The Pomp Podcast - #1515 Chris Kline | Tax Trick The Rich Use For Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:00:00 What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on, guys? We got an awesome conversation that's going to help you save money today. It is with founder and COO Chris Klein of Bitcoin IRA. In this conversation, we know that

Starting point is 00:00:39 tax season is coming to a close. There's a deadline coming up on April 15th. And Chris is here to explain exactly what you can do, how to do it, how to fund these accounts, how to use the tax advantage code to your benefit. So make sure you listen to the whole thing. He's got tons of alpha that's going to share with you. And then, of course, we got a couple of good stories, including in one guy who's got $50 million in his retirement account. I think you guys are going to love it. Here's my latest conversation with Chris Klein. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a

Starting point is 00:01:15 specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by NASDAQ listed Bitdeer. They trade under the stock ticker BTDR. They're led by a seasoned management team. Bitdeer is a global leader in Bitcoin mining and high performance computing for artificial intelligence. And they are backed by technological innovation and a massive 2.5 gigawatt global power portfolio. Recently, Bitdeer launched its own Bitcoin mining ASICs named the Seal Miner to target what Wall Street analysts project to be a multi-billion dollar annual market. Their proprietary seal miner

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Starting point is 00:03:16 untouched, never lent out, and secured a global network of military-grade bunkers with cutting-edge security technology. Head to zapobank.com forward slash pomp to learn more. That's X-A-P-O-B-A-N-K dot com forward slash pomp. Go check out Zappobank today at zapobank.com slash pomp. Today's episode is brought to you by Polkadot. Polkadot offers secure, scalable, and decentralized blockchain technology that perfectly aligns with the needs of innovative projects. It was developed by Gavin Wood, one of the co-founders of Ethereum and the creator of Solidity. Polkadot aims to build an internet where users have full control over their data and their applications. Polkadot offers tons of unique features, a shared security model,

Starting point is 00:04:01 along with a new auction model and significant implementations like ASIC banking. Given these characteristics, it's easy to understand why Polkadot is gaining more and more traction in the cryptocurrency world. Some people even are talking about it as the AWS of Web3. Now, companies such as Mythical Games, Astro Network, and over 50 other independent blockchains with hundreds of applications already leverage Polkadot's technology to power their platforms. If you're looking for a reliable, scalable, and cutting-edge solution, Polkadot seems to be the top choice for industry players. Go check them out today at polkadot.com. so chris i thought a great place to start the conversation is there's this big rumor in

Starting point is 00:04:39 washington dc that the current administration is going to remove all capital gains tax for bitcoin and cryptocurrency obviously if you hold bitcoin or crypto you're super excited about this um do you think it's going to happen what do you kind of evaluate uh in terms of what the impact would be if they do do this it's definitely an exciting rumor for sure um i think that it's going to probably maybe even go beyond crypto too because the guys that are in real estate or equities or other things are going to say, well, what about us? What about our capital gains? But hope isn't necessarily a strategy. You have to think long-term. When you're looking to sell things or thinking about retirement, when you sell an asset, for you and I, we'll be seven

Starting point is 00:05:15 to 10 presidents or administrations from now. Who's going to be in charge? What will taxes look like then? But certainly something that will accelerate the short term. And when you think about that seven to 10 years, one of the big things that I always think about is investing. There's basically three inputs to what the return is and what's your take-home money, right? Not what is it on paper, but what do you actually get back? And so if they remove capital gains tax, that'd be huge, but it's what asset am I buying and when am I buying it? What asset am I selling and when am I selling it? And then the third one is the big, bad taxes. And you guys seem to be very, very focused on helping Bitcoiners and crypto holders

Starting point is 00:05:49 invest in these assets in a tax advantaged way. And there's a whole bunch of things that I think we're going to get into in terms of how you can do that. But talk a little bit just about like taxes in general being such a big impact on what the return is? Because you guys see all the data. You see what your customers are doing and you can see how important it is to have these tax advantaged accounts. Yeah. So a lot of Bitcoiners I talk to, they often don't realize that they actually have about 20% less Bitcoin than they think they do. Because that day when you sell, whether it's short-term or long-term capital gains or just basic income, the government's going to take a big bite out of it. But no matter who's in charge, that's the nature of the beast.

