The Liquidity Event Podcast: Episode 89

 

Episode 89: Mega Yachts on the Supreme Court, EVs at Walmart, and an IRS Glow-Up

Dive into the latest episode of the Liquidity Event Podcast, where we tackle the complexities of moving to a no-income-tax state, Amazon's rethinking of employee stock rewards, and Walmart's electrifying plan for 2030. Uncover the hidden mega yachting with Justice Clarence Thomas and the ambitious IRS hiring spree. We question Forbes' 30 under 30 jailbirds, the IRS's $80B tax collection overhaul, and the enigmatic age bias in hiring. To wrap it up, we explore the looming credit card rewards crisis, and how Bookshop.org defies the Amazonian odds. It's a rollercoaster of financial intrigue and tax evasion evasion

Read the Full Transcript:

Presenter:

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be considered tax or investment advice.

Welcome to the Liquidity Event, a show about all things personal finance with a laser focus on equity compensation. Hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn Fi, each episode will take you through the week's news on FinTech, IPOs, SPACs, founder wins and fails, Crypto, and whatever else these nerds think is interesting. Learn more and subscribe today at brooklynfi.com.

Shane:

Hello and welcome to episode 89 of the Liquidity Event. We are your host, Shane Mason.

AJ:

And I'm Ally-Jane Ayers.

Shane:

Full name, sick, and we're recording.

AJ:

I'm going back to Ally-Jane.

Shane:

Okay, and we're recording on April 12th, 2023. This will be airing on April 14th, 2023. It's an odd number episode, which means your boy will be running things today. AJ, how we doing?

AJ:

Oh, I'm doing great. I'm doing great. Can you actually call me Ally-Jane? I've just decided 30 seconds ago that I'm going back to my given name. Thank you.

Shane:

Sure. Everyone gets to get called whatever the hell they want these days. Ally-Jane, how we doing today?

AJ:

I'm doing great. It's our first 80 degree day here in New York City ak Leg Day for those who celebrate. First day that we get to wear skirts and dresses.

Shane:

Oh, is that what that is?

AJ:

And shorts.

Shane:

As a lifter, I was thinking it was leg day or hitting quads and hams today.

AJ:

Well, if you've been hitting your quads and hams all winter, then Leg Day is going to be real good for you.

Shane:

You can finally let them shine today.

AJ:

Let them out, let the dogs out.

Shane:

Let the dogs out. Is that what we call legs? Is that what the ladies are calling legs these days?

AJ:

That's what we're calling them. That's what we're calling them.

Shane:

Let me see them dogs, girl.

AJ:

I call them like I see them.

Shane:

AJ, do you know what they call a man that's had a vasectomy in Mexico?

AJ:

What?

Shane:

They call him Splendor, because you get all the sweetness but you don't get fat.

AJ:

Oy, oy, oy.

Shane:

All right. On this week's episode, we've got Amazon cutting equity for employees in the year 2025. Walmart's rolling out EVs across the country. We got a lot of tax updates for you, and then we got some Philadelphia cream cheese breaking news for you in tax land. It is tax season. We're almost at that deadline, people.

Off the jump, we got a lot of articles today. I'm going to hop right into it. It looks like Amazon is going to be switching to a base pay package according to Seeking Alpha, and the insider. Employees are not happy with their equity awards. They don't want variable compensation. People want base pay, they want bumps in their...

Amazon is notorious for having very low caps on salaries and very high caps on the value of equity compensation awards, RSUs, etc. which have been helping out employees a lot through the pandemic when the stock price of Amazon skyrocketed, but it has not performed as well post-pandemic. AJ, what are your thoughts?

AJ:

Yeah. Famously, Amazon had a salary cap at $160,000, which they had to raise dramatically to $350,000. They did that last year. I think with RSUs specifically at Amazon, which have a really wacky vesting schedule, they don't vest very often. A lot of other companies vest quarterly or monthly. A lot of Amazon's wacky equity packages vest yearly or semi-annually.

