406: FTX Scams, Losses, Theft and More | Must Know Tax Information.

This was your life savings is a huge part of your retirement plan here.

There's this situation going on, the crypto markets, you know, and some of you

have had some big losses this year.

There's been some big news came out of course, FTX most recently looks like there may be some fraud involved. We get into that.

You're going to want to get some good tax advice this coming spring before you file your tax return for 2022.

What type of tax position are you going to have on that? Maybe you've been a Voyager, Blockfi or Celsius. Blockfi is on the verge of bankruptcy apparently.

Welcome everybody to the this week's episode of the Main Street Business podcast. Some of you may be first time listeners looking at this topic of two tax lawyers. They're going to have a good answer for me on this experience you might be having with FTX or Voyager. My name is Mark Kohler, I am a tax lawyer and I'm here with the infamous Matt Sorenson. We love to help our small business owners around the country and today we're going to tackle this lost topic.

But here there's this situation going on, the crypto markets, you know, and there's been some big news came out of course FTX the most recently looks like there may be some fraud involved. We'll get into that. What type of tax position are you going to have on that? Maybe you've been at Voyager or Blockfi or Celsius. Blockfi is on the verge of bankruptcy, apparently all these companies, many of you may be familiar with. We're going to dig into some of the tax loss issues that we know. But we do have two clear guidelines are going to be really helpful to you thinking about tax losses and how you can maybe get a little silver lining out of this, maybe a little tax loss if you're in one of these scenarios. We're going to run through here that are very popular. I think many of you can fall into one of these and we want

to make sure that as a disclaimer here, all of you are going to maybe have a. Not all of you, there can't be 10,000 options. But there's a lot of different variables in this and some, many of you, it's going to be critical that you meet with your accountant. You're not going to be knocking this out on TurboTax Tax. You're going to want to get some good tax advice this coming spring before you file your tax return for 2022 and everybody's a little different. Okay, Matt Tell us something. Let's do some easy ones. Can we come out of the gate? Let's do some clear black and white. And I want to tell the.

Let's do some of the easy ones. Yeah, yeah, let's, let's do the easy one. That applies to a lot of people. And this is maybe you were in Voyager Celsius Lockfi and you were basically had crypto on one of these platforms and you and you were getting yield.

This is the easy one for you. This was like 10 steps down the

road for me because it's easy.

Okay, all right, so your yield, you're getting yield. Okay, this is you yield folks out there. Okay, yeah.

Now this is important, this is a really important distinction because how, what you actually own. You have to know what, what was my investment? Did I just have crypto somewhere that it was sitting there? Did I lend the crypto out? Which is a different type of thing. So if I lent the crypto out, this is what most people are doing at Voyager high yield, Celsius blockfi, you're essentially lending your crypto out. You're getting yield. That's a loan. And the most practitioners, Mark and I included, are like, you know what? That's going to be considered a non business bad debt loss. Now we're going to go into how this, you calculate that and determine it, Mark. I mean the first one is if I was lending out my crypto for yield and now I'm not going to get that crypto back or it's in question, I'm going to be thinking of non business bad debt loss, which essentially is a short term capital loss that you're going to get. It's going to go on your 1040. There's a process for it. That's your lane you're looking at.

Okay, let's write down lane number one. For some of you on this podcast here, I've got a non business bad debt, bad debt because I was seeking yield. Now by the way people, in order to prove you had a non business bad debt, you better been claiming the yield. See a lot. We were crypto tax summit twice this year and people are like, you mean I have to claim that yield the day I earn it? I didn't even convert it to USD or I didn't even take that token and I didn't have access to it. See, everybody wants their cake and eat it too. I'm getting yield, but I don't pay tax until I take the yield I received and actually take possession of it. Oh, but I Lost it. Now I want to write off. Well, what the hell, you can't. So. So if you want this non business bad debt expense, we're going to be hoping you've been claiming the yield all along and you've been not trying to play some game of oh, my yields out there in some, you know, wallet that I haven't actually taken possession of yet. You know, that's not going to cut it. Yeah.