Starting point is 00:06:23 And so that's part of why we built the hack that we created was what better way to get into cryptocurrency if you think long term than use some of the tools like Roths and Traditionals and SEPs. These are the tools that the government gives us to save effectively so that we can avoid some of those tax hits down the road. So you guys have these IRA accounts. There's a whole bunch of different types of IRAs that you can do. There's a couple of different ways to fund it, which I think maybe is a good place to start, right? is you can just contribute, but there's other ways as well. And so maybe walk through, like how does money get into these accounts?

Starting point is 00:06:57 And what are you seeing your customers do? Like what are the most popular ways that they get money into these accounts? Absolutely, there's three key ways. So you just mentioned contribution. You can do up to 7,500 if you're under 50 or 8,000 a year now if you're over 50. And that's a pretty popular way

Starting point is 00:07:11 to continue to grow your retirement every year, which actually the tax deadline's coming up April 15th. You have until then to do last year's contribution. A lot of folks, they call it the catch up contribution. Oh, I forgot to do it last year. I have until April 15th. That's one way. But the more popular is to fund from an existing IRA. Like if you got something at Fidelity, Charles Schwab, even Edward Jones, you can transfer from your left hand pocket to your right hand pocket. There's no tax implication because it's staying inside the tax deferred and sheltered umbrella. And then the really big one is your old 401k or 403b or pension, or maybe you might've had a TSP as a soldier, is to roll those over into these traditional or Roth IRA tools. It's really important that when you leave a job, it liberates your 401k and you don't want to leave it behind at the old employer. You can move it at that time. So talk to that a little bit, right? So like if

Starting point is 00:08:02 you have a 401k, but you left the job, like what do you do? You just call somebody up and you're like, hey, give me my 401k or how's that work? In fact, we have folks that help you do that because it is one of the more, I would say, tenuous processes. They don't really like to give up that AUC or that assets under management. So what you'll do is first you open up a like kind account. So if you have a, you can have pre or post tax funds, you open that on our side, you'll have a traditional or Roth IRA, and then you request a rollover. Sometimes like some of the smaller groups have this cumbersome paperwork you have to fill out. We can help you do that. And then often you just call or go online to like net benefits or things like that.

Starting point is 00:08:36 and they'll send a check made out to the new financial institution and then get deposited in your new IRA. So they're basically like a kind of like a gym subscription or something like that. They really don't want you to be able to get the money. They're really good at holding on. What's the craziest things you guys have seen them try to do to hold onto those assets? You know, the time period. So pensions are the worst. I've seen a pension take 90 days to issue a distribution and it just, and it just blew my mind because if I took 90 days as a financial services firm to give somebody their money, I would probably be in court, but because pensions are the, and also the TSPs are government driven. So if you go and see the forms, remember those

Starting point is 00:09:09 old forms, like in the eighties, where it's like a box, a box, a box for that, they still use those forms. I can't wait till Elon finds this bunker full of paperwork. And, and so then you have to send it off. You can't fax it. You can't, you have to mail it old school mail, no FedEx, no US UPS has got to go USPS to them. It's actually processed in this bunker in Pennsylvania that was used. Oh, literally in a bunker. It literally is in a bunker. And they've got, I just, I could imagine I've never been in there, but I can imagine like these stacks and stacks and stacks of old like filing cabinets. And on average, a TSP can take upwards of 15, 20 days. In fact, there was a, I think right after COVID