I think this is, honestly, I think this is a good move. I think this has a lot of tax problems for your average bear worker at Amazon. I'm all for increasing base pay, especially if you're going to, we have a lot of Amazon workers at the HQ are going to be in a no tax state like Washington. If they can just understand their taxes a little bit better, I'm all for this. It's not going into a event until 2025. Is this actually going to happen? I don't know. They got to rework their workforce after they just laid off about, what was it, a quarter of it in total?

Shane:

I think it might have been 10%, something in there. Friendly reminder, stock is up 109,000% over its lifetime. Brings us to our next article about Walmart. Apparently Walmart in an attempt to get with it, get relevant, I think this is a win-win. Walmart will be adding thousands of electric vehicle charging stations to stores by 2030 according to CNBC. We know that Walmart is going to be, is a hub for a lot of rural communities. If every Walmart had electric vehicle charging stations, essentially every small town in America would have an electric vehicle charging station. What are your thoughts?

AJ:

Yeah, this is great. I think it makes it EVs, the reason why you're not going to get an EV in rural Wisconsin is because you'd have to install your own charging station at home. But if you've got a Walmart 20 miles away, it's a great opportunity. It's also a great business move for Walmart because while your vehicle's charging, you're going to stay in the store longer and spend more money. This is probably, from on high, how do we increase sales 7% a quarter? Well, I don't know. Why don't we keep people in our store for an hour longer?

Have you ever experienced this, by the way? My sister has an electric vehicle up in Washington and we were running low on a charge and we were in some shopping center and literally had to wander around the store for 45 minutes while the car charged and I was like, okay, yeah, I would not have spent, maybe we saved 50 bucks on gas, but I definitely spent another 75 bucks at Target or wherever it was.

Shane:

Yeah. What's the more on brand department store for this? Would it be a Target or...

AJ:

Ikea?

Shane:

Micro Center.

AJ:

That would be a good... What's your computer place? Micro Center.

Shane:

Micro Center, yeah.

AJ:

Your Motherland. Apple Store? But Apple Stores typically aren't in, well in the urban areas, they're not around a lot of parking.

Shane:

I have not been to the Apple Store in Harrison, Arkansas. By the way, I can't wait for some dude in Harrison, Arkansas to have a public freak-out on TikTok, like they're having on Bud Light and Jack Daniels these days because of how un-American it is to reduce our reliance on Russia and oil and OPEC.

AJ:

One number that I'd like to keep an eye on, Shane, maybe on this podcast is the number of vehicle registrations that are EVs. Because in January, it was 7% of new vehicle registrations were electric vehicles. I think that number is up. Last time I checked in on this, I think it was something like 3% or 4%, so that number seems to be going up in a healthy way. Let's keep that in mind.

Shane:

I think we actually skipped over it on accident on the last episode. We ran out of time, but the Biden administration is pushing forward heavily on electric vehicles. We're seeing some legislation come through the administration, or get offered through the administration that's going to help bump up. We'll probably cover it on the next episode.

AJ:

Speaking of bumping up, we've got HUD finalizing a rule to allow for a 40-year FHA loan instead of the typical 30-year, which hopefully will lower some payments for mortgage payers down because we can stretch the mortgage over more years. We missed this. I feel like you slacked me this and you're like, I can't believe we missed this. This is a huge freaking deal and it was a weird random footnote on some law firm's website. We missed this, and so did the media because this is positive news that government made a little change that's supposed to help people. That's not flashy news, it's just a footnote. Anyway, that's my take. What's yours?

Shane:

I'm just glad the government's finally listening to us millennials and now we can take 40 years to pay off the house. It's finally affordable. Looking forward to paying off my loan at 75 years old in the year 2064 when I go to get a house. I mean, it's irrelevant because no one's buying new homes with these interest rates at where they are anyway, and no one's refinancing. Well, I shouldn't say nobody's buying homes, but we're not going to see a lot of refinancing in the...

AJ:

Whatever payment reduction this might have caused six months ago is basically going to be wiped out by the rising interest rates. Good effort, but will it actually make a difference in someone buying a home today? Probs not.

