough explanation. Your quality of life is basically good. You are not flying private. You are not driving a super car. That said, no one will look at you and say “this guy is a cheap and depressing loser”. We gave out a rough range because some people want to live in slightly more expensive cities.

Oh and by the way, for the peanut gallery, it assumes you don’t work at all. Chances are basically zero percent that happens for any successful male. Therefore the add ons are all earned.

You’re not rich if no one wants your productivity/skills. You’re rich when they can’t offer you enough to come back.

By The Way, This Is Already Happening at Scale

The odd thing about this trend is that everyone “in the know” already sees it. The people who are not in the loop are blinded by the corporate veil. They see the person one level above them and get jealous. So and so makes 20-30% more (or whatever the number is). They spend the next 3-5 years chasing that jump.

In the interim, people who built a small business and sold it? They make a jump that is multiples of that in the same time frame.

People don’t see see the aftermath when a successful person leaves. If someone leaves the corporate grinder, they do not check back in on the company 3, 4, 5 years later. He’s just a artifact of the past “oh yeah that one guy who quit”.

People forget. Then the slow drift occurs. They get promoted once and by the time they check back on the guy who left, he’s already on his 3rd or 4th venture. The gap is too wide to send the “we should catch up” message.

Smart New Money is Sovereign: Being new money has a negative connotation to it. Mainly because a lot of people blow it. That’s true. However, the people who don’t blow it are valuing the right things. The trend is for maximum time freedom and only working on scalable high value items. If it can’t scale. It’s not even in the conversation. If it requires a commute… you can guess that the answer is no.

The smart New Money figured out a lot of the games in life.

• They spend a lot more on once in a life time experiences in their 20s/30s because they know it’s a snapshot. The partying is definitely not the same in old age

• They care a lot about how the money is made. The smart new money values $1 online at a premium to $1 in a brick and mortar. The location and time freedom is massive

• The big picture difference is there is an acceptance of life stages. Assuming you will want to do the same things at 35 vs 55 is absurd. They build their life in anticipation of the next wave of interests

• Higher acceptance of human psychology. New rich discuss correct trust fund set ups since they know tons of messed up rich kids who amounted to nothing (or worse, OD’d)

Recap Summary

If you’re envious of your boss or your co-worker it is time to leave that belief behind. Your W-2 is not the life map that leads to wealth. In fact, when you get that promotion, you’ll understand exactly why the guy you were envious of… didn’t love his life that much.

Instead you’re going to have to play a game of reverse engineering.

• Write out your quality of life baseline. Toss out stuff you wouldn’t need to do if you were self employed (dry cleaning, commuting, “happy hour costs”, etc.)

• When you find that number, your goal is to back track and figure out the fastest possible way to get there (statistically it’ll say sale of a small business or growth of a small business)

• Then you throw away all your terrible $1B+ unicorn ideas. You’ll realize you don’t need anywhere near that

Just fixed your map in seconds! See you on the beach at 11am tomorrow.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

Read more

Read more

This sounds good until you see that he has a $2,000-$3,000 hoodie on the entire time.

Don’t think it takes a lot of intelligence to see the hypocrisy there. We’re aware that a billionaire spending $3,000 is similar to a typical dude spending $10. However. The context is still broken. If you’re going to state that possessions are meaningless, your expensive items should be saved for special occasions. The contrast caused the message to land flat.

This side of the web is anti-FIRE (living like you’re poor to save money just to live like you’re poor for life) and anti-consumerism. Surprisingly, there is a happy medium. We’re going to write that out here which will help explain your future purchases.

Big Picture - Where to Spend

We wish we wrote this ourselves. Credit goes to Michael who came up with a pretty good framework for spending up.

Source

Spend Where Your Time Is: The first thing is always a home/condo. You’re going to to spend 12+ hours a day there, work there (hooray for WiFi $) and you’re going to bring friends/family into the location frequently.

We’ve got no real problem with people who spend up on their houses because it also appreciates over time as well. Seems like a no-brainer. Even if you get the slightly nicer flooring/countertop, it ends up being a break-even investment by the time you move.

The only time this becomes a problem is if you go into displayed wealth territory. This means a 10,000 square foot mega mansion where you use a grand total of 2,000 square feet on a monthly basis. This doesn’t make a ton of sense unless you’ve got an enormously large family or a multi-generational living set up.

The 2,000 sq/ft number wasn’t a guess. It’s generally what happens

Source

Benefits: We laid out a few but logic is as follows: 1) it generally goes up in value, 2) you spend the vast majority of your life there, 3) it can offer better quality of life outside as well - closer to the better restaurants, beach, etc, 4) you’re getting access to a better social network by design and 5) it’s likely safer by a wide margin.

Most of the real estate crash bros do not understand how hyper local real estate is. The luxury areas are incredibly hard to break into. Has nothing to do with cap rates. It has everything to do with hundreds of items that don’t show up in spread sheets: distance to health care, beaches, quality of people, walkability, opportunities etc.

Next Category - Beds

Once you’ve solved the house part, most people go to cars. To us this makes absolutely no sense. Cars depreciate in value and on top of that you don’t spend a ton of time in them. Who in the world goes out to party and drives back? Yeah no one. Uber is around for a reason.

Majority of any car usage is just going to be for basic tasks/point A to B type stuff. Call it a few hours a week. If you’re sharp and become an entrepreneur, you’re definitely not commuting.

Insert the next item with huge time value: beds.

Source

This is not a sponsor or ref link or anything like that. In fact, Alaskan King beds may not make sense for your specific situation. If you’re tall or move around a lot when sleeping, this is going to do wonders for you. If you’ve got back problems or neck problems, we’re certain there is some sort of memory foam or new age technology that’ll improve your sleep quality by 10x.

Yes. 10x.

