Uncompensated Risk in Investing

Since the new year began, my investing portfolio is looking rather basic and boring – and I love it! If you happened upon my last post on tax loss harvesting, you know that towards the end of 2022 I unloaded my position in a lot of hand-picked stocks (where I was in the red) to offset some taxes I was going to be paying from a real estate syndication that cashed out late last year. Truth be told, I have a slight degree of remorse about selling off the several hundreds of shares of Tesla that I owned – as it has rebounded/recovered rather quickly since then. Regardless, essentially, I have nothing but a couple of index funds (i.e. VTI and VXF) and a couple of stocks (i.e. COST and BRK.B) remaining that I stayed profitable in. In that simplicity, I have found I have a lot less stress about the going ons in the market day-to-day, and I feel strongly resolved to stay this course and filter out the noise and temptations of following grifters that make promises of higher returns and unfathomable riches.

As of writing this post, the current rate of inflation in the United States is a 6.4%. Taking on some degree of risk is essential if we hope to grow our money in a way that combats the toll inflation takes on our hard earned dollars. I first learned about the concept of ‘uncompensated risk‘ on the White Coat Investor blog. Basically he says that when we make an investment, a compensated risk will provide us a reasonable expected (but not guaranteed) return. However, in an uncompensated risk scenario, we take on additional risk without an increase (and in many cases, a decrease) in the generated returns.

I do not profess to be an expert at any of this. A disclaimer that I consistently make is to consult professionals for financial advice, as I am a mere pediatric dentist that is trying to figure out his footing on the path to financial independence. I have tripped and stumbled countless times along the way, and fallen flat on my face (e.g. Celsius and the whole crypto fiasco) in many instances as well.

There is a lot that goes into investing that I really only know a small (more like minute) fraction about. Lots of economic indicators and trends to look at e.g. jobs reports and unemployment, consumer confidence indices (CCI), etc. Changes in interest rates, geopolitical events, and macroeconomic factors (e.g. inflation, recession) drive the markets performance. Savvy investors have all kinds of sophisticated software to give them real-time market data, research reports, and analytical tools. And for those people that have the time to commit, the advanced training and education, along with the temperament to endure the volatile nature of the stock market day-to-day; more power to them.

For anyone average like myself; who work for a living, limited hours in the day to commit to much else, just trying to set aside some kind of nest egg for the future – taking on uncompensated risk investments really can be quite a dangerous setback. The key is diversification in your portfolio of investments. I hope we all know by now never to put all your eggs in one basket. The one saving grace for me has been that all my ‘speculative’ investing has been limited to 5-10% of my overall portfolio. My crazy crypto experience with Celsius Network (where potentially I stand to lose everything), my uncertain venture into real estate syndications (which fortunately has partially and profitably paid out) – it’s all been a bit of a wash, but I cap it all within a small percentage of my total asset allocation.

“Invest in what you know…and nothing more.”
Warren Buffet

For those that have read my blog, one of my previous posts talks about my love for watching some late night comedy bits to start my day. There was an interview recently on The Daily Show where Hasan Minhaj debated Kevin O’Leary (from Shark Tank) and essentially called him out on being a (paid) spokesperson for the recently failed FTX crypto exchange. About midway through the interview, Minhaj makes the point (around the 17:45 min mark) that most retail investors would be better off investing in boring Vanguard S&P 500 index funds versus trying to time the market and chase the trends that influencers make us believe was their formula for success. It resonates with me on a personal level since I so foolishly followed the same preaching’s of a similar conman by the name of Alex Mashinsky of the Celsius Network. The other point being that social media nowadays has made it so (dangerously) easy for grifters giving the illusion that millions can be made effortlessly simply by doing as they do.

The performance of the U.S. stock market overall, dating back to the 1920s, has provided an annualized average return of around 11.88% since its 1957 inception (according to Investopedia). After factoring in inflation, it runs somewhere around the 8-9%. That’s pretty darn good. If we put money into any one stock its the equivalent of putting it all on black (my attempt at a roulette metaphor in case you missed it) – that is uncompensated risk. I am willing to designate a small piece of that to certain companies and real estate deals (preferably REITs) that I think may, in the long-term, be worthwhile; but a vast majority of my investing endeavors from here on out will be in the slow and steady S&P500 index funds.

