Think about your retirement to late, never too soon, but in what way? And how do you diversify? I have the top expert here right now who is telling us about a different way to think about your retirement. Welcome to the show, Chris Klein. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Well, I'm glad that you are here because this is something that interests me personally. Because sooner or later we're all going to retire, but some smart and some not so smart. And you give very wise, yeah, should I say, you're giving a very wise insight on how to diversify how we think about retirement, how to invest in it, tell us about what's currently going wrong and what are you rectifying? How are you doing it? Yeah, so absolutely. So I mean, we're in here in the United States. We are in a retirement crisis. And it's driven by, I think it starts with mindset. We have a pretty solid financial literacy gap in our country today. They teach us, you know, Pythagorean theorem, A squared, B squared, C squared. We all memorize that, but most folks don't understand what an IRA is or a retirement savings plan or how taxes even work by the time they get out of high school. And even in college, I went to business school at the University of Colorado and we didn't dive into a lot of the personal finance things. It was business finance things. And so you have that first layer of financial literacy. And then there's this apathy because it feels like it's a mountain that's too heavy to climb. You know, it's just so steep. Right now, 50% of Americans do not participate in a retirement platform, which is, or any type of program, which is terrifying when you think about it because we all are going to get old, right? At some point, we're not going to be able to work anymore. At the same time, those that are near retirement, about a third of them feel like they're not going to, they're going to outlast their money. They're going to run out of money before they pass away. We're getting older every day. I think it's about 11 to 15,000 Americans are turning 65 every single day. So you have all these put together. And Northwest Mitchell did this really interesting study back right before COVID 2019. They asked about 20,000 Americans, how much do you think you need to retire comfortably? And the number that came up was $550,000, which is a pretty serenable, like that's a pretty sizable amount already. They re-did this survey with the same folks about a year ago, after COVID and after everything. And the number is a staggering 1.8 million now that people think they need to retire comfortably. And that comes to the core of rising costs for everything. So we're at this point where even people that are close to retirement, maybe people that are in there 20 to 30 years before retirement, the generation, I guess I consider myself, I'm not a millennial, but I'm 1985, so they consider me one, but I call myself a Gen X, like the lost generation in between. And then younger than myself and my daughter's age, that even the concept of putting aside $200 a month in your 401k or your IRA, with all the other bills you have, student loans, those types of things, you're really kind of trapped in this, well, damned if I do, damned if I don't, right, you're just boxed in. And that's really where a lot of folks are sitting. In Americans, we tend to do this thing where when it's uncomfortable, we just brush it under the rug and forget about it, it'll solve itself later. And then later comes, and it becomes an even more unsurronable problem. Where's the government coming in on all this? Tokenization, blockchain, what do you think is happening? Is it a too late? I think there's time still, I think there's time. What we did, and what we focused on at Bitcoin IRA, was our mission was to help more Americans retire. So we didn't just, I don't still get up on the soapbox and say, oh my god, this guy is following. We tried to put action behind the words. And so we built 10 years ago, we started the first Bitcoin retirement plan. And it allows folks, because this isn't my grandfather's economy. My grandfather was able to buy GE and a handful of stocks, hold them for 50 years, get the dividends, get his pension from here and walk her, get us some social security checks, and he had a comfortable retirement. He did well for himself. Both my grandparents did, or grandfather's and both my grandmother's were, it was the 50, so it was different, right? Then it is today. But you fast forward to where we're at today. And most of the generation, we need this, what it's called, a modern portfolio theory. You can't just rely on stocks, holding US dollars for interest in a bank account for years, compounding interest. Well, great, thank you Warren Buffett and Charlie. It doesn't really work in the modern economy. You need a modern portfolio. And that includes alternatives. And alternatives can be gold or silver, real estate, private equity. But what didn't exist yet was Bitcoin or crypto at the time. So the challenge came