You’re going to spend at least 8+ hours a day in the bed. This is a baseline case since it doesn’t include reading or working on a laptop. Makes a ton of sense to invest money here because it also impacts your health. If you’re sleeping well, getting REM cycles and generally recovering better, that’s a 10x return without a doubt.

Next Category - Luxury Gym

Unless you plan on being out of shape and rich (defeating the point) we’ve got a completely different direction for your next purchase - high-end gym.

Lots of guys complain about meeting people. Based on that alone, we know that they are not trying. If you’re looking to meet “winners” in a general sense, they will be at high end gyms. We’re going to make it relatively broad since we don’t know your city. Could be a place like Equinox. Could be more niche (you’ll know what gym it is based solely on the category - Luxury).

As you get older you’ll expand this into “health clubs/country clubs” depending on where life takes you. Life Time is a good example. Goes up from there.

Think About the Hours: Generally speaking, at least five hours a week at the gym. Even as you get older this is going to be a minimum. Maybe 4 hours of real working out and another hour of sauna/steam rooms/stretching etc. Add in the benefits of a luxury gym (typically food, some working cubicles if needed, etc) and you’re going to be up to at least an hour per day on average (7 hours per week).

This doesn’t sound like a lot but it is. 4-5% of your life will be spent working out in some shape or form (that’s a low-end estimate). No point in doing that with broken equipment. Huge environment bonus as well. Everyone in the same facility is also successful!

Pause and Add It Up

• 9 hours in your bed per day (8 hours sleep, 1 hour other)

• 1 hour per day at least at the gym/sauna/tennis courts etc.

• 6 hours per day in your house for eating, showering, changing, watching a movie, cooking, working on WiFi money business and other basic activities

• 16/24 = 66.66% of your entire life is now accounted for in nice/high quality environments.

Perhaps now a lot of you are realizing you need a lot less money than you originally thought. If you have a paid off house in a nice area + a few million to cover food, a nice gym and some going out money… you’re going to approach 80% of life coverage in seconds.

Next Category - Your Main Hobby/Interest

Here it gets extremely personalized. Some people love golf. Some guys actually enjoy fixing cars. Some people collect comic books. Some people have a travel bucket list. Other people are religious fans of some sport, music type etc.

We’re not in the business of telling people what hobbies they should be interested in. We just hope that it’s something non-destructive. The destructive part of life (20s to early 30s) is when you should have already gone through the classic partying phase already. When you can’t play a fast twitch sport at a high level, you shouldn’t be in a night club anymore. For those that don’t have a barometer on that, just say “if you can’t sprint without warming up” best to move on.

Hobbies/Interests: Generally they will take up another hour or two per day. As a rule of thumb, around 7-10 hours a week is probably the right amount of time someone will invest in a hobby. That’s around 5% of life. Oddly, lines up pretty closely to your expected time in a gym/physical fitness activity.

If your big plan is to have two vacations with the family to exotic places, don’t bother being cheap. If you can make the experience better, simply do it. As long as you’re not taking money from more important things (health, education, mortgage, etc.) it makes little sense to “penny pinch” when you’re attempting to create a unforgettable snapshot in time.

Similarly, if you’re really interested in fixing cars, it makes little sense to do small projects. Go bigger and you might even make money off it anyway!

Source

Note: we’re not entirely sure if this is all legit since we just looked it up, however there is a huge market for this stuff.

The Rest of the Stuff

At this point, you’ve already covered 70-75% of your entire life. Now you can pick and choose some small stuff but it really won’t move the needle. Here are some basic ideas:

1. You will need at least a few nice outfits. People can say what they like but you’re not showing up to an important meeting or event looking like you walked out of the Nike Outlet. You can dress down and chill for the most part. However, there is a time where dressing to impress matters. Majority of you will be best off with a made to measure suit, some nice shoes and moving on

2. Speaking of outfits, you do want to start with shoes. High quality shoes end up improving your health since they are made of better materials. Rough math is that $300 shoes is the cut off. At around that level you are in “good quality” arena. Also. They wear out a lot slower so the cost difference doesn’t even show up

3. Watches are a complete waste of money. If you have one, you can keep it for the whole “just in case i need to flee the country and need $10,000 on my wrist to pawn off”. Basically a item you never wear unless you’re going to those important events (weddings, business meeting where people are judgemental etc.)

4. Cars enter the equation if and only if you’re a car person. We’re not big on them since working in E-com doesn’t require any real commuting. If you had to work an industry where you drive a lot and impression matter, then sure, we get it

5. Luxury travel - lay flats. As you get older, these seats matter a lot. Your recovery time goes through the roof and it does add value (despite being expensive). Don’t bother with business class tickets for some 1.5 hour flight.

“But What About Food/Healthcare etc”

We didn’t bother with this as a category because it is painfully obvious. When you realize you’re going to make it with your first $500K or $1M E-com sale, the last thing you’re going to do is drink Bud Light for the next 20 years.

This post is about luxury spending beyond the obvious. The budget on food isn’t going to move a ton on a percentage basis. If you were on the come up spending as little as possible, the 20-30% increase on the food line item isn’t moving the P&L. It mattered when you were broke and grinding. Doesn’t matter when its a low single digit percentage of your monthly spending.

Healthcare is also a non-topic. If you can figure out how to make good money, you’re going to find the right healthcare plan as well. This would be similar to saying “get umbrella insurance after you make it”. Of course you will and the few hundred dollars in difference is not going to register as a real “needle moving” decision. Country clubs and a bigger house have a larger impact

Quick Note on Services

We held off on adding this one. Since the topic is on life style vs. time saving.

Generally speaking if you want a rank order of importance.

• Bi weekly cleaning of house/apartment

• Laundry Services

• Once a month massage/deep tissue

Those are the three highest return items. You spend hours cleaning a house/apartment. You spend hours washing/folding clothes. If you can remove these two headaches, you’ll get a huge amount of your life back. Even two hours a week for a decade is 1,040 hours. A month and a half of your life was going to go to a couple of chores.