Starting point is 00:09:44 with a lot of people that got opened a distribution availability for them because they lost their jobs. They had like a six month backlog. It was on the news. And these are veterans. These are folks that have dedicated their time to our country and they have to wait until basically liberate their funds. I have seen, you know, the ones that are really good or 403Bs or 457s for firemen, nurses, and police officers, those usually because they have great unions to make sure they get taken care of. Now, let's talk about the types of accounts here because when I first started making any little bit of money, I was like, what's a retirement account? I don't even know what that is. Oh, it's tax advantage. Okay, I'm interested. You hear about a Roth or you hear

Starting point is 00:10:20 about some of these things. And I remember the first time an accountant told me about a SEP account. And I was like, whoa, baby, that sounds awesome. Bigger contributions. So yeah, explain a little bit about the different account types and why certain people may use different accounts. The most common you see out there is a traditional IRA. It's post-tax money or sorry, pre-tax money. And what that does is it allows you, so say you made $100,000 last year and you contribute to a traditional IRA, 8,000 bucks. Now your taxable income is dropped by 8,000. So now you have a 92,000 that they do the math of your taxes on. Great way to, especially if you're close to a bracket, to be able to drop that down and get underneath that next bracket

Starting point is 00:10:56 in the waterfall. The next, which came up in the seventies is the Roth IRA. It's actually named after Edward Roth from the, he's from Delaware of all places, a Senator that we were in a crisis. We were in a savings crisis in America in the seventies. We were in a lot of crises, oil crises, inflation crises, but we're also in a savings crisis. Folks were just not saving money. So the he mechanized and got passed through the Senate, a tool where you do post-tax money. So instead of get that benefit on the front side, you get the benefit on the backside. You are able to take funds out completely tax-free. And I want to repeat that tax-free when you reach the age of retirement. So if you're $8,000 and Bitcoin skyrockets to 800,000,

Starting point is 00:11:35 when you start taking your distributions at that ripe age of 59 and a half, or if you wait till later, you're completely tax-free. It also has two really cool mechanisms for younger guys. You can use it for higher education expenses without penalty or taxes, and you can use it for first-time home buying expenses without penalty or taxes. And so once you put the money and it's already been, you've already got some taxes there, but it's growing and you can trade. All day. You can go from a ETF to spot Bitcoin

Starting point is 00:12:02 to your favorite, you know, Bitcoin treasury company. Or any altcoin or swap between any other crypto that's out there. All kinds of different things in there. You're not paying taxes. No capital gains taxes. And the whole key is that essentially they have incentivized you financially

Starting point is 00:12:15 to be a long-term thinker till you're 59 and a half. These are the tools they gave us to said, hey, if you put the money in here, you can trade all day long, go crazy. You don't have to report it because it's staying inside that that shelter of what we call the tax umbrella over the over the top of it. And so until you take distribution, you won't have any tax implications. And when you get to fifty nine and a half, you just take 100 percent of it or you have to take out a little bit. You can take it all at that at that point.

Starting point is 00:12:37 But it's important because if you're in a in a traditional environment where you will have income taxes, a lot of accountants will say, make sure you're not putting too much out because you don't want to all of a sudden take out a million dollars and have this giant tax bill. You got to be strategic about it, spread it across, just like dollar cost averaging with investments, average your way out of your, of your retirement and only take out what you need for expenses every year. Or if you have some bigger plan that you want to do now with the Roth, you can go crazy because it's tax-free. Yeah. So with the Roth, you can just take out a hundred percent of it at 59 and a half and you're good to go. And is that how I think Peter Thiel put equity from PayPal and it became like a couple billion dollars. Yes. That's how he started with the PayPal equity. Then he put his shares of Facebook, Airbnb, and Uber inside the same