Shane:

Yes. Speaking of useless legislation. No, I don't actually have a good transition for this spicy meatball.

AJ:

I have one.

Shane:

Go for it.

AJ:

Speaking of probs not, if you're a Supreme Courts justice, you should say probs not, when your rich billionaire Republican donor friend invites you on a free trip to The Bahamas.

Shane:

That one's a stretch, but I'll go with it. This isn't really a political podcast, but it is fun to highlight some political items every once in a while, and obviously the Supreme Court just saw a case about Section 230, so it's relevant.

Clarence Thomas has been called out for accepting hundreds of thousand dollars of gifts from Harlan Crow, which is not a superhero comic book villain. It's an actual person, and it turns out that he could be coming under fire for these ethics violations and we might have, should have listened to Anita Hill 20, 30 years ago. I don't know if there's anyone else on the other side of the aisle that's also been doing this. The Supreme Court has been on this pedestal for a few hundred years now, and I think it needs to be knocked down at this point. This is yet another indication that the Supreme Court is a political body that is being used to implement the will of the minority on the majority of Americans. AJ, what are your thoughts about this impropriety?

AJ:

Yeah, I think, I mean lifelong appointment. The argument that Clarence Thomas was making about these gifts, it was like, we're friends. I'm not going to say no to my friend. First of all, you became friends after you were put on the Supreme Court, so not, timing of that friendship's really interesting. Shane and I became friends after we started this business, right? Wait, were we friends before? TBD.

The only thing important that I got out of this article was that Mr. Crow has added to the grounds at one of his vast estates, a replica of Hagrid's Hut, which appears many times throughout the Harry Potter books. No, I don't like this. I mean, you're right. This is probably just one person who got caught. ProPublica went really deep on this. We love ProPublica for doing the Lord's work when it comes to journalism. But yeah, there's probably many, many, many more cases of this on both sides of the aisle.

Shane:

I'm just going to do a little role play here, AJ. I'd like to say hello. My name's Jimmy Catman, and first of all, I don't hate dogs. Okay, that's just a nasty rumor that the mainstream media loves to talk, but by the way, I hate cat people. I give hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to the Cat Party. It's not illegal. It's not a big deal.

And what's the dogcatcher doing at my house? We're just buds. It's irrelevant. Can't we just be buds? I mean, he asked all of his friends if it was chill, if I threw him on international flights and he came to my multimillion dollar estate. According to the other dogcatchers, it's totally chill and it's not illegal, and we don't ever talk about cats or dogs, which while being our professions and our life's work, and we are widely considered the most important members on those topics, it's off the table for discussion on vacation. We just talk about fishing and drinking beers. It's just vacation. All right, I'm Jimmy Catman. Nothing to see here.

AJ:

Thank you for that. Thank you for that.

Shane:

Sorry.

AJ:

But okay, so isn't it like... Thank you for that little role play. It was from our sponsors, folks, Kibbles 'n Bits, or whatever the fuck.

Shane:

No cat stuff, I'm a dog guy.

AJ:

I know this. That's like me trying to talk about fuzzy animals or something I know nothing about. Look, when you're on the Supreme Court, there's this idea that you exchange, you get a lot of power and you're a public servant. I think this idea of classical government where you make a sacrifice, you take a lower salary. You don't get to do these things because you have such a position of power and respect and integrity, and this news story just exploded all that. It's pretty gross, not a fan of this.

Shane:

Friendly reminder. Citizens United is the worst thing to ever happen to America, and the culture wars are our distraction, while these boomers burn the world down whilst they give us the middle finger and sink it into their graves. Moving along.

AJ:

By the way, folks. Do not email Shane. It's the last week of tax season.

Shane:

My inbox has been spared. Luckily this year I have a lovely tax director.

AJ:

He's a little spicy, a little spicy. Speaking of a little spicy, we've got an article here. 30 under 30 sentences, why so many of Forbes Young Heroes face jail time and criminal charges? What are we at? We got Shkreli. We got Bankman-Fried. We have this new person, Charlie, who was the CEO of a FinTech company called Finch, who's the latest to come under scrutiny for fraud. It turns out if you land up on the 30 under 30 list, you might be facing jail time.