Okay, now remember, the, the dollar amount of this loss, though, is the. The basis your purchase price of the crypto. So if you bought this crypto, let's say for $10,000 and it went up to 50 at some point, now it's back down to 10 or it's at 15 or whatever. Like your loss is not the value it's at now. The value it was up at when you lent it. Your value is you bought it.

Okay, now let's. I'm going to be more clear on this too. Let's say you bought this, you had $10,000 of some token. You lent it to Voyager in their yield program.

Yeah.

Okay, now they were paying you yield, people. And so. Matt, I know what someone's thinking out there. Well, I bought that token for 10,000, but it was worth 20 or 30, and I was getting yield, and I had this yield sitting over here of five grand. So I get to write off what it was worth plus my yield sitting over there. Did you claim that yield as income? Because if you didn't, you didn't really receive it. You can't write off something you didn't receive and claim as income. Well, all that yield was over there. I lost it. You didn't even claim it as income. It wasn't yours yet. See, in three months ago at our conference, you were telling me you couldn't claim it as income because you didn't have access to it and you hadn't put it in your personal wallet yet. So you were trying to put it off, not claiming it as income, but now you want to claim it as a loss cake and eat it too. Same thing.

Yeah. So what do you guys are already dying over here? They're like, dude, throw me a bone. I've lost some crypto here, man.

You're like, I know I've been a little tough, but I'm sorry, I'm just being. It's so easy to be selective. You want to hear what sounds good and ignore what doesn't sound good. So, okay, but for you, here's the.

Yeah, you got to take the tax bad with the Tax good.

Yep. So here's the good news that Matt's talking about because we got worse news. If you are in a yield situation, at least your beginning basis of what you started with or had claimed as income along the way, whatever that basis is, is going to be a write off as a non business bad debt. Most CPAs agree with that. There's a great article in Forbes on this. So if you were in a yield program in any of these exchanges, you've got some hope there. Okay, now let's go to number by the way. We're gonna talk about someone stealing your nft, stealing your crypto, hacking your account. We're gonna come to that, we're gonna talk now. I wanted to move to bankruptcy, but Matt, go ahead.

Let me just say the one last thing on this non business bad debt loss is it has to be deemed worthless. Okay, so like Voyager, I don't know how far along they're in the bankruptcy, but they're not very far, you know, and so you have to know is this totally worthless or not? Or what is the loss? Like am I going to get 10 cents on the dollar back? You know, am I going to get some recovery? So there's going to be a wait and see period. Because you got to know what the loss is before you can actually take it. It has to be essentially realized, you know it's worthless or you know it's going to be 10 cents on the dollar, whatever it may be.

Yeah, now that's point to bankruptcy and that's a great lead into it. Some of you are like, well they're in bankruptcy now my crypto's gone. Is it? We don't know. I mean these exchanges had assets and we've got to somehow make sure that we understand what's happening with that bankruptcy. You may get some pennies on the dollar. So here's the hard part. Whether you were in the yield program or not, whether or not you just had some tokens or currency in this exchange, if, if these exchanges go into bankruptcy, you're in a holding period, you're waiting because we don't know what your ultimate loss is going to be yet until that point. So the loss you are going to take is going to certainly be next year in 2023, not on your 2022 tax return. Then once we know what the bankruptcy says, which category were you? Were you a yield person? Were you I got ripped off person? Were I? Did I just lose my money person? And then your personal situation is going to play into how you put it on your tax return. The good thing is bankruptcy trustees don't take forever. They're very motivated to get this result. They actually are. But. Thoughts on bankruptcy, Matt?

Yeah. Now this is, this is tough because there might be people that it's just, it was just a bad business. There's a loss. You didn't, you weren't in a yield program, so you didn't have a loan. Right. And I'm not getting anything.

Yeah.