Starting point is 00:13:16 Roth account. And I think it's up to two or $3 billion now, which is driving the government crazy, of course. Right. But then also you brought up the SEP, you have a SEP account with us and, and that you're qualified for that. And a lot of folks are more qualified for SEPs than ever before because we're in a gig economy. We're all running our own small business, even though a lot of us may be 10, 1040 or W2 incomes. If you have any 1099 incomes, run a small business, your contribution skyrockets. You can do upwards of 50 to $60,000 a contribution, which for a small business. Amazing. So just so people understand, a SEP account is something, if you have a small business or you have this 1099 income, what you're able to do is you're able to put a higher degree

Starting point is 00:13:55 of capital in. It's going in pre or post-tax. It's pre. Pre-tax. And same thing, just continues to compound in there, tax-free, and you're good to go. And every year you get that larger contribution. There's also something that's become really popular for higher net worth earners called a solo K or an indie K. And this is where between if you and your spouse, you can put upwards of almost 150,000 tucked away pre-tax and get that benefit and lower that income bracket for your small business. And so what are like the rich people doing? I think that's the key that everyone wants to know, right? Is they're like, hey, I'm operating. Maybe I'm smart. Maybe I even know an accountant. I have an accountant. I talked to an accountant. They tell me some things here

Starting point is 00:14:31 and there, but like, I know they got rich clients that are doing stuff I'm not doing. Like, what should I be doing? What do you see the wealthiest clients on your platform doing that maybe the average person doesn't know about? Backdoor Roths is probably the most popular because what happens is uh with the roth the way they did put a limitation on it you have to make only less than 140 250 000 called the magi score it's your adjusted gross income if that's over a certain level then you're not eligible to contribute to roth's okay so what they'll do is they'll contribute or they'll have a traditional ira already say 500 000 or a million dollars and they'll see bitcoin like it did for the last couple of weeks dip down into 79 80 000 and

Starting point is 00:15:07 they'll time their conversion so they'll convert from a traditional to a roth commonly known as a the backdoor Roth. What they do is you pay the taxes now, but you're now taking that pre-tax money, turning it into post-tax money and watching it grow over time. Especially if you, it's not just being rich, but being very confident with your investment strategy. If you think that that's going to five or six X, because you also think just seven years from now, we're going to be, miners are going to be competing over less than one Bitcoin for every block. And we all know what that's going to do to the price of Bitcoin as supply and demand constraints come into play. So if you're thinking that long term, this may be the time where people, I mean, I hear it all the time. My Uber driver tells me all the time, oh man, Bitcoin's too expensive. Rich people are thinking, man, that's pretty cheap right now when you think about the economics of it.

Starting point is 00:15:49 And so when you look at these different accounts, tax season is coming. There's a lot of people who are saying, maybe I didn't plan as much as I should have planned. What can they still do between now and this tax deadline that may put them in a better position than they are now? And then obviously they should be responsible and go and plan and do things for next year. But right now, is there anything they can do in this last couple of weeks that they should be thinking about? Yes, they have up until April 15th to contribute for last year. And what a lot of folks do is, Hey, I don't want to be in the same place again next year. So they'll do a double down. They'll do their 7,500 for 24 and just go ahead and get the 7,500 done for 25. And now you've

Starting point is 00:16:25 put $15,000 pre or post-tax away that you can start investing in things like cryptocurrency. And you have up until that deadline. We have, we make it really simple because we have a plaid integrated. So you can just log in and connect your bank account. And the next day, the funds are there available for you to trade and everything gets filed appropriately for the tax year that you're looking for. But that's probably the most popular thing right now. And to incentivize folks for the Pomp Special, we're carrying it all the way through April 15th. You can earn up to a thousand dollars in cash back rewards for contributing your deposits. Oh, how does that work? So for up to, I think if you do up to 200,000, it's a thousand dollars that we give

Starting point is 00:17:00 you back as a gift card that you can use for some people or just turn it into cash and contribute for the next year. Others will use it to just to have a nice dinner with their family or otherwise, but we'll, we'll send you. And then it starts at a hundred or 50, $50 all the way up to a thousand based upon the amount that you deposit. Got it. And so when people are doing these rollovers, you mentioned that you have people, if I remember correctly, you guys also have like a phone number people can call. And like, you know, one of the knocks I worked at Facebook and I would always talk to people like, Hey, what can we do better? They'd always say something like there's no number to call. No, there's no number to call. Right. Forget answering the phone. There