Shane:

This is not a judgment, but I did notice those names you just said. Are all three of those Jew, are they all Jews? Asking the Jewish American Princess. Isn't Charlie Javice, Martin Shkreli, Sam Bankman-Fried?

AJ:

I don't know.

Shane:

Interesting. I don't know. I think we need a new minimum requirement for the title of CEO, by the way. I noticed a lot of CEOs in the space. I think you need a certain number of employees before you can call yourself a CEO.

AJ:

How many?

Shane:

There has to be other chiefs for you to be the chief executive because you got to have a CFO, which Sam Bankman-Fried didn't have. You got to have at least one other chief, chief marketing officer, chief product officer before you get to be the head chief.

AJ:

I kind of disagree. I mean, in order to get venture capital money, you have to call yourself a CEO. The institution has been created for you to have to walk into this room and be like, I'm the CEO.

Shane:

I disagree.

AJ:

Disagree?

Shane:

Disagree. You think you can walk in and be like, I'm the...

AJ:

I'm the founder.

Shane:

This is my company.

I don't know. Yeah, it's my company. I'm the decision maker. I don't know, it just seems silly to me.

AJ:

I love this tweet, which was the Forbes 30 under 30 have also been arrested for fraud and scams worth over $18.5 billion, which is way more than they've actually raised in funding. They're like the Forbes 30 under 30 list collectively has raised $5.3 billion, and they've been on the hook for fraud of $18.5 billion. They're in the hole $13 billion right now.

Shane:

I didn't know about this other guy that founded Nikola, or his name is Nikola. Apparently...

AJ:

No, Nikola's the company and which I assume is for Nikola Tesla, which is a weird shadow Tesla.

Shane:

Well, yeah, it's a hydro truck. It's a hydro powered trucking company. Apparently they made a video of a truck rolling downhill and they just tilted it, so it looks like it was moving on its own will. The guy was on the Forbes 12 under 40 list for being a billionaire, and now he's being tried for fraud, so that's another fun one.

AJ:

Yeah, just a quick PSA. I'm 34 and Shane's about to be 36, so we have about collectively five more years to be on your 40 under 40 list so we are accepting nominations for any and all 40 under 40 lists. Thank you so much. We have not committed any fraud. Yeah, hopefully we can be the trend breakers.

Shane:

That we know of or that they know of yet. We're going to get to tax fraud a little bit later.

AJ:

Speaking of being 34, bosses want hard workers, so they're hiring older people. We got this lovely Wall Street Journal article, the newspaper for boomers by boomers, talking about how great it is to hire older people because they're more experienced. Cool. Great. Love this. Love this for everybody. Let's get the right people in the right seats. I don't know. I don't have anything negative to say about this, honestly. In a surprising turn of events, I have no criticism of this article.

Shane:

I do. Ding, ding, ding.

AJ:

Oh, you do.

Shane:

I do. The article's all about how boomers work harder and they are more reliable and they're more loyal, so that's why our companies are going after them. And no, they're not. They're going after boomers because we're at 3% unemployment, and we need anyone in any seats that we can fill.

Also, if we can get people that will work for less money because they're coming out of retirement and they'll take any job that they can, then yeah, capitalists are going to do that. They're going to do anything it takes to reduce the cost of labor, including rollback child labor laws, which they've been doing across the country over the past year and a half. They're hiring children and also retirees just because it'll drive down the cost of labor. It's not about work ethic, so please shut the fuck up. Anyway. Yeah, I am very spicy today. Too much coffee.

AJ:

You are spicy.

Shane:

Oh, well. We do have a lovely article about credit card rewards, also from the Journal. Apparently, this article, I think I put this in here, AJ, because it's about credit card rewards, and I thought it would be useful for us. We love credit card rewards, but actually there wasn't a ton of meat on the bone. Apparently, the cost of credit card rewards have skyrocketed as credit cards have tried to lure people back away from debit cards, which people started using during the pandemic when everyone started saving and not going out. Yeah, I don't know.