Summary

With just four items: 1) house, 2) bed, 3) gym and 4) your main hobby, at least 75% of your life is now covered with luxury/high quality. The other items in your life will look like rounding errors.

As long as you don’t sacrifice obvious items (health, kids education fund, food quality etc.)… it’s a no brainer.

Then you wake up and realize, the quality of life change after a paid off home and $4-5M liquid is basically nothing.

Doesn’t matter though. You will overshoot the bold italics section, ignore everything we just wrote then realize the same thing 5 year later (after blowing past all your “quit” numbers")

Happens to everyone!

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

Read more

Please note, additional productivity does not always equal additional profit. You can be very busy, doing so many things, and get lulled into an ego loop by a sycophantic agent or five, but until you have experience under your belt, and can really understand what you’re looking at, know the landscape, how you can improve a certain business, et al your instincts are likely garbage. Just the truth.

No way to fake this really, just have to get out there and attempt.

Read more

If you want the white picket fence, 2.5 kids and Simpsons-style life? It’s actually achievable. The path just doesn’t involve slogging away in a W-2. Squirreling away fractions of paychecks.

Low interest rate debt is also hard to come by. Guess what that means? You’re left with one painfully clear answer: Equity.

Part 1: SpaceX Equity Changed Thousands of Lives

This is the IPO of the year (without a doubt) and thousands of people became millionaires. The estimate was around 4,000 new millionaires and 400 new centi-millionaires. However. That was assuming a rough IPO valuation of $135/share. It’s already trading at $200 so you can imagine that there are more millionaires out there. From a single stock (5,000-6,000 new people and likely 500+ centi-millionaires).

The above paragraph makes Elon look good. Therefore everyone obsessed over the fact that he is a trillionaire. Crabs in a bucket. Anyone more successful has too much and got luck. Anyone less successful needs to work harder. Classic human ego problem.

The bigger picture is that *ownership/equity* just made thousands of millionaires at current prices. The people who owned a small sliver of the Company made more than people working for 10+ years in a time for money exchange.

To put a number on it, a smart employee who held 0.00005% of the Company got to $1,000,000. (1M divided 2T).

The high salary employee who took all cash at $200,000 with a 10% savings rate isn’t getting there any time soon. Their game is linear. Doesn’t work in the age of technology. Completely different convexity.

Don’t Even Get Us Started on The Executives!

What is a Salary For

We’ve said for ages that it is “the rock hammer to get out of Shawshank”. More specifically, you need to think of a paycheck as a survival tool.

The old school personal finance stuff talks about “emergency funds” and “cutting costs”. The reality is that this stuff will not work if your plan is to make it into the top 10%, 5% or 1%.

The salary is simply something you use to cover your cost of living. That’s about it. Once you have your cost of living covered + some amount to shove into a business, you are done with salary hopping. If you can pay all your bills + generate just enough to get a basic demand test/wifi biz up (about $20-30K all in cost), there is no real value in additional income. You need to either 1) build more equity with your own business or 2) get equity in the company you work for - RSUs, etc.

Autist Note: The exception to the rule is if you work for a dying company/industry. In that case you max out cash comp and look to leave for a Company that has secular growth.

This isn’t what most people want to hear. They want to hear “10% raise and you can make it if you keep scrimping by”. The reality is that the tax system doesn’t work in your favor. If you get $100,000 in stocks that grow to $1,000,000 you would owe long-term capital gains taxes on the sale. Or. You could borrow against that $1,000,000 with a SBLOC loan and make the amount even smaller. With a W-2? That entire $100K bonus per year is going to get cut in half in high tax states (NY/CA etc. - where majority of the money is anyway)

If you constantly use cash compensation, you will fight upstream: 1) higher tax bracket, 2) limited optionality and 3) no convexity in a bank account.

Part 2: Seeing How This Helps Home Purchases

“Well BowTiedBull I’m never going to get a $10,000,000 single stock IPO, how does this matter for me?”

It matters a ton. For some reason people think they need to create the next unicorn or manufacture some brand new amazing tech idea. In reality, if you have a couple small wins (say two sold companies for $500,000 then $1,000,000) you’d be in a position of strength.

Simple example: You try to look at mortgage rates and see this.

Looks pretty ugly. At 6.5% every dollar you borrow = $1.28 over a 30 year loan. If you borrowed $300K you’re going to pay $380K+ (just interest payments)

Initially, you think, maybe i just sell all of my stocks and cash purchase the house.

Just before you click sell (and incur massive capital gains taxes), you login to Interactive Brokers and check the interest rate there.

Well you are in the $1,000,000 to under $50,000,000 camp. Looks like you can get about 4.37%. Since you sold a couple small companies, nothing Herculean, your $1.5M is sitting in pretty safe stuff (S&P, QQQ etc.)

Drum Roll: Instead of going to your local bank and getting cooked with a 6.5% rate, you decide to get a bit creative.

Instead of getting a large mortgage, instead of selling everything to cash purchase you do the classic “50/50”. You sell enough to put $250,000 into the house and then you borrow $250,000 against your portfolio at 4.37%.

Now remember. If you borrow that money is still working for you. Take 2026 as the example. If you bought the house at the start of 2026 with a stock based loan, you would owe 4.37% of interest on $250,000, however, that $250,000 in the S&P 500 is up 10%

What if Stocks Go Down: This is the fair and reasonable counter argument, if and only if, you borrow a ton. If you are borrowing $250K against $1.5M, the chances of the stock market going down 66% in a single year is pretty low (puts you at $500K vs. $250K loan). Even if there is a down year (of say 10%), you’d just pay the interest and wait for the market to recover.

Key concept: much like a mortgage you wouldn’t borrow an amount that would make you a forced seller.

Crash Bros Ignore Equity

If you want to build on the SpaceX IPO concept, do you believe the Top Tier engineer out in Hawthorne California is going to buy this $9.45M beach house with a 6.5% mortgage from Bank of America? Don’t think so!