Starting point is 00:17:32 was no number to call. And so they're like, how does this work? And we were building all these widgets and flows and all these things to do customer service and, you know, answer people's questions or take their complaints and all that kind of stuff. But in finance, a little bit different. You got people's money. And so explain a little bit as to how you guys operate. Like you've mentioned a couple of times, you're helping people with the 401k kind of recoveries and rollovers. You have a number, like what is it? Yeah, absolutely. So we have two teams of folks. We have, we have a vice president of retirement and their, and their assistants that you can call at any time, 877-936-7175. You even got it memorized. Oh yeah, absolutely. I've left a lot

Starting point is 00:18:06 of voicemails. Say it again. 877-936-7175. All right. And the cool part is we focus on being real crypto, real people. So this isn't a phone line that you're going to call and wait for 15, 20 minutes. We have a standard SLA of 120 seconds or less. You're on the phone with somebody. And these guys and gals have been with me, many of them for almost a decade. We have very little turnover and they've been helping Americans retire with crypto for some of them had opened two or 3000 accounts in their lifetime and helping account account holders. So they're available. They can walk you through how to fund, how the platform works. They'll help you do the online application, make sure everything's buttoned up and really tailor to your needs.

Starting point is 00:18:42 Everybody, you know, this is your retirement. This is the holy grail of your financial savings. So we try to take that human touch with you. Now, also along the way, when you're trying to fund, if we run into problems with Edward Jones trying to move the money over, or they need you to, we had this one yesterday where they had one share, they were waiting for 60 cents. It was $0.60 to liquidate. And they rejected the entire transfer for like over $200,000. And it was for that $0.60 that they did that. So we jump on the phone and we go, hey, come on, let's get this taken care of. Because a lot of times folks don't realize that all you got to do is put a little bit of pressure in the right places and funds will move faster. Because everybody wants to get into

Starting point is 00:19:16 crypto quick, right? We're knocking on 90s door again, and who knows where we'll be within the next couple of months. Yeah, that makes sense to me. And so what's the money's in, right? Any one of these accounts, what can people do with it in there? Pretty much whatever they like. They can sit in cash if they want to. They can average their way in. We have, what is it now? 75 different cryptocurrencies available. So we've got pretty much everything your heart could desire. We just- Well, careful. There's meme coins. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of meme coins. But we listen to our clients. We started as just Bitcoin. That's why our name is Bitcoin IRA. But we listen to our clients. I remember April of 2018 or 17,

Starting point is 00:19:51 we added Ethereum, which I remember we added it was $40. And within a month, it was $400. And people were thrilled. Later that year, we added XRP. We did the Bitcoin cash fork support and tossed in Litecoin. And then slowly, we've been adding more and more coins. Most recently, I would say the most popular new ones have been, we did add the Trump coin for those that wanted it. Sui has been a big one as well. And whatever the clients are looking for, we really try to make this a self-directed choice. But you can invest in all those types of coins if you just want to do Bitcoin. And then later this quarter, we're relaunching both staking and covered call programs. So this is a way for you to make yield with your assets instead of just having them sit

Starting point is 00:20:31 there. Great tools, especially in quiet markets to just stack up more ETH or stack up more Bitcoin. And I think there's about six coins that'll be available for staking. One, I think Avalanche is paying up almost seven or 8%, which this is a whole new ball game of yield though. Not like what we saw back in 2022 and 2023. So people are buying the Trump meme coin in their retirement account? Yeah, it was, it was, they were asking for it. I was shocked. I was shocked. Yeah. I mean, and the only bummer, I guess the only bummer I felt was we, we didn't get it before the big run when it went crazy in January, but there's folks that have put that, I mean, uh, she was really popular. Um, and like, who are these people? Are they just like normal Americans? Are they like,