AJ:

Sorry, go ahead.

Shane:

No, just one takeaway I had is that apparently the winners of the credit card rewards games are high FICO people, people with good credit, which apparently are able to pay off their credit cards every month. No surprise there. They get the points. They don't have the interest expense. Then low FICO people end up overspending. They get the points, but their credit gets... Their balances go up, and they pay interest payments and they lose the game, which is a bummer. I hate to see that.

AJ:

Yeah, this article just, yeah, the same. I was like, where's the catch here? Just kind of stating everything we already know about credit card rewards. Just a reminder, you want to win the game by beating the credit card companies, by keeping your FICO score high, by paying off your balances every month and reaping those rewards. Also use your points people, don't hoard them. You get those credit card points. Start booking those hotels, start buying those Barnes & Noble gift cards. Whatever you got to do. They're just sitting there, like start using them before you lose them.

Shane:

Yeah, they don't earn interest. It's not like your cash in a high yield savings account is going to earn 5% these days. Your credit card rewards points are probably going to reduce in value due to inflation, and they can change the rewards program at any point to make them less valuable, and they have done that. Delta's done that a lot over the past five years.

Quick update on SVB, Silicon Valley Bank. There is a lawsuit coming forth against KPMG amongst others who was the auditor of Silicon Valley Bank. The bank failure was in Q1 of 2023, which was just weeks or just a few months after KPMG the auditor released their audit opinion. Apparently, there was not a substantial risk of Silicon Valley Bank going out of business according to their auditors, which for a bank that didn't have a chief risk officer for most of 2022, and the previous one that left in April of 2022, got a two and a half million dollar pay package, which was all just too corporate, white collar fun, fraud, fun stuff here. There's no fraud actually. But yeah, apparently...

AJ:

It's more a risky business than risk management, if you know what I mean.

Shane:

Exactly. Auditors are supposed to provide an indication if a company is going to be around in the foreseeable future, and friendly reminder, we have a lot of them this week that auditors are paid by the companies that they audit. Any preposterous attempt at independence between these two companies, the independent company that does it, they don't want to stir up trouble. Why are you going to hire a company that says, "Hey, you guys are going out of business soon." Unfortunately, we do have an independence problem in the audit space in America.

Speaking of problems in America, AJ, you've got this article about bookstores in America. This is a little bit too 2009 for me. I didn't read this one. Get me up to speed.

AJ:

It's all good, it's all good. Quick note here, so bookshop.org is a website, if you're not familiar. You go to it, you type in the book you want to buy, and instead of buying from Amazon or a big conglomerate, you can actually buy a book and the money will actually go directly to a local independent bookstore. If you are in Anchorage, you can shop at your local bookstore from the comfort of your own home, and all the books are actually sourced through Ingram, which is the big publisher warehouse conglomerate. It's just a great way to support small businesses, keep bookstores alive as a place to browse, but you can do it from the comfort of your own house.

So TL;DR, like use bookshop.org when you can. If you don't need a book tomorrow, use that instead of Amazon. It helps put money back into your local economies, and also, this is a highly profitable business. This guy from publishing just started this business to help independent bookstores. Turns out it's a huge success, obviously an iota in terms of Amazon's market dominance in the book space, but do what you can to support your local independent bookstores. As someone who grew up in one, this is very close to my heart.

Shane:

Tight. Yeah, we have another hyper. We're moving into tax land. We have another very local situation happening here, but AJ, you added this one pretty late to the game. I do see it's a sales tax item, but it's mostly about food.

AJ:

Basically.

Shane:

What's going on with Philly versus New York bagels?

AJ:

Apparently there's a bagel tax, which is basically, if a bagel is cut, means you intend to eat it on premises, so there's going to be some sales tax charge. Philadelphia cream cheese to get us to talk about Philadelphia cream cheese is doing a promotion where they're actually going to inject cream cheese into the bagel without actually cutting it to circumvent the bagel tax in New York. To celebrate tax day, we're trying to circumvent the sales tax, so cute little stunt by Philadelphia cream cheese.