Now there's ftx. Right. There's FTX going on right now. Where good old sbf, Sandbank and fraud freed. Sorry. But good old, good old spf, you know, he's, I mean, it's alleged that he stole, you know, basically took billions of customer funds, funneled them over to his own trading company, which was having losses, and, and then he had more losses and now people's money's missing. If that's the case and you had fraud, we got a different scenario, though.

Okay.

Wow.

Now you're going to number three. Okay.

Oh, I didn't know you were digging in on too. Because there was like.

No, I didn't know. No, I just wondered. I just wondered if you had a thought or two on bankruptcy, Matt and I have had clients over the years that go into bankruptcy themselves or are creditors in a bankruptcy where you're sitting around going, what am I going to get out of this? And so the one thing I would remind. I'm going to just say it. There's different types of bankruptcies. Some bankruptcies are a reorganization. Voyager may come out of this and in then, then you have a whole.

They're in. Is a reorg. Right. They're in a chapter 11 reorg.

Yeah. And so in a reorg, a bankruptcy trustee's job is to say, hey, your money may not be gone. It's just here's how much you're going to have or not or we don't know, but the company's going to live on in a Chapter seven. It's over. There's nothing.

Yeah.

And so let me give an example of this. Let's say you own Microsoft stock. And these exchanges are different. You didn't have stock in Voyager. You had money Voyager was holding. And that's different. You're a creditor because you're a customer. Yeah. You're in a different position. But let's say I have stock in Microsoft and maybe you're a supplier to Microsoft. There's two people at the table. There's someone over here that says, I sell computer chips to Microsoft and they Owe me money. And then I'm a stockholder of Microsoft. And Microsoft goes into bankruptcy, and they can't reorg out of it. There's no light at the end of the tunnel. The bankruptcy judge says, this company's done. So they take all the assets and they start giving away those assets in an order of priority. And the supplier that's owed money may get money before you as a shareholder. They're going to have to settle all the debts. And there's different levels, and it's very complex. I mean, there's specialists, there's bankruptcy courts, bankruptcy judges, and bankruptcy attorneys that fight through this every day around America. So I'm not. But I'm just saying there's a process, and it takes time. And what the shareholder gets at the end of the day may be very different than what that supplier gets. Well, right now, in a Voyager bankruptcy, where are you at as a class? Are you a creditor? Are you here, are your customer, or there? And so the judge, the bankruptcy trustee and judge, they're trying to figure out, what are we going to do? What's here?

Priority of claims is what they call it. They do a priority of claims. And as a customer whose funds are missing, you're going to be at the. You're going to be at the top of that priority.

That's right.

For someone Voyager took a loan from before, a supplier they owe money to before their stockholders before, you're actually going to be at the top. We just don't know how much is even at the top. Like, we'll see. We'll see.

Yeah, we'll see. Okay, hopefully there's good news. Now, Matt brings up after. Now, you may say I was scammed or ripped off. Now, I've been on a bunch of Twitter spaces. I'm seeing the chatter out there. There's a lot of people that. It's easy to say SBF ripped me off. Okay, he may have been an idiot, but there's a line between stupidity and ripoff. And the IRS code is very clear about this. So let's let me get another example. Some of you may have seen. Oh, my gosh, what was the movie where they're driving the little Minis and they steal all the gold. Oh, what was that? Jack was just saying it the other. Just a minute ago before he.

Italian Job.

The Italian Job. All right, everybody remember Italian Job? I think. Wasn't Mark Wahlberg. Wahlberg was in that.

Okay, yeah.

