”Salting Your Retirement Funds With Crypto, Tax Free” by Eric Tastet

• Eric grew up in a single household – at times with mother and at times with father, quite a poor background.
• I ended up going to a seminary, became a pastor, planted a church, but took a break to give full attention to entrepreneurship.
• I learned financial management, but not financial strategies.
• I’ve had a window washing company, a pressure washing company, wedding venue business, among others.
• I started searching the market on cryptocurrency in 2017-2018, and that’s where I am.
• When you are pastoring, you are not looking for money; but I was entrepreneurial even while a pastor to supplement my income, leading to learning about self-directed IRAs.

Collective Influence Group

• This was started by 2 men I was in (Bible) college with.
• Within 2 years, they started the company, “Impacting others”, hence initiatives such as clean water initiatives, orphanages, and Christian media radio. They buy companies, build them, and sell them.
• Collective Influence is a private equity firm that has 15 -16 different companies in it. But the main goal is self-directed investment, especially as people become more educated on their personal finances. Self-directed investment frees people from investing through institutionalized processes. If we can release people from this “institutionalism”, we will have succeeded.

Tax Free Crypto – one of the companies that Collective Influence has acquired.

• Tax Free and Retirement Accounts: I started with Roth IRAs while a pastor. I chose the fund. I thought this was self-directing but realized it was self-managing.
• Analogy: we are good when it comes to self-directing our consumption, but it’s not the case when it comes to investment. One needs full control of where their money goes.
• So instead of being given choices by someone else, I make a choice of where to invest and how.
• Consider the case of the bank, who takes my money and makes money from my money, and I do not get a dime from the money they make from my money. They hand over a circa!!
• But I want to self-direct my money; so, if I had accumulated some money, rolled it over to a self-directed IRA, got a deal, gave a company some credit, and got an 18% return over a 6-month period, I would have thought it was fantastic.
• This is the kind of a thing that Mitt Romney did: he made about 13 different moves out of his Roth IRA and accumulated about $100M; How the hell did he achieve this? What is good about a tax-free IRA is that there is no limit to your gain.
• If you self-direct on the promissory note, then you can gain as much. He gave a high debt to private equity.
• Crypto currency is an asset.
• So, if one gets a paycheck and contributes to their retirement benefit, they can’t do anything with their contribution until they are old enough to withdraw the money. But if this was released to a private equity, it is possible to buy real estate or other investments, or a rental property.

Crypto and risk

• People make a mistake by equating volatility to risk, which are probably within the same meaning range but different concepts.
• The same number of people buying and selling crypto currency presently is the same number of people who were using internet in 1997, i.e., 130mil people globally. Today, the internet is the main thing.
• Bitcoin was invented in 2009, 14 years ago. The adoption rate trajectory is exactly the same with the internet in 1997.
• Many people did not understand the internet those early days, so they abandoned it, but there are others who jumped in, and they are the market leaders today. So, it pays not to make same mistakes of ignoring an opportunity simply because one does not understand the crypto world.
• Crypto currency is an opportunity. It is an asset. The block chain — which was started for the pur