Shane:

There are 12,000 different sales tax jurisdictions in America. Isn't that fun? Don't you want to be a part of that, each with their own rules, such as whether or not the bagel is cut, will it be subject to tax?

Speaking of local state, local jurisdictions, we have an article here from Hodgson Russ, our favorite state and local income tax attorneys. Just with a friendly reminder published on April 3rd that if you're moving to a state with no income tax, there's way more to it than paper changes and 183 days ak half the year. AJ, what do you have to say about this article, this update?

AJ:

If I had a dollar for every time a tax expert or well-informed person told me that they're no longer a resident of New York because they spend 183 days out of the city, I'd be paying a $7 billion state tax bill, folks. There's this idea that you can look up an article, and I'd love this article's genius because it basically unpacks the CNBC article about residency change, and it's like, all this stuff is nice. You should change your driver's license, of course. You should change your voter registration. You should rent an apartment. Those are the basic things that you have to do.

But basically it's saying the IRS will, or the New York State will call your bullshit if you don't actually move, and these are the things that you actually need to do to break ties. If you even think about coming back to New York, the auditors are going to come after you and disallow you. Bring that income back to New York, which means it'll be taxable, likely with some penalties and interest.

If you're ever thinking about moving out of a high tax state like California or New York, you definitely, definitely need to talk to a good tax attorney, a good accountant who's going to help you with a real checklist that isn't just these paper changes. I moved. Don't worry about it. Here's my moving receipt. You really actually have to move, and you can't move for six months. You got to move for good.

Shane:

Yeah, you have to leave and land, as they say. You have to not only get rid of your old stuff, but you have to land somewhere else and stay there, and moving into your parents' house does not count as moving.

AJ:

Just a reminder, just a quick reminder. For example, let's say you rent an apartment in New York City and you put all your stuff in storage and you go traveling around the world, you do not get to exclude all of your income from New York for that year because you left New York. You didn't land anywhere. You're still floating around the world. Just be really careful, especially if you're doing your own taxes via TurboTax. Do not try to exclude income. Talk to a professional before you start moving your income between states. That's my PSA of the tax season today.

Shane:

Yeah. It takes us to our next article from the Treasury Department, which is our $80 billion plan to overhaul tax collection. Yeah, the Biden administration helped pass a bill to fund the IRS. We get $80 billion heading towards them. The next few articles are actually going to be about that, about audit rates and who's going to get audited and how it's going to happen, and fear-mongering and the government getting involved. What do you think about this $80 billion plan to overall tax collection, AJ?

AJ:

Yeah. Congrats on the IRS for raising its series Z fund round from the federal deficit VC company. Good for them. Definitely going to be a pretty good ROI on that, depending if they can actually collect, use this money to collect the revenues that the government is owed. We have a huge deficit because we are sure, maybe we're overspending. I'll let Congress debate that, but at the end of the day, we're not collecting the revenue on the income that is being generated in this country.

I mean, look, we're tax people. We need the IRS to survive. The IRS is there to collect tax that is owed. There's no hating the IRS, like they're not making the rules. They're just collecting the tax. That's their job. That's why they exist to pave your roads and get your hospitals funded and whatnot.

Shane:

I mean, just imagine a business that has all these accounts receivable from all these services they've provided and were owed $500 trillion, but we just don't have anyone literally to call the people and be like, "Hey, are you going to pay us? Like, you should pay us. Can you please come pay us?"

AJ:

That's a great analogy.

Shane:

We don't want the government involved in that. Why would we want the government collecting money that's owed to it? That's fucking stupid. By the way, we can't afford universal healthcare, and yeah, we're going to increase the cost of the military, but we don't have the money for it. Also, we really care about the deficit and all these interest payments that are coming up, but we're not going to collect the money. It's just insane.

AJ:

That's a great way to put it. Yeah, imagine you are a public company and the government put a law that you could not hire an accounts receivable department. You couldn't spend any money on your accounts receivables team, and it was...