So in the Italian Job, they went into this guy's house and stole all of his gold. They stole his gold. He had a gold bars. It loaded up all these Minis driving through the house. Pretty cool. Does that guy get a tax write off? They stole his gold. That was an investment for him. Well, under the new tax code where we're trying to. This is tax cuts and jobs Act a few years ago just passed. There is no longer a write off for a personal casualty theft. They stole his gold. There's no write off for that. That's a big deal. That used to be an itemized deduction if someone ripped off your fridge, your tv, your gold. Well, in this situation where you have crypto, and I've had a lot of clients that, they've had their wallets hacked, their secret code phrase was compromised and their crypto was stolen and they call up and go, do I get a write off for that? I got that stolen right now under the code. That is not a write off. Now what CPAs and what you're seeing on, on Google and on chatter is people are saying, well, it's an investment loss. So you're trying to take a theft and morph it into an investment loss. And there's IRS publications on this, IRS revenue rulings, IRS stuff. And there's some windows in there, there's some options. But. But just so all of you know, you got to come from square one, is if it's a theft, fraud, a scam, it's generally not a write off. It's going to be shoehorning this into an investment loss. And some CPAs are like, I'm not going there. And this is where it starts to get gray. Other CPAs are like, let's figure this out. And you could get audited and have to defend your position on this. So, Matt, how do you like to frame this as we go from a theft? And I'm writing this down, just keep my head straight on all this into this investment loss category.

Well, I think this is where the word theft is tricky because the way it's used in the tax code and the way it's used criminally is different. What I like to look at it is, and what I've read is if it's a investment loss, if we can say that, and I might even allege that the guy's gold, they were holding that gold for an investment, you know, if they like stole the guy's Ford Taurus, you know, I was just thinking

of a car, I hope he was driving more than a Ford Taurus. Yeah, all that gold. Come on. What kind of criminal are you?

The Guy that has a lot of gold. They drive Ford Tauruses. Now, they probably drive a. What are they driving?

They weren't driving Minis.

Yeah. So. But I think the biggest one everyone remembers, of course, is Bernie Madoff. Right.

Okay. Now we're getting into a class.

Yeah, okay, now we're getting to a class, but. Okay. People invested money with him and they were hoping for an investment return. Right. And I'm taught. Think, look, think of everyone with their crypto at ftx. Bernie Madoff stole their money and tried to use it for his own company. Lost it. This is the classic.

Yeah.

This is exactly what SBF is alleged to have done. He stole your crypto. So the safe harbor, though, on this that allows you to actually take a loss here in the event of theft says if it's criminal and they are charged criminally. Someone is charged criminally. You're automatically in the game. Whoop.

If you add the word Ponzi scheme. Okay, here's the difference. And Matt and I are. He just needed to add those words. Is that. See, Bernie Madoff, it was a scheme from the beginning. It wasn't like he was doing a good investment plan for everybody. He wasn't lying to anyone. And then one day he just checked out the bank account and went to the Bahamas. What Bernie Madoff did is he created a scheme. There was a Ponzi scheme. And so the IRS has specific revenue rulings and code on this situation. So if you can take that theft and you want investment loss, your first lane that you want to try to get into is it was a Ponzi scheme. It was a scheme from the beginning. Now, if you just lose your keys, you just, you know, someone hacked my wallet. That's a theft. That was not.

Yeah.

Even if they criminally prosecuted someone. Doesn't matter.

Yeah, that's a theft. Yes, it does, because there's a safe harbor that says we will consider. And they say investment scheme. If there is a lead figure that is criminally charged with fraud, theft, embezzlement, then you basically have a safe harbor to claim it if they're criminally charged.

This is where the gray area starts, where even Matt and I start to debate, because there's a lot of interpretation out there on this. And so we have to be an investment.

It has to have been. That asset was an investment asset, essentially, which I crypto, I think, is going to fall into that, deemed that it was stolen. Now, I think the fraud charges are what's going to happen to sbf. That's my thing. He's going to have wire fraud charges. Fraud. I mean how is that not fall into a, like to an investment scheme? But I don't know.

Oh yeah, yeah. I'm not saying, I'm not saying FTX doesn't probably fall into this category so far it appears it does. That this was.

The reporting is true. Yeah, yeah.

If the reporting is true, don't suss people were. Because, because the way I look at it, and here's my interpretation of this, is that it's a scam is different than a theft. It's a scheme, it's a scam. From the beginning you were misled. And so when there's misleading and scam and fraud, that's different than a cold hearted theft by knife or gunpoint or I got a hold of your keys and I just took your stuff and so my position is if I was signing your tax return, is that if you just get it stolen just like you were, heaven forbid, careless or dumb or whatever and someone stole your crypto, I don't see a write off there. But if you were.