Part 3: The Dream Just Has a New Map

Vast majority of people don’t need to create the next Trillion Dollar company. Vast majority will be beyond thrilled with a paid off home and $3-5M liquid.

The irony is that the people who get there (paid home and few million liquid) will over-shoot huge. They end up becoming serial entrepreneurs and create fake games in their head “oh i need more because of 0.00000000000001% tail event of a tsunami in Nevada”

Instead of viewing your “net worth” by a bank statement, you need to come up with an asset statement: Stocks, Vesting RSUs, Options, Business ownership percent, real estate, Crypto and anything else that should go up in the future. The only way to fight off inflation + constant regulation is with assets.

American Dream Is Brighter in Many Ways

You can achieve the classic American dream much faster (completely free of office commute by middle age at minimum). This is due to immense opportunity and wealth in the USA. If you can’t make it here. You can’t make it anywhere. We’re serious.

We know a lot of people who grew up in various countries and the avenues to getting rich in the USA are unmatched. Europe, Asia and little brother Canada have nothing to offer compared to the opportunites in the USA.

The only real downside is that you need to be ruthlessly self aware and laser focused on the next 10-15 years. If you choose the wrong map (going into low margin high competition restaurant businesses for example), you will be playing a much harder game.

Make your long term predictions and stick to them. Ours is on digital immersion, glued to screens, degeneracy, long-tech and talented people having multiple businesses/income streams in the 2030s.

We’ll roll with the Mike Tyson punches as they come. Sure beats following the old path that practically guarantees you end up on the wrong side of the wealth divide.

While Everyone Looks at the Hot IPO, Always Look at the Grey Area… Stats are Stats!

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

To us this seems to set up for basically the same idea: 1) AI hype IPOs, 2) people get euphoric, 3) …

Read more

To put things in perspective, if inflation stays at around 4% it means everything doubles in 1…

Read more

What you’re really looking for is a *reason* to add to the crypto market (or any market). Currently, with AI and SpaceX, it makes it hard to get that attention.

Speculative/Hyped markets are not driven by fundamentals: attention and flows determine the price direction.

You can see this in various sizes by looking at the past 10 years. Crypto hype, the marijuana hype, the electric car hype, social media hype and now we have AI hype (we’re sure we missed a few but you get the point). In 2026, the marginal buyer is chasing anything that can be labeled as AI or AI beneficiary.

While multiple markets can move up at one time, the mania market is usually one per year. When you’re not the shiniest object in the room, the marginal buyer moves on until given a compelling reason to rotate.

Part 1: Mania Creates a Liquidity Vacuum

In 2026, the main question is “how much AI exposure do we have”. That’s the primary question amongst hedge funds/mutual funds. They have to decide what they are going to do with OpenAI (S-1 Filed) /Anthropic (S-1 Filed)/SpaceX (Thursday Evening Pricing). Since the market caps are so high, it will actually move the returns when you look at weighted portfolios (mutual funds have to decide if they will own the market weight - say 0.5% or up/down from there). We don’t even want to know the number of Portfolio Managers who were fired for being underweight tech the last 15 years or so!

Since these three companies alone will add up to $3-4 Trillion, being wrong is actually costly. It isn’t a throwaway small position. They have to decide exactly how much they will own and why. Their clients will certainly ask at year end.

Why This Matters

Once you realize that markets are more about emotions than PE valuations, you’ll remember one of the famous investment papers called “All That Glitters” (source). The paper basically says: 1) people follow crowds/herds, 2) high trading volume drags in buyers, 3) media coverage and 4) extreme price movements.

Simple Overview of What Causes Herding/Crowds

As you can imagine all of those four things lead to underperformance. For the typical person who just started investing you should be selling when you feel good and you should be buying when you think an asset is officially dead. Will serve you a lot better than 100s of finance textbooks.

Zoom Out On This: If we’re in an AI mania, this means everything else should be up more than it is (non-AI stocks). Said differently, it changes the fund flows for every single asset class. At the institutional level it probably only impacts tech. At the retail level, it impacts everything since no one has a “tech only” mandate. They can buy whatever they like and if it’s AI they will not be buying any other industry.

Even More Important, Has Happened Many Times Before

The best comparison is always going to be the 1990s Tech bubble. Not because tech stocks went to wild valuations, but because it dragged in every single investor with access to a stock account.

It ticked off all of the major 4 markers of a Liquidity Vacuum. Despite being a small percentage of the total stock market (leading up to peak valuations), the trading volume was massive. This meant: 1) herd, 2) volume, 3) price movement and 4) media. All at once.

If you want to create a parallel, you should track the trading volume of SpaceX/Anthropic/OpenAI and any other AI/AI related names. See how large the trading volume is vs. market cap. If trading volume is 2x higher than it should be, then you’re looking at market wide attention. If you see trading volume in excess of the actual market cap of the company? Extremely high chance you’re in bubble/mania territory.

Source

As you can see, as people leave the hyped asset, the market absorbs those sells (they have to invest in something else). Causes the broader index to remain at ATHs even as the entire sector falls apart. Important note, 2001 was 9/11 and other macro issues beyond the bubble pop.

Simplified Conclusion

If you keep it simple like this, during periods where there is a large narrative forming, you should assume that a chunk of people will sell. This is pretty much a lock because SpaceX/Anthropic/OpenAI employees are actual people. They go out and buy houses, diversify their investments and look around for new places to park money (*after* they get a clean exit via IPO).

For research purposes, if you use the Tech bubble as an example, practically everything was a better investment for a couple of years post 2001. We all know that Tech eventually ran to absurd numbers again, but there is a lull where you can buy other things beyond the AI/AI related stocks.