Starting point is 00:21:10 you know, wealthy investors who are like, Hey, this is like kind of my play money and I'm taking one, 2% of my entire net worth. And I'm doing this or like a little bit of everything. So when I was talking about that rollover. We had a guy, early adopter back in 2016, he quit his job at Intel. I'm telling you, he actually quit his job. He had a great job making great money because he wanted to liberate his 401k. He had almost a half million in there and he wanted to get into Bitcoin. And this was back when we were at $600, $700 of Bitcoin. And now fast forward these 10 years and he's upwards of about five or 6 million in his retirement. And he took early retirement, but we helped change his life. And he focuses on a charity. His son has a very rare degenerative

Starting point is 00:21:47 disease in the spinal cord so he focuses on that with his with his family another one a doctor from sri lanka i was talking to just last week my birthday was last week so i talked to a couple clients they called wish me happy birthday he so he was telling me this story he has four kids he got them all through school and engineering school and medical school but he really focused on kids success and left himself with about 75 000 for his retirement he took 35 of it and put it in bitcoin with us and now he's up to i think two and a half million and what he's planning on doing is building a small business on blockchain to disrupt physicians and streamline the physician process for that paperwork. We have to constantly fill out every time we go to the doctor's office.

Starting point is 00:22:24 So these are just a few of the stories. We also have Rocket Ron, who's my favorite. He texts me almost every morning. He wakes me up like the Bitcoin price, whatever it's doing, he wakes me up with it almost every morning. And we get to know clients like this really closely. And he's big on right now. He's really big on XRP and XLM because of the case that got just dropped from the SEC. So these are, these are not maniacs. They are a lot of our early founders. I called them the engine nerds because they were from NASA, IBM, Intel, those types of places. But it's a lot of just regular folks like you and I that are just looking for an ability to keep up and beat inflation and keep up from all these haircuts. I mean, I look at my parents' generation and

Starting point is 00:22:59 every five or six years, it was a big haircut on their 401k. And, and even for us with growing up, I was 18 when the towers fell, I was coming out of college when the housing crisis happened and then building a small business when COVID took place. It's an upward battle for Americans. We need every tool we can to try to accelerate our retirement chances. When you look inside these accounts, are people trading a lot because there's no tax ramifications? There's a lot of trading. There is. Okay. So explain a little bit more as to like, is this like daily, weekly? Are people like day trading with their retirement accounts? I don't think day trading. There are a few, like maybe a handful of those guys and they've done, some of them have done well. It's just

Starting point is 00:23:34 like day trading in anything, right? You're taking risks because a lot of movements, sometimes just sitting still is a great thing. I used to joke with my partners that the investment capital we built, we put in to build the company. If we would have just bought Bitcoin that day instead of started a company, we'd probably all be retired by now, but we wouldn't have been able to help thousands. I mean, we're up to almost 50,000 account holders that we've helped. Wow. And 14,000. Yeah. And 15, 14. Well, in January, it was 15 billion of assets in custody. Now I think it's about 14 billion. But yeah, that's, that's kind of the excitement about the whole thing. And how do you guys make money in this whole thing?

Starting point is 00:24:05 Of course. So we have a few ways that we make it. First, when you deposit funds, there's a small fee to deposit, set up the account. We create this pentagon of custody around your account. This wasn't something we just tripped into and said, hey, let's just use wallets here, left and right. You're a pretty versed guy. Most of your audience is. We use cold storage to cold storage technology. We partnered with the best like BitGo for years. They're the layers of administrative control. If you ever want to move your Bitcoin out, which you can do in distribution, we can talk about that. You have to go through AI video verification. You have to talk to a human, like a lot of this. I think of like the Pentagon,

Starting point is 00:24:38 the rings that go around it. Every one of those is a layer of security. So to set that up, we have a fee. Transaction fees are a market standard, somewhere between one to 2%. And then an ongoing insurance fee. Every wallet is covered for up to $250 million a year or per wallet for any incident. And so there's a 0.0008 monthly wallet fee that's associated. That's like such a small, that's like dust. When you think about it, yeah, it's like dust. Okay. And then what are the risks, right?