across our desk, could this be done? And we'd already had a few years of experience in self-directed IRA. So we said, well, we'll take a crack at this. And this was 2016. So Bitcoin was about $175, $200 per Bitcoin. And some of our early adopters are thrilled, right? Now we're charging past $110, $120,000. Our goal was to just really empower folks to look at this as a different emerging asset class and have access to it. We were able to use the tools the government already gave us in the 1970s. The government gave us IRAs in order to save funds for tax advantage settings and for long-term investing holds. So we used that structure, got all the same tax advantages. But we just were able to build in a solution for them to bring cryptocurrency into the space. And now we're, I think, just under 200,000 users and about 14 billion with a B, an asset under custody today. So we, it's obviously grown over the years. We're not just some kind of startup dreaming about this concept. We've helped really try to help Americans retire and be that, you know, that starting point where modern retirement investment begins. So in what way is, so decentralized assets and what way is it changing how people proceed financial security? That's a great question. So decentralization takes us away from the centralized world. And I think one of the things common people commonly ask is, well, when did, I get this all the time, especially coming up at Thanksgiving dinner, et cetera, is when, when did the American dream break and why did it break? And I always, I always go back to 1971 in the, the Nixon shock. And we actually just celebrated, I think, like the four-year anniversary of this, where up until that point, historically, the US dollar that we know it was backed by physical golds that's stored at the Federal Reserve report knocks. And in that moment, the, there was so many nations that were about to call in their debts, bring us dollars to get their gold back, the French in particular, that Nixon, the president was in this box. He was like, oh, what am I supposed to do? And he shocked the world and said, the US dollar is no longer convertible to gold, which basically meant it was no longer backed by gold. So now you couldn't go to the bank and put a hundred dollar bill and get out a hundred dollars worth of gold or silver. Like there was no interchangeability. That moment, if you look at almost every single chart of finance, socioeconomics, everything, and you're pretty well, well versed across, like you said, you're 10 miles long. If you look at every single one of those charts, if you look around 1971, everything is up and to the right. And most importantly, is monetary supply, the amount of money we pumped into the system. And it's, and it's gotten, we did, in my lifetime, the 90s stock market crash, the global, 2001 after 9-11, the 08 housing crisis, COVID, post-COVID. So these are all places where we're just basically printing money out of thin air. And who hurts the most from that is the American consumer. That's why everything feels more expensive, whether it's eggs, houses, higher education, cars, everything feels more expensive because we've basically injected money in. That breaks the American dream. I'm just turned 40 and I'm one of the few that I feel like might have pulled off, but it used to be a house, a white picket fence, and two and a half kids, right? That was the American dream in retiring, comfortably at 65. It's a tough world out there for anybody in our generation of, we're just kind of every few years we have another crisis, you know, like they say millennials, we're so immune to crisis anymore. You tell us there's a crisis, we're like, oh, another one, great. And that's really where I think the dream broke is that we mismanaged our money. And that is where people are losing faith in the government. It's ability to manage money. It's every time we turn the corner, it's, oh, we've got to pay. We're going to put a more stimulus here. We got to buy more bonds here or we have to fix this debt or bail out this corporation or this sector. And Americans are kind of getting fatigued from the whole thing. So that's where Bitcoin is kind of this beacon on a hill, a shining light because it's scarce. There are only 21 million Bitcoin that'll ever be created. Well, that is the interesting part because that is when people are asking me about crypto. I said, well, at least with crypto, we know with Bitcoin how many exists with gold. I never know whether, if they find more. So the value is fluctuating with Bitcoin. There's actually a set number and more and more people are losing their passwords. So they actually don't have access anymore. So actually, the supply is shrinking. The demand is getting greater. That's kind of, and that's something that we're not used to. We've lived in this world of abundance. Yes. And this is a world of scarcity. I always say we're kind of we're shifting from commas to decimal points. So we've been doing commas for my whole