Snapshot of Returns after the Bubble Popped 2002 - 2007 and comparison to NASDAQ

The only wild part is that Cash/fixed income has practically never been a great investment. Unless you look at pure recessions (2008) or market down turn years, the idea of holding cash/bonds long-term isn’t great. Unless you’re in your 60s, you’re better off just shoving money into anything else (Real estate, stocks, commodities etc.). This is because one of the other markets will go through a bull market and you’ll outperform the low returns of AAA fixed income.

Part 2: Secular Assets Are Not Dead

We know. We’re in the standard bear and were fortunate enough to notice the breakdown back in November. That said, the goal is always looking to the future.

We can now tie in crypto.

If you look at the prior table, you can see that every single asset class did better. When a narrative flips, the bubble becomes the funding. We’ll say that again. The bubble asset becomes the funding.

Big Picture: It actually makes a lot of logical sense to see a real estate run up after the Tech Bubble. While the laws were looser, the psychology seems to line up. If you were handed life changing money today, what’s the first thing you would buy? A house. That’s right. We’re sure there is an exception to the rule. However the vast majority would buy a forever home (90% of people).

The tech bubble created a lot of instant millionaires. Horror stories are made of people who sold nothing. However. A large chunk of people did leave with millions and decided to park a chunk into homes.

Now Move to AI/SpaceX/AI Related Hype: Whenever we get a standard correction, you should then think “what will these people buy”

From here, you can decide where they will go. Is the newly minted deca-millionaire going to buy silver and gold bars? Are they going to buy t-bills? Are they going to buy Crypto? Are they going to buy commodities? So on and so forth.

Instead of worrying about the latest ChatBot, start asking yourself “what will SpaceX/Anthropic/OpenAI employees buy”.

Read that carefully! Not what you would do. You are not them. Put yourself in the shoes of the employee. Map out their personalities. Map out their interests. Map out their risk tolerance and personalities. Now you’ve got a decent answer.

As a Starting Point This is a Rough Mix for HNWI (note this does not filter for tech related HNWI. This includes everyone including 60 years olds who don’t use computers much)

Don’t Let Envy Get in The Way Of Profits: Most of our writing is all about trying to stay ahead of the curve. We don’t claim 100% hit rates and we don’t try to dump everything into 100x gains. There is a nice middle ground where you can stay ahead by following incentives.

If you let envy get in the way “all those lucky AI guys”, you’re only playing yourself. Those minted deca-millionaires will invest their money. You just need to put your trade in first.

You have a few months!

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

Read more

From what we’ve seen, anyone who actually did the cycle decently is unemotional. The people who got greedy and didn’t de-risk are praying for some sort of sudden step function back up.

We’ll go over the likely scenarios and touch a bit on other markets.

Read more

If you don’t know what to do, you always choose the option that opens the most doors.

This is because doors close (rapidly) every 5-10 years or so. Going and partying at the dive bar is fine in your early 20s… but by the time you hit 30 you’re entirely out of place. People think this applies to social stuff only. Nope. Applies to work as well.

If you get laid off at age 25 does anyone really bat an eye? No. If you get laid off at 45 after working and becoming niche? You’ve got a real problem.

Not only did your options decline (specialized) but you need to prove that you still have the energy to grind it out (or learn something new). Look no further than Technology for a sector that constantly weeds people out as they age.

“I can always start later, life is long” go ahead and toss this advice out the window. While it is true that you’ll unlikely make money doing what you start out of college, the opportunity to try stuff begins to close. Immediately.

There is a good 10-15 years or so (age 15-30) where you’re allowed to try whatever you like and people will at least entertain the idea of you doing it. We’re drawing the line at ~15 years because you need to go through puberty and get a good sense for what your natural cognitive and physical gifts/burdens are.

The guy who is extremely popular is unlikely going to become an engineer (better off in sales), while the national math champ isn’t going to be knocking on doors (again general rule of thumb)

Why 20s Are So Valuable

Everybody knows that you have more energy. You can run 5 miles, lift, go drink until 2am, wake up at 8am and be at your desk W-2 career like nothing happened. Trying to do that at 40 is simply off the table.

What people miss is that they need to be learning and trying a number of things at the same time. If you go all in on the first thing you’re decent at, chances are high that you miss the biggest talent you’ve got.

Ignore “what I like to do” and go with “what am I unusually good at” from there you create a list and figure out “what industry pays the most for this skillset”.

If you skip any part of the process your chances of becoming successful (no not just money) drops off a massive cliff the size of Mt Everest.

We’re going to write that again. We’ve stated a million times that health > wealth despite the main focus being on making money (our core writing).

If you don’t figure out what you’re good at, you lose more than money. You will lose health and friendships as well. You will incur a lot more stress later in life. The friends that make it will slowly move into different social circles. This is simply how life works.

Since people love step by steps it really boils down to this:

• 20s: most critical decade to figure out exactly what you are good at before you reach 30. You better be sure as it compounds from here

  

  Source

• 30s: you figure out how to monetize those skills and you take all your social capital to figure out if you plan on having a family or not

• 40s: you should have figured out the best way to monetize, leaving you with enough time to either 1) be a present parent or 2) scale up a ton of the ideas you got from bullet two

• 50s: capital moves the needle when compared to effort. You’ve accumulated too many assets for effort to make a sizable difference. You have some hobby income but the real value is how your assets are balanced

If that’s too long, we’ve got a simple one word framework for each decade: 1) 20s = accumulation, 2) 30s = concentration, 3) 40s = freedom and 4) 50s = judgement.

Accumulate everything, concentrate it to create freedom and spend the rest of your days in a position of judgement.

You can speed up the timeline with talent, effort and self awareness. Unsurprisingly, the last one is the most difficult as it requires a separation of emotion + objective performance.

Corporate Designed for the Worst Outcome

If the above wasn’t enough to convince you, wait until you logic your way through the corporate world. What you’ll find is that the entire structure is designed for the following: 1) plug people in who are good enough, 2) pay them slightly less than they are worth, 3) hit a performance ceiling, 4) drag them out a decade and 5) layoff and replace.