Starting point is 00:25:05 Like with crypto, if people are putting their crypto in here, if I leave my crypto on an exchange or something, right? There's obviously like hacking risk. I can be socially engineered, whatever. You're talking a little bit about, you call it like Pentagon security or whatever. How do you guys think of what the risks are for people? And then how are you guys mitigating? Your greatest risk is yourself.

Starting point is 00:25:21 We found over the years is that people will get SIM swapped and they'll get hacked on their emails and people will impersonate them. We've had some folks that have been, their business has been hijacked and then they get the ransom and they know that they have these. These are all layers of security we put to prevent that. So multi-factor authentication for your login, your assets stay in the ecosystem. But like, so if you log into Coinbase, that's your actual Bitcoin. And if somebody got your login, they could simply take that Bitcoin, move it to another wallet. If somebody got into your account, that Bitcoin is not going anywhere. And we have had people that have been hacked and then

Starting point is 00:25:53 somebody will try to do a distribution request or something. And once we put them through, hey, we got to get you on video. We have to do an AI authentication. We go through all these layers in order to confirm that it is you, in fact, that wants to do this. And so that's those layers. Now, you have the traditional risk of anything with investing. The other thing that's really nice versus your Coinbase or even your ledger is you have your beneficiary set up. So if something was to happen to you, like my wife set up for mine as my primary beneficiary and my contingent is my daughter. So they don't have to go running around finding seeds and figuring out how to use those little ledger devices or in general, just losing it. Like that one guy that bought the trash dump

Starting point is 00:26:32 because his ledger was thrown away by his wife. This is all programmed into the system so that you don't have to worry about when I die, are my family members and heirs able to access that Bitcoin? And what is the process there, right? Because I do think this is a big problem that people worry about is like, hey, something happens to me. Like what happens? You set up a beneficiary. Somebody passes away. Unfortunately, you just contact the beneficiary and work through the process with them to get the funds. Yep. Absolutely. Usually we don't know that the person's passed. So the beneficiary will come to us. What we do is we set you up with a nice little welcome package. So once you open and fund the account, we have you set up your beneficiaries

Starting point is 00:27:05 and then we put together letters that you put in your safe or where you put all your other regular documents so that they know to call us. And then all they really have to do is call us, provide a death certificate, go through an onboarding process. So we'll open up an account for the wife or for the kids or the grandkids, and then they'll be able to access it. And they don't have to get rid of the Bitcoin either. That's one that's really interesting, a pattern I see. So like when my grandfather passed in 2020, everybody just said, liquidate all the assets. We all want cash, right? I find that a lot of these grandkids don't even know grandpa bought Bitcoin and they're thrilled. And so they're like, well, can I hold onto the Bitcoin? I want to keep it.

Starting point is 00:27:38 And yeah, so we open up what's known as an inherited IRA account for you. So now it's in the name of you in honor of your deceased family member, and you can continue the tax deferment. Oh, you could pass it down. Yep. You pass it down. Oh, interesting. So there's no tax. There's no- As long as you keep it in that inherited IRA and don't take distribution. Oh, interesting. And so is this a way that wealthy people pass money down to their children? Absolutely. It's a great way to pass things down. Avoid that death tax,

Starting point is 00:28:00 as they called it in the 80s, or the estate tax is a great tool for that. Yeah. Very interesting. As you've been building this, what's the number one surprise so far? You've been doing it for years now. You've got 50,000 customers that are on the platform, approximately. You said $14, $15 billion of assets. I'm assuming what you started out to build is not exactly what you ended up building, just in the nature of entrepreneurship. But are there any major surprises along the way? I would probably say the engagement from the client. So I've done financial services before, and a lot of folks kind of just set and forget their retirements. And it's something that they don't think about, especially old 401Ks.