lifetime. I remember when I was a kid, man, if I could just make $100,000 a year, I'd be wealthy. That was the mentality. And now when I get to my 20s, there's a lot. I need to make a million dollars a year. And then once you do that, you're like, well, after government uncle Sam takes his half, you're like, well, I guess I need to make $5 million a year to feel wealthy, if you're comfortable. And it's because there's so much money and supply. If you take the average house is $420,000, medium home price. If you took that five years ago, in terms of Bitcoin, it was about seven or eight Bitcoin. Today, it's just around just about four. So if you think in terms of Bitcoin, things are going down in price. If you think in terms of dollar, things are going up in price. And we're about to hit this critical mass point between the two. It's not, you know, a lot of people, you'll have conversations. I know like it Thanksgiving and Christmas about red versus blue Republicans. That's not the argument that really matters for Americans. They want us to believe that's what matters. I think it's an argument of orange versus green. As stable money, store value, limited outside the control of five guys sitting in the Federal Reserve deciding how much we're going to make this year and what rates are going to be. And it's consensus driven, stable money, which is Bitcoin. And then from Bitcoin, there's been these offsets, offsuits of Ethereum, XRP. And they all have utility. But really, I think the big daddy of them all is Bitcoin as that stable money that you'll see is even more stable than gold over years over the years. That's why Bitcoin is part of your company name. Yeah. Well, it was the only one around. In 2016, 2015, when we built it, there was only Bitcoin. All the other ones have come since. So where did that OG is what I always say? You were in early in the game. I had no gray hairs when we started. It's all those bear markets and that 12 year old daughter of mine. Oh, that's fantastic. But also that you are now diversifying, obviously, within this new game of crypto, where you're saying, okay, we're not going to be like going all in on one. But we're going to observe the market. So how do you make the assessments? Okay. So there's this coin going on, this new one just launched. This one is getting more traction. So how do you make a decision where to invest in for your clients? We start because we listen to our class customers. So we have 200,000. I have close ones. The rocket Ron is out of Florida. He was a former NASA scientist. He did the heat shields for the space shuttle. He was a client back. He's number 11. He's very proud to call himself number 11. They 11th client are big one, IRA. And so he's him and among others, I call my engineers. You know, we were talking about former Intel AI guys. They will tell us, hey, I'm really interested in this project or this project. And we'll go through with a very, so we're not just kind of like a exchange, like you think of a coin base. We're actually a fully integrated trust and regulated solution. So we're regulated by the state and Nevada FID. And we have a robust compliance compartment. We're audited, sock two, insured all those things. And so we have a robust team where I'll go to the operations officer and to the compliance officer and say, here's what this last quarter clients are asking for. And we'll evaluate a few big things. A, what's their 24 hour volume? Because there's a lot, well, you find a lot with just like any like penny stocks and things like that is there's a lot of volume, but it's concentrated in one place. And one person sells off and the coin's gone, right? Then you also look at what's what's their ability to fill market orders. Because if they constantly have slippage, so the price is constantly moving, whether it's pennies or fractions of a penny, that's very frustrating for clients. And then we look at can it be stored securely? One of our big tendencies, we started with security first. We're trying to change the world in a really crazy way. We're putting crypto inside of retirement. That's the holy grail. So we have to really invest in security. We have cold storage solutions, partners at BICCO, are actually insured up to $250 million per wallet for any instance. I think that's important because how many people had their wallet wiped out? Yes, exactly. So this is still something that I think is on people's mind that saying, I'm very intrigued by that. I want to diversify my portfolio, but I want to make sure it's safe. And so that's where you come in. Exactly. You check that box. Yeah, because with self custody, which is, I've done it myself, it's actually really kind of difficult. It's these ledger devices to go cold storage, they're very small and you've got to remember the key, you've got to store the key, you've got to break the key apart. There's all these moving parts to it and people will lose their keys, they'll lose the devices or they'll stay on an exchange. They'll put $100,000 