“If I was running a Company I’d only Hire the top 0.00001%!”

Not how it works.

Top talent? Majority try to start a company quickly and are not even in the organization by 30. Let alone 40-50.

If you still find the right people? 100+ other companies likely saw the same thing. No guarantee they choose the firm or stay for a long time.

The end result? Companies typically go for the “safe bet” over and over again. In a cruel way, much like the meme of women settling for the “safe guy”, the company you work for is incentivized to find the “safe employees”.

Put Yourself in Hiring Manager Shoes: You are 30 something. Probably got a mortgage. Or a mortgage + a baby! Either way you are stressed out of your mind with the new responsibilities.

You can choose two people: 1) seems to be the safest bet and 95% chance he is good enough with 2.5% chance he sucks and 2.5% chance he is a rock star or 2) you meet a really unique and extremely quirky high IQ person. Hard to say but you know he’s either 50% the best hire in history or 50% just too strange to fit into the mold. Who do you pick? Yep, you are going with person #1.

You are not risking your career and reputation on someone you barely know. No point in creating attention if you can remain in good standing, collect the “above expectations” review and move on with your life.

This is Why Less Options Exist Up the Ladder: Companies do not hire people in the hopes that they will climb the ranks up to the C-suite. Read that again. They do not care about any hire climbing the ranks to the C-suite. They want to find “good enough” people, make the profit margin and let statistics do the rest.

If you hire 100 people and you expect 95% of them to be in the mediocre bucket, you will get your 2.5% rockstars and 2.5% instant layoffs anyway.

End Result

For the vast majority, this means your current corporate/W-2 career is something you are “above average at” but not elite. Think about that. The entire system is designed to find people who are good enough for about 20 years. If you’re “good enough” to last 20 years, what does that say about your actual unusual niche? It says that your actual main talents would last 30, 40 or even 50 years. Pay more. And. Be easier for you to do on a day to day basis.

Even if you could do more, there is a huge corporate politics lottery game that you need to win as well. In the end, you don’t get to decide if you get a shot or not.

Time to Run Some Math

Put this all into perspective by tying it all to your earnings potential. If we’re now in agreement that you’re “above average” but not amazing at what you do, that would land you into the top 10% or so. Think that’s a fair assessment

This would lead you to a long-term average of being worth around $2M.

If instead you decided to find your actual talents and become elite at what your body and mind were designed to do? You’re looking at ~$14M.

Another Cruel Part of Life: If you are talented at something, you need to do a lot less to perform well. If it takes you 40 hours to generate a million dollars of value for the firm, by doing what you’re actually talented at, you could probably generate $5M in half the time (or less). That’s how steep the knee in the curve is from the top 10% to the top 1%.

Source

If you want a mathematical way to look at it:

• Revenues Scale with 80/20: This means the top 20% generate 80% of the revenue. However. The top 4% (0.2^2) generates 64% (0.8^2) of the revenue. It doesn’t stop there. The top 0.8% (0.2^3) generates 51.2% of the revenue.

  • Take a wild guess on how much the top 0.8% at FAANG make vs. the top 4%

• Square Root the Headcount: This is another rule of thumb. If you square root the entire head count (say 10,000 people) the resulting number is who generates the majority of the value (100 people).

• Ask yourself, if you’d still be in your organization if they took the square root of the headcount

Still Don’t Know Where to Start

Depending on where you are in self assessment, you might feel overwhelmed. Most people who read us are beyond that and simply on the paid side going through various new markets and testing demand.

If you’re new then you should do a bottoms up approach. Look at the foundational skills/tools needed in 2026 and beyond.

Sales: If you don’t have any knack for what your skillset is? Start learning sales. This can be in person sales or it could be copywriting. Really doesn’t matter. You will need to have this skill in every aspect of life. Want more dating options? You’re selling yourself. Found your niche skills but need to impress the interviewer? See selling yourself. Found you’re terrible with people but can find trending e-com ideas in seconds? Yep you’ll need to make high quality ads/copywriting skills.

The message is that you choose this as a base layer because it will be useful to you regardless of the path.

Data Literacy: In the end, people are going to choose what they want to buy/sell. This means you’re going to take all those new fancy AI tools and figure out the intention behind the data. You should avoid the trap of saying “oh women like this new lipstick brand”. Instead, you will have to go through all the data related to the new brand.

You need to solve for: 1) what exact age band/ethnicity/location etc. 2) what exact price point, 3) what search filter is causing it and 4) if it is repeatable and if there another similar hole in the market

Similar to sales, data literacy is going to be extremely valuable. Most will take a bunch of information from AI and then make the AI solve for what is important. This is simply not good enough. AI is only at average intelligence. While it can organize the data quite well, the judgement layer leaves much to be desired (to say the least)

How fast can you spot a new market trend? Pick a few, write them down, come back in 6 months… were you right? This doesn’t even cost money if you’re extremely risk averse.

Creating a New Workflow: If you go through the second process this will naturally happen. You’'ll find trends or patterns that are obvious to you but not obvious to 99.9% of people. This needs to be automated with AI/software into something only you look at. In an ideal world, the workflow helps you research any topic you like in half the time.

What Do Strangers Say: Not your mom. Not your best friend. Total strangers. If complete strangers are saying you’re good at something, that’s a hint. Start writing them down and take it seriously.

People are extremely critical. They can’t solve their own lives but they can certainly tell you what to do after your meaningless 1 hour interaction. If strangers are telling you that you’re good at something, this is a sign of being in the top 10% at minimum (already).

Do What You’re Good At

Hopefully you’re convinced at this point. Doing what you love is a terrible starting point. When you’re set for life, you will have decades to spend your time doing what you love.

There is a ton of positivity to glean from this:

1. It means your current role/job/income stream is not your full potential. Not even close.

2. It also means that you’re working a lot harder than you should for the same pay. If you found your main talent, you’d work less and make the same or more.