Yeah, I, yeah. If like Mark Kohler came and stole Matt Sorensen's crypto, you're right. And that's theft. Mark Kohler could be prosecuted. But you know what, if it's the company that says we're going to keep your crypto safe, we're not going to touch it. You leave it over here with us and then they take it. How is that not an investment scheme?

Agree. Agree. Yeah, agree. And, and, and the more misrepresentation there is, the more of a happening. Yep. And they're taking money from some people and then paying off others. And that's where the Ponzi type pyramid sch.

Or they were paying themselves. That's what this is.

Yeah.

Not others. I mean, I mean anyways.

Yeah, yeah. So, so this is where I'm. Some of you might have a safe harbor. You're going, okay, it was a theft. But oh, there was a scheme, there was a scam, there was fraud misrepresentation and they're going to get prosecuted. And so you want to get into this. There's a revenue ruling on this. There's.

I could start in these 2009 20, 2009 20. That's the SAF harbor on this for this investment loss from a fraud scheme. Ponzi scheme, best scheme.

And I feel bad. I've had family members, very close family members get wallets hacked, whether it was crypto or NFTs or through a pancake swap or this or that. And these hacked, these hacks are not a deduction, but a scheme that caused you to invest with them. And then you were taken advantage of and stolen. The government saying, well, we're going to allow you right off because you're more of a victim of this, this misrepresentation. So that's another category here that some of you might be able to claim again once the bankruptcy flushes out. Because the bankruptcy trustee is going to defer to a criminal prosecution if one comes in too, and then they're going to work together. And that's kind of what happened with Bernie Madoff back in the day. Some of you are too young to remember the millions that he absconded. And the bankruptcy trustee in court is trying to give money out to the victims and the criminal is going after Bernie and his family and his son commits suicide. Oh my gosh. It was just. Terrible story. There's a great movie. I like the Robert Dairo version, not the Richard Dris version.

Okay. They were both good. I, I liked them both.

Yeah, they're both good. But I think, yeah, if, you know,

if you're that big of a villain, you had two movies made about you. One with Richard Trifus and Robert Dairo. Man, you made your mark on the world.

I think Michelle Pfeiffer was the wife. Robert De Niro too. Yeah, yeah, she was. She was so good because she was just like, what the. She had no idea what her husband was up to. It was just so many people disagreed

with that, that, that she knew more. She certainly lived off of it. But.

Yeah.

Well, here on this one though, if you're able to get this one we're talking about here, this is a schedule A loss, right?

Yes. Help.

You've got to itemize. That's better than. I like that. This is good. I mean, we hate that you were a victim of fraud or embezzlement or you know, but from a tax standpoint, that bumps you up. It gives you a little more valuable loss because if it's on schedule A, you got to itemize, but you get to use it against ordinary income. It's not just a capital loss like the non business bad debt when we were talking about earlier.

Yes. I'll give some forms here. So if you can get into this category of a Ponzi scheme situation, you're going to go through Form 4684 that feeds into the Schedule A and then this is right above your taxable income. This is a really good write off. If you end up with the bad debt loss that Matt was talking about on this yield issue, that's a short term capital loss and is that going to get ordinary treatment? Is that what you've seen? I think it goes into the carry forward of losses and so it's a capital loss and if you don't have enough gains, that's going to be a carry forward situation. But that's my understanding there. So if you have a choice, you want to be over here on the scheme side because it's going to be a much better write off. And some of you goes, well, I was yield but I also got ripped off. We'll go with the ripped off one.

Yeah.