Starting point is 00:28:31 The number of people that are actively engaged in providing feedback and willing to share their stories, uh, and, and, and get on and help others. And the referrals is insane. Like I would say probably 40% of those accounts are clients referring their friends or family to us. And that might be because we're doing a great job or because it's just so exciting, but that's probably the two biggest surprises in the, what people do with it later. Like, you know, I always thought when somebody, when I watched some of these accounts go to two, three, four, we have one that's at $50 million. We got $50 million in their retirement. Yeah. And their retirement account with us in a Roth setting as well. And, and started came in. No, they just did. They came

Starting point is 00:29:08 in perfectly at COVID when, you know, when everything just plummeted, Bitcoin went down to like 7,000, got in there, did a, did a big swap into Solana a couple of years ago before it went big. They basically traded their way up to 50 million. What did they start with? Five. Five million. Oh, okay. So five, so they started with a big pile. Yeah. They still, but still to go from five to 50. Yeah. 10X. Yeah. Of course. And, and the way, and then they're still holding like The commitment of crypto people, and especially Bitcoin folks, the hodler mentality is unreal. And it inspires me every day that we're doing something right, because this is a scarce asset. I was just on with Yahoo Finance yesterday, and they're talking about why do you think

Starting point is 00:29:44 it's a hedge against inflation? It's the only scarce asset we have in our lives. Yeah. $50 million in a retirement account. That's crazy. By trading. That guy's doing pretty good, or that girl, whatever. All right.

Starting point is 00:29:54 Where can we send people if they're interested in doing this? And then also, do you guys provide tax advice, or do you recommend them to accountants, or How does that work? We recommend you always meet with your tax attorney or CPA. We have a list of them that are available that like to work with us. Preferred vendor types. Yeah, preferred vendor type groups. But the best place is obviously if you just want to get started, 877-936-7175 or BitcoinIRA.com forward slash POMP because then they'll be, we'll identify them as a POMP listener and they'll get that reward after they deposit.

Starting point is 00:30:21 Oh, so they go to slash POMP and they get this. Or when you call in, make sure that you know us from POMP. Your audience loves to make phone calls. Do they really? We get a lot of phone calls. He's trying to say we got a lot of boomers out here? No, it's young people. It's young people.

Starting point is 00:30:34 Young people too. I mean, you know, I was reading this study about- The boomers know I love them. Oh yeah. I love the boomers too. But I was reading something about Gen Z is having to take therapy classes to get ready for work to do telecommunications. They're terrified of the phone, of either making or receiving phone calls.

Starting point is 00:30:51 So this is like a new thing companies are adding to their training. We got a couple of people that I know that- That won't like to do the text. No, I call them all the time. Hey, I only got time to be going back and forth. Just tell me what you got to tell me. Agreed. I'm an old school guy like that as well. Yeah. But okay. So young people are calling too.

Starting point is 00:31:03 Yeah. Young people are calling too. I know. That makes me happy. All right. So bitcoinira.com slash pomp is where to send people. Awesome. I love what you guys are doing. I'm a user. I obviously like the product. And I think that more people should just understand how to do this, especially with the tax season kind of coming to an end. Yep. Deadline's coming. Time to act now. It's like, hey, man, let's go. Let's go. Because once the 15th's over, you miss the year. There's no catching up after that. So that's

Starting point is 00:31:27 $8,000 that, or 7,500 that the government said you could save that you no longer can save. So it's best to take advantage of it. Yeah. Makes sense. All right. We'll definitely do this again in the future. Absolutely. Thanks for having me again.

The Pomp Podcast - #1515 Chris Kline | Tax Trick The Rich Use For Bitcoin

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