3. If you accept this as being reality, you will become more objective as it relates to your gifts/abilities

Really nothing negative about it. If you fall for the trap of doing what feels good, don’t be surprised when the door closes and there is no other option to choose from.

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money

In other good news, opportunities for E-com continue to multiply. In June we’ll explain how t…

Read more

The general theme has been the same: 1) crypto in a bear market and 2) best to hide in various tech investments. Think that is working out so far and we haven’t been tricked into buying BTC at $81K+ during the ty…

Read more

Since this all came up today for some strange reason there is no clear order on how we’re going to write it. Directionally, we’re going to try and make it go from low amounts to high amounts.

Part 1: Basic Gift Tax Exemption Rule

First Item: As of 2026, you can gift anyone you like $19,000. If you are married this would be $38,000 since you could gift someone $19K from husband and $19K from wife.

Before saying that the amount stops there, read the rules closely. It says you can gift $19,000 to one person, however, you can gift $19,000 to person number 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10…. infinity. If you were to gift 10 different people $19,000 you would have given out $190,000 with no tax consequences.

Second Item: When you inherit stocks assumes no trust set up the cost basis is stepped up. If you had $500,000 in stocks and this ended up being $1,000,000 when you kick the bucket, the person who inherits the stock (son, daughter, grand kid whatever) will pay $0. They can sell it tomorrow, get $1,000,000 and owe $0 in tax.

Simple Bullets to Explain Why This is Valuable

Since everyone thinks $10M and $25M is not a lot of money on the internet, we realize this initial strategy seems meaningless. It is not meaningless at all.

If you think that your future net worth is going to be north of $15M as a single person or above $30M as a married couple, then you should start doing this basic one now.

Step 1 - Every Year Gift $19,000 to a ton of Recipients: Okay. We know that you can gift money to an unlimited number of people. Say you want to start moving money to your kids. You gift $19,000 to… grand dad (x2), Grandma (x2), Aunt/uncle (x2 each) and tow close friends. This gives you $190,000 to gift every single year.

Step 2 - Every year they dump it into an irrevocable trust or just a brokerage: The right way to do this is to dump the money into a trust. However. Since we’re dealing with a small amount of money, each person is simply going to open up a brokerage account. They will take the $19,000 they were gifted and dump it into the stock market (just say the S&P 500).

Step 3 - Click Fast Forward: After 10 years, you’ve contributed $1,900,000 into 10 brokerage accounts. Since each account is going to be invested in the stock market we’ll just use 7% return for the average. We’re well aware that returns are not guaranteed etc etc. This is just a basic framework.

After 10 years? You’re going to have 10 separate accounts owned by 10 different people with $280,888.39 in each account. Simply click “transfer on death” and put in the recipients name and social security number (all the legal jargon).

Step 4 - Hit By a Bus: Suddenly every single person dies. $280,888.39 is transferred to the son/grandson (whoever). 10 accounts worth a combined $2.8M are given and $0 in taxes are owed.

Step 5 - Bonus Maths: For those following along, if all the money is only going to one person you can grow the accounts to $14.99M each. All ten accounts can transfer $14.99M to one person. The person collects $149.99M. Total tax owed? $0.

Important Key Point

Where everyone gets messed up on this is that it is $15,000,000 per GIFTING person. Read that again. It is possible to have 100 people send down $14.99M each to one single person. It does not matter that the person received $1.49 Billion.

Part 2: Up a Level With Basic Trust Funds

Okay. So now we understand the lowest level of giving away money and having a step up basis. We can move onto structuring a trust. In the real world, you do not wake up one day and suddenly have $50,000,000 in a Schwab account.

Now lets say you have done nothing and are currently sitting on $10,000,000 liquid. Since this is not a lot of money according to X, everyone will find this useful as they have $10,000,000 and are under 35 years old.

Back Story: The rich dad or rich mom sold some small company and came into $10,000,000 post tax. In addition to that, they happen to be extremely young (35 years old in this case).

Well now you do have a problem. If you let that grow for 35 years you’re looking at $100,000,000+. This is way over the $30,000,000 mark for married people ($15,000,000 if single).

Enter Basic Planning: You do some basic math and realize you don’t even need more than $5,000,000 under your name. You already have a good income and you recognize the huge compounding that will occur. By the time your kids Henry the 17th and Evelyn the 24th are adults, you’ll be over the inheritance tax.

Set Up a Basic Trust

You set up an irrevocable trust. You take the $5M and toss it into the fund. At this point you’ve used $5M of your total gift allowance. Read that closely. If you are married or single you’d still have access to another $10M or $25M of gifting.

Step 1 - Send in the $5M: You write the check. The irrevocable trust now has $5M and owns a bunch of stocks growing at 7% per year. You can’t touch them the money is gone.

Step 2 - Die a Tad Early: The parents die a tad early. Under their name they have $25M. This gets sent to the kids. In addition to that the entire trust fund is outside the inheritance. It was already gifted away at $5M valuation. Even though the trust fund value has ballooned to $25M it does not matter.

Step 3 - Henry and Evelyn devolve into partying and hedonism if the vest isn’t set up correctly!

Important Key Point

The lifetime gift tax exemption needs to be used intelligently. If you give it away early you can reduce your headaches dramatically. If you try to do it last second you will likely pay a lot more in taxes than you should have.

The Five Key Points: 1) you want to find an asset that will grow without a ton of income being spit out - QQQ is a decent idea since the dividend yield is minimal, 2) transfer it early, if you transfer late you will just eat into you $15M or $30M of gift exemption, 3) appreciation outside of the estate is clear and 4) for the final touch - you want to make sure it is a true transfer where you cannot use the assets. A common set up is an irrevocable grantor trust.