Anyway, okay, so we talked about bankruptcy, fraud, stolen scam. Here's the last thing too, is that, yeah, one other thing too is that at the end of the day there's just basically a write off if your investment goes down to zero. You know, this was kind of more the dogecoin, you know, scenario you own. There was no fraud, there was no theft, there's no, it just went down to a penny or less and you sold it, licked your wounds. That's a capital loss, it's just a loss and you're going to net it against your gains. And at the very end of the day in a lot of these situations, a capital loss is you kind of come out with something that you can sell, then you have another triggering event that shows I bought it for X, sold it for Y, I've got a loss. When it goes down to zero and is gone. That's when the IRS is like, what happened here? Did you get theft? Did you get, what was it? You know, and that's, it's weird.

Yeah. And that's the hard one because I worry that some people might be in a situation where there's just bankruptcy. They weren't in a yield platform, they were just some provider platform, had their crypto and they're like, man, I'm not over here on this fraud loss basically. But here's my opinion on it. I think you are, I think you're going to be an aggressive tax position. But see, when you have your crypto at a provider, take Voyager for example, you either decided to enroll it in a yield platform which you consented to, you agreed to lend them your crypto. When you did that, there's documents you signed, whether you read them or not. That said, I agree to give you this pay me back yield, I'm accepting the risk. You did that and you're in this non business, bad debt loss if you didn't do that, you just have your crypto there and now it's gone or it's frozen or whatever the case may be right now and you don't get it back. Somebody took it. Okay. Voyager didn't have the authority to go take your crypto. They would have had to stolen it or take it. So now we're back into this. Well, then it wasn't that fraud. Can I get back over here?

Well, and in the Voyager, the counter argument, did, did someone really take it? Or they just mismanaged their business, but they can't.

The business, their business funds should have been separate from holding your crypto. They, you know, they didn't. If, if they took your crypto and put it over in their business stuff, then that was fraud. They stole your, they stole your assets. They didn't have authority to do that.

Yeah, and in the. And I'm just.

That's my argument.

Yep. Here's my argument. That's not helpful. Some of you aren't going to like it. But is that was Matt misled? Now Matt may say, yeah, you misled me. You promised me you'd keep my crypto safe. Well, there's the revenue ruling 2009 dash 20 is all about. You were misled by a lot more than just, we're going to keep your money safe. There was a scheme. There was like, you're going to make a bunch of money, come over here, come give us money. And there's kind of this fraud and misrepresentation. Not just a safe keeping promise, but we'll see. We'll see. I think we're going to get. There's going to be some IRS guidance on this for sure. Because so many people were impacted. That's how the Ponzi scheme law came. Yeah. That.

Because of Bernie Mato 9. That dash 20, that is the year 2009. When the IRS published it. It was the 20th revenue ruling they did. That was a year or two after Madoff's.

Yep.

Crap got unraveled.

Yep. It was. This is how legislation happens. Call your congressman. There's a lot of brand, brand new elected, newly elected. How can I say this? There's a lot of newly elected officials in the House of Representatives. Call yours up, say, I want you to sponsor a bill. And they, they'll do that. They'll sponsor a bill and we'll see how it goes.

I like Mark. You're so optimistic. There's these newly elected congressmen. They don't. They're like, so where's my office. They don't know what the hell they're doing. They have zero authority and power. They're going to be like getting coffee for the speaker. They don't know.

Oh my gosh. Okay, well, here's what we're doing now on our show every week. We want to give you guys more resources, more tools and try to help you out in your quest. And I'm going to say this too, one other thing in summary, for what it's worth, and I'm going to shoot a little video more on my social media about this. But for you young people, I know it's really sad. It's like your faith in society and America and everything. You just came off Covid. You've come through this crypto fall this year. The stock market's down. It seems like the sky's falling. Well, I want to, I don't know if this is encouragement, but it's a reality check. Guess what? When I was, I was born. I'm 50 plus years old. I was born in the late 60s, but I remember as a little kid interest rates at 10, 12, 13% or higher. There was lines at the gas station. I remember sitting in a backseat of a car while my mom's in line for gas. And I was just a little kid. And we had the oil embargo and all this stuff, the Iran Contra affairs. We had the stock market crash multiple times. We had Black Monday back in the 80s, we had the dot com bust. We had the real estate crash of 2008. We had Y2K and we had the 911 and there was before that there was the Vietnam War and the Korean War and World War II and everybody, you know crap's going to happen. Don't lose faith. This isn't. This too will pass. Continue to build your wealth. Continue to live and believe in the dream and work hard, but don't lose complete faith in society. I know it's fun to rant and rave on social media a little bit, but get back to work, get on your career, get on your business, start saving money, building wealth. And that's what this podcast is about. If you're still listening, I want to say thank you. Want to give some stuff away, but I just want to tell you, don't give up. We're going to keep plugging along too. And it's not the first time the sky's been falling. Matt, any final words like that?