a Bitcoin on Coinbase or Kraken and we are our greatest weakness. If we get Sim swapped or our email gets hacked, then those hackers know right where to go, they're going to match that pass with your Coinbase and they're going to empty you out before you even wake up to have your Cheerios in the morning. It's that fast. It's crazy. And so what we've done is we've taken just like with any other retirement asset, you have to have it at an arm's length distance from you. So a fiduciary has to hold the assets like the stocks, the bonds, the mutual funds, the cash. It's an account that's aside from your personal accounts. So we do what we do direct custody where we have multiple keys, all this insurance around it, I call it the Pentagon of custody, which allows all these layers of security protecting you from your account and then the connection between the wallet and the exchange is completely broken. So there's never a chance even if somebody got into your account, they wouldn't be able to take your Bitcoin because of the layers that we put between yourself and the crypto. That helps us with IRS fulfillment for the regulations at the tax advantage and also helps you sleep well at night knowing, hey, I've got my crypto and then let's not forget, we all pass away at some point, right? And sometimes it's tragic and quick and sometimes we have a long fulfilled life. But at some point you want to hand those crypto down to your wife or your husband or your kids and do they know how to use those things? And if you and if your will gets compromised from your lawyer, say your law firm that you put it with or the estate firm is their documents get compromised, your your your past key can't be sitting there. So we set it up where you have beneficiaries. So all they have to do is bring in, hey, grandpa Joe passed, here's his death certificate, we need to follow the his rules of 50% goes to grandma, 50% goes to mom, dad, however he broke it down, just like any other account. And that makes you hope to kind of sleep well at night knowing, you know, there's this story, I think it's in Jersey where a wife found one of those ledger devices and thought it was like an old USB drive and threw it away. And it had like 25 at that time, 25 million worth of Bitcoin on it. The guy bought the trash dump where the where it ended up at and has been searching for like five years for this device because I mean to him, it was worth it was like, I'm going to find this 20 because I think it now is probably maybe even a hundred million dollars worth. And he just recently gave up because it just couldn't be found. And that those are the things that you don't want to worry about when you get into crypto investing. And really the bridge we try to, the gap we try to bridge is yes, it's new, it's fresh, it's kind of scary technology, but it can be just as easy as click, click, click and secure. Yeah, it seems like back then when people were scared of the internet. Oh, yeah. And also in the beginning when you don't know much about it is same with AI. Yeah, yeah. You know, well, we got to look at the good and the bad but still use it, use it to our benefit. Absolutely. I think the benefits are fantastic at least for people to also dive into it, take control, get educated as always the best. And I love that you are educating me on this because I learned a lot just through this interview. So I'm sure audience audience will as well. Yeah. And don't forget in the time of this interview, the US government probably printed 21 million dollars of money. That's how fast they printed. And there's only 21 million Bitcoin that ever exist. And if you can keep that at the core and actually you and I won't maybe my daughter, I don't know how old your kids are, will live to see the last Bitcoin mine. It'll be sometime in 2140. So this is a process that gets slower and slower and slower as we get to the finish line. And we're about to hit that supply element where people are going to say there's not enough Bitcoin to go around to have one Bitcoin could be life changing. I personally set a mark in April of Bitcoin hitting 180,000 this year. And I'm still bullish to get that will get that by years. And there's a lot of folks like sailor, scaramucci, another major players out there. Calling for by 2035 a million dollar big because of that scarcity. So it's getting off zero. You don't put all your eggs in one basket, right? But getting some exposure to crypto, especially Bitcoin, your future self will be very happy with you. I would love to have you back in the not to distant future to see what has happened. Absolutely. And so then to see where the market has been going and where the crypto has been going. Definitely, it's now something is becoming more mainstream. People should just dive into it, read about it. I make my kids 9 and 13 read about it. And yeah, thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely. Thanks for having us. Absolutely pleasure. Thank you so much. Join us again next time.