Part 3: Reducing Business Income Tax

We do not know what your business is. We do not know how big time you will get. We have an outrageous range here with people who clipped their first exit for $200,000 to people who are already in the 8-figure club. Frankly, we don’t even care where you are at this point. If you understand that you must start a business to really make it, we’re thrilled you’re here. Our first $100 online was the most exciting feeling in the world (even more so than making the first million because it proved that the sky was the limit)

As a W-2: There is not much you can do. You get taxed before you even get paid. The business world is the opposite. You receive revenue, you deduct expenses, you deduct interest, then you have a income line that is taxed.

As a Business Owner: We’re skipping over S-Corp, C-corp, LLC etc. It is too hard to tell you which one makes the most sense. If you are serious about making money off of it and think it’ll exit for 8-figures then you should definitely look into QSBS before we discuss some simple income statement moves:

Using the Tax Code for Income Adjustments

Once again. Everyone on X is rich so we assume that you’re making millions in operating income. Several million.

You look down at your tax bill and you owe 50%. This is because you’re in the pico top tax rate with a incorrectly structured entity that you can’t get out of. Option 1 is to cry. Option 2 is to just play the game. We’ll choose option 2.

Current Income: Before taxes are paid you are showing $2,000,000 in taxable income. This means you would see a net payout of $1M if your tax rate was at 50%.

Step 1 - Borrow Some Money: Since interest is deductible you are going to borrow some money. You get a loan for $10,000,000 at 6% (we’re just making this up to make it easy to follow).

Step 2 - You Pay $600,000: Now you have taxable income of $1.4M. Assume the same tax rate of 50% and you collect $700,000. This is of course lower than $1,000,000 so it seems foolish until…

Step 3 - Put the $10,000,000 into Real Estate: You do some basic research and find some low risk real estate. You can generate a 6% return but this is before deductions: accelerated depreciation. You end up with limited net income, call it zero to keep it simple (tons of mom and pop shops show no income)

Add this up… Now you make $700,000 + 6% return on $10M in real estate that doesn’t get taxed due to deductions. $700K+$600K = $1.3M

Note: Yes this is an example. We’re not going to go into the weeds and if you’re sharp you’ll realize that you can game this quite hard if you are running a large entity.

Part 4: Big Time Problems

As they say more money more problems.

If you really run into big numbers and need to reduce the tax basis you really have three options: 1) you move to Puerto Rico for Act 60, 2) you renounce citizenship and move to a tax haven or 3) you go with buy, borrow, die.

Option 1: You already know if you’re in this camp. You don’t want to give up US citizenship so you simply pack your bags and move to Puerto Rico for 183 days out of the year. This gives you 0% capital gains tax and if you run an export services business a 4% total tax rate. You can make $1M or $1B and the tax rate will be 4%. (Note: depending on what city you live in, there is a small additional tax of around 0.5%, just call it 5% if you want to be safe with the annual filings, accounting, basic legal fees etc.)

If you have to ask, it isn’t for you. What happens is the guy does the math, realizes he can pull in decades of work within a few years. Tells his close friends “hey moving to PR”. Everyone else fills in the blank.

Option 2: You renounce US citizenship and move to a tax haven. You have to pay an exit tax and you better be sure you want to live where you’re going! Not going to bother much with this one since we doubt anyone cares much about it.

Option 3: This is the most common amongst the truly rich. Zuckerberg doesn’t care about income taxes because his salary is irrelevant. They just pay whatever they owe on the basic salary and move on.

Step 1: You have real money. Not $2M in S&P 500 money. You have say $100,000,000. Nice round number.

Step 2: You go and get a loan against this stock portfolio of say $1,000,000. Since you are only borrowing $1,000,000 against a $100,000,000 portfolio the interest rate is tiny. You go to interactive brokers and borrow this $1M at 4.12% (current rate as of this writing, source)

Step 3 - Let the Loan Grow Slowly Rack Up Debt: You borrowed $1M you didn’t sell a single stock. Say you have $100M and it is going to go up 5% a year on average. By year two you have $105M and you now owe $1M + $41,200 in interest.

Step 4 - Basic Logic: Does it make sense to pay the loan at all? Nope. You just let it accumulate interest and never pay it off until you’re in grave.

After 10 years, your portfolio is reading $131M. Even if you borrow $1M a year, your debt + interest owed is not even $15M. You’ve spent $10M, paid no taxes legally and your net worth went up!

Important Key Points

The chances of you waking up with $100,000,000 in your account is basically zero. One lottery winner per year or so.

If you find yourself in this position, you are simply going to borrow against the account instead of selling any positions. As Felix Dennis said: “reduction of any asset to cash very often leads to the imposition of capital gains tax - the equivalent of the Black Death to the truly rich”

Summary

As usual, there is no point in evading taxes. You should always pay them, just pay what you owe legally and use the rules intelligently.

You do not owe anyone additional money for being inefficient. Do things correct and you’ll find that your real tax burden goes down a cliff if you are a business owner/equity owner vs. W-2 employee.

There are a lot more complicated items to go over but this is good enough.

If you have questions on this we’re always around on the paid side. None of this is legal or financial advice, DYOR and we’re confident you’ll find what you’re looking for.

Ain’t no one rich worried about inheritance taxes or income taxes. It’s all wealth, capital gains, deductions and debt. By the book

Disclaimer: None of this is to be deemed legal or financial advice of any kind. These are *opinions* written by an anonymous group of Ex-Wall Street Tech Bankers and software engineers who moved into affiliate marketing and e-commerce.

• Old Books: Are available by clicking here for paid subs. Don’t support scammers selling our old stuff

• How ETH is Staked: Covered (here)

• Crypto: The DeFi Team built a full course on crypto that will get you up to speed (Click Here)

• Crypto Taxes: We have a suggested Tax Partner and 25% discount code, for information see this post.

• Security: Our official views on how to store Crypto correctly (Click Here)

• Social Media: Check out our Instagram in case we get banned for lifestyle type stuff. Twitter will be for money