I don't know. Yeah, man, you got all sentimental there. I had like a little one last tax tip, but I feel like, how can I even give that. Now what I was going to say, Mark went off script there.

Yeah.

And the whole show was off script. But I love that though. I love that your message though. One thing I was just going to note, just because some people are going to ask is IRAs and retirement accounts, you don't take a loss, remember, you don't get a gain either. Now there is if you have a total loss of a total retirement account. There's a weird little exception. I have an article on my website, matt sorensen.com of how you can take a loss action on your ira, but you have to deplete every retirement account had to go to zero. And there, and there's actually, there was a. That thing was created back during the Bertie Madoff years. But what I'll say too is I think this is a lesson for a lot of people. A lot of people still believe in crypto, believe in blockchain and the technology, believe it's the future. But some things get a little too hot and heated and, and we see this in markets and cycles all the time. The real estate market was similar and in 07, 08, in 07 in particular. 08 is, you know, crash late 07, it was on fire. Everyone. You couldn't, like, you could be the dumbest person in the room and you make money in real estate, you know, and crypto kind of felt like that too. And, and a lot of people worried, is this going to happen? And since everybody's making money, everybody gets excited and people stop reading, they stop looking at stuff. I saw these yield platforms and I was like, I would never do it with my crypto. I love the yield and, and not that I'm like any genius, but I'm just like, you know, maybe I'm just like due diligence. Scary lawyer Matt. And my brain came out and is like, wait, am I buying this because I believe in the crypto or am I really going to lend it to someone else who's going to lend it to someone else who's going to go to try to make money on it and hope I get paid back. But I really want that, you know, 8% yield, you know, so, so just be careful. Always realize with high risk, sorry, high return investments like crypto, there's high risk. We're facing some of that high risk. Take that into account as you're reassessing what to invest in crypto, Stan it or not, I know it's tough. Talk to lots of clients over the last six months about this who are trying to reassess and reset, make decisions, but just be analytical about it. There's a lot of emotion probably going right now. Just like there was a lot of emotion on the way up and it's like, bye, bye, bye. So be also analytical on the way down here. Don't do it. Make an emotional move. Try to be analytical about it.

Yeah. And it's funny, you talk about the real estate crash in 2008. Now look where real estate is now. It's pretty much holding strong. There's markets up and down a little bit here and there, but it didn't go away. Real steel, real estate's still worth a lot of money and blockchain technology is amazing. So we're gonna just keep watching, giving away some stuff. So here's our call to action. We're going to be watching our YouTube channel for likes and bell icons. Those that give us a five star review on Google and get to our Main street business platform, itunes. Get over there and give us a five star review. We appreciate it. We are going to draw three winners this week from anybody that gives us a five star review. Gives us a little light, gives us a share, gives us a subscribe will be. We appreciate it and you're really helping spread the word. So if you from those methods of engaging, we're going to choose three winners. We're going to give away some books at the beginning of the show next week and maybe even a ticket to the December 2nd and 3rd event. Coming up, a virtual ticket for year end tax strategy planning. I think a lot of good stuff we're doing this coming year. We're out there trying to help make it happen. So please engage and we'll choose three winners at the beginning of the show next week. Matt, take us out. Any final words?

No thanks everyone. Pleasure being with you. We'll be back next week with more amazing tips and strategies on how to live the American dre.