Shane:

Why would you pay that company? I'm just, you know what I'm going to do? I'm just going to cut services from that company and never pay them.

AJ:

And never pay them.

Shane:

I mean, that's just human nature and friendly reminder. We get $6 for every dollar that we give the IRS. Since we gave them $80 billion, potentially that's half a trillion dollars that we get back from them, and that's supposedly because we're only going to audit people or we've promised, or the administration has promised that they're only going to audit people with incomes over $400,000.

That's kind of problematic. First of all, it's really hard to, it's problematic for a lot of reasons. One that's highlighted in this journal article is that let's say you make $450,000 and you never cheated on your taxes before, but now you're suddenly scared of the IRS auditing you. Maybe you leave $60,000 off of your freelance income, which you have the ability to do, because we're on an honor system for some fucking reason in this country, on the thing that matters the most. I think that the tithing that gets passed around the church is more obvious because you can see what other people are putting into it, whereas everyone files their own taxes in secret, which is just insane.

Anyway, so you would potentially be incentivized to now hide $60,000 because you slip under that $390,000 threshold. There's some other things going on here. What are your thoughts on the problem with the $400,000 pledge to not be audited?

AJ:

Yeah, I mean, anytime you draw a line in the sand, people are going to try to fly under the radar. I agree with you that, I mean, they have to start somewhere, so I think I'm kind of in favor of this. Let's just start somewhere, see how it goes for a year.

Shane:

Indeed.

AJ:

Again, an audit. A lot of people are so scared of audits. If you're reporting your income, everything's good. An audit is fine, and most audits are just about documents. The IRS is like, "Hey, I didn't get this document that said you made this, or here's a charitable contribution you made." A lot of the times they just want to hear from you to confirm something like, let's not be terrified of audits.

Shane:

Yeah. Speaking of which, we are not getting 87,000 armed murderers from the IRS, like the Republicans and TikTokers would like to you to believe. We are getting 30,000 staff over the next two years to help deploy this $80 billion funding. What are your thoughts?

AJ:

Oh my God. I went to the IRS job resources page. This looks like a pretty sweet gig, right? The IRS is going to hire more data scientists than ever. Like, hey, if you're a data scientist fed up with tech, maybe you just got laid off. Maybe your options are worthless. Come on down to the IRS. They've got a cafeteria. They've got onsite childcare. They have some flexibility for telecommuting for working from home, and they have fitness centers. Stay in shape at any of our fitness centers located at more than 25 IRS facilities across the country. There is no membership fee. Yeah, if your job sucks, you're sick of tech, you're sick of this fast-paced nonsense, go work for the IRS. Learn some shit about personal finance. Put those engineering skills to work. I know, the IRS is a recruiter.

Shane:

Yeah, thank you. You're like, I think they need the military recruiters at every small town strip mall ready to sign people up. I mean, you get a pension too. You don't have to do... I mean, it's one of the last few places you get a pension, and I guarantee you they're not working more than 40 hours a week.

AJ:

No way.

Shane:

I work with these people.

AJ:

I mean, they can't. They're government workers. Yeah, they're government workers. That's it. You punch it and you punch out. I mean, it's the IRS.

Shane:

You can't get emails on your cellphone.

AJ:

Right, you literally can't.

Shane:

How much is that worth to you? How much is that worth to you? To me, that's worth a lot of money.

AJ:

Is the IRS the new Google in terms of employee benefits?

Shane:

You got it, sister. All right. This has been episode 89 of the Liquidity Event. Thank you to our listeners. Feel free to leave us a voicemail at memo.fm/liquidityevent. We'll play it on the air. Show notes are available at brooklynfi.com/episode89. Thank you.

AJ:

Bye.

Presenter:

Thanks for listening to the Liquidity Event, hosted by AJ and Shane of Brooklyn Fi. Head on over to brooklynfi.com where you can subscribe to the podcast or YouTube channel, or if you want to learn about their full service, financial planning, tax and investment firm, specializing in tech professionals and creatives on the path to financial independence. We'll see you next time on the Liquidity Event.