Everything is a mess right now and I can’t keep up.
Obviously the market gains that I’ve made the past month have come to quickly, and I’m over my head. I spent at least nine hours last night on the computer, downloading wallet transactions and going over them in a spreadsheet, trying to figure out what funds came from dad and the girls, and where they went from there and how much of the yields belong to them. The funny thing is that I don’t actually owe them any of it, but I want to keep track of it to be fair. There has got to be a better way to manage a “family office” like this. There’s got to be software out there that I can use, I sure don’t think I want to roll my own from here, but we’ll see. Using a token set in the future might help.
I wrote the above paragraph early this morning. I think I got distracted somehow, cause at some point I had to step away, and that’s when I found out the news that Tesla added $1.5 billion dollars of bitcoin to it’s balance sheet, sending the price mooning from thirty-eight to forty three in a matter of minutes. I think I lost my shit at one point. I remember rushing upstairs to tell Missus, who was utterly unimpressed with something work-related.
I was a complete wreck by the time I tried to get onto my morning conference call with work. Literally shaking, and almost brought to tears while scrolling Twitter. I signed onto the conference call, did my check-in with as much poise as I could and told Bossmang that I needed to talk to him privately afterward. I told him that I was meeting with a lawyer to draft up papers to transition me from full-time employee to contractor status, and before I signed the paperwork I wanted to make sure he was still cool with it. Not really, he said, but what was he going to do about it.
I started off telling him all that’s been going on, how things have been going better than expected, and how I couldn’t afford to keep moving forward with things the way they are. He understood my position, although his reaction was to ask me if I’d heard of the tulip bubble. Boss, I said, I’ve been in this space for years, of course I’ve heard of the tulip bubble. The conversation moved from there to discussion about what I was going to do in “retirement” and about his plans for the company. I’ve jokingly called it Zombie, LLC in posts here over the years, cause I do think the market here where we’re at is fairly oversaturated. He’s in a franchise agreement for almost two more years, and recently took out a PPP loan. Otherwise he would have gone bankrupt last year. I still think that would have been the better choice, honestly. But I told him that he’s been good to me for the last eight years, and that I wasn’t going to abandon him. I’d finish the projects that I started, and stick around long enough to transition to what’s next. What that’s going to look like, I have no idea.
And then, later today, I met with the lawyers. I wasn’t terribly impressed. I’m going to let them handle my independent contractor contract, but I don’t really feel right about using a lawyer for my crypto that doesn’t hold crypto. I knew the associate lawyer as a client in their previous firm, but this was my first call with one of the actual partners. I asked about their background with crypto, and they said that they had helped with some ICOs and with some individuals that were in my position, and needed to reduce their tax liabilities. I’m not sure they’d really kept up since the 2017 cycle.
We talked through some options, like buying depreciable assets, like a car, for example, gifting to charity, setting up a revocable trust for the kids, and so forth. They mentioned a client that has moved to another jurisdiction (Germany) to reduce their taxable income, and I joked about moving there before the end of next month to qualify for the nine-month exemption. There were a couple other options that we ran through, but nothing really stood out to me as something that I really wanted to pursue. I think moving as much money into a 401k is my best option at this point.
I did do some further research afterward, but I’m still trying to process it. There are too many moving factors right now, and today has been exhausting. I know a lot of people are interested in strategies to save on taxes, and I think the steps I’m taking right now are the best I can do for now. If my wife and I can reduce our income to less than $80k then we can take advantage of the zero percent rate on long-term gains, but that might be the best I can do. Right now my Badger yield farming is making more in a week than I take home in month, although as long as I leave that unclaimed I suppose I could let that accumulate for a year.
The bottom line is that I’m going to need to take a look at several tax services to see how well they can track defi farming. I can probably get away with reducing the income on some of the recent activities that I’ve done since it’s mostly been a wash, but I need to think real hard about what I want to do with my Badger gains. It’s tough.