Wishing you all the best in your journey! Thank you all for visiting this site and spending some time to read through this post!

Tax Loss Harvesting

investing, Lifestyle

First off, Happy New Year to you all! When I reflect over the past year, certainly the Celsius crypto scam I endured and a private equity company taking over the office I work at were both big ticket items. While both matters still strike a chord with me, time has helped me not feel quite so overwhelmed by them. In terms of the Celsius fiasco, the Chapter 11 bankruptcy is still underway; but what has helped me cope is giving up on any expectations of seeing any of that money returned to us. The feelings of betrayal, and ignorance, and outright stupidity I once felt for falling for such a con – that has slowly subsided. Since then, yet another big crypto company (FTX) has collapsed; and while I thankfully did not have any money tied up in that embezzlement, I certainly can empathize for those that did. In the new year, I am resolved to return to the traditional, tried and true, much more conservative means of investing.

On the dental practice front, I had explored several partnership and ownership opportunities but ultimately decided to stay put. I talked briefly in a previous post about why I have remained an associate for so long; and at the end of all my recent explorations to find my own office, I realized that the time with my family is more valuable to me then equity in a business. Truth be told, I am still a little nervous about what changes have yet to come. Will I have to clock-in now? Will they start to dictate what supplies we can and cannot order? How soon do they intend on selling our office to an even bigger DSO? As of this new year, they are officially my new employer – so time will tell how tumultuous this transition will truly be. Let’s hope it is not as chaotic as my mind makes it out to be.

This past week, we vacationed with my sister-in-law and her family in their new home in Tampa, Florida. Towards the end of the trip, a few days shy of the new year, I received a call from one of the managing partners of some investment property we did in Arizona a few years ago. To my surprise, she notified me that the property was expected to sell before the end of the year and they had sold for nearly 3x the original amount of our investment. Now there are management, legal and accounting fees that are withdrawn before investors like us are paid out in syndication deals such as these, but still, it was music to my ears to close out an otherwise rough investment year.

As fate would have it, I so happened to be in the house with a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) at the time I received this news. Now, I am a simple W2 employee, with a buy-and-hold investment strategy, who has never inherited any amount of money to where I would need to be concerned about the tax burden on it. However, the profits on this AZ syndication investment would stick me with a 20% long-term capital gains tax rate on that amount.

The concept of ‘tax loss harvesting’ is a tax-planning strategy where you can offset some capital gains with some losses you incurred in the same or other securities. It can be a complex, and fortunately I had a knowledgeable CPA available to me at the time to help walk me through many of the intricacies in implementing this. Since the S&P 500 finished down nearly 20% for the year (2022), and many of my hand-picked stocks (including TSLA, AAPL, NFLX just to name a few) did even worse – I had plenty of stocks to sell (and therefore ‘realize’ losses on) that could help counter my tax liability on the gains I am looking to make from the AZ property.

Even with this tax loss harvesting technique, it comes with rules to abide by so not to void its efficacy with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). One such rule is called the ‘wash sale rule’. The gist of this rule states that an investor cannot buy a ‘substantially identical security’ within a 30-day period before OR after the sale. For example, I cannot buy any shares of TSLA within the next 30 days, otherwise this eliminates my ability to use that original sales losses for tax purposes.

If you have any interest in this topic whatsoever, please visit the White Coat Investors Tax Loss Harvesting Rules website. He goes into much greater detail and knows significantly more about this topic then I have gleamed within this mere past week.

The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.
– Henry Ford

Another potential route I would love to have explored (if I had more time then just two days) is to consider selling my Celsius claims at a loss. I read an article in the Wall Street Journal that states some customers are selling their bankruptcy claims (at steep discounts) to a broker/buyer (Cherokee Acquisition and XClaim). I already expect to see pennies on the dollar by the time the Chapter 11 bankruptcy concludes, I would have loved to utilize the financial losses this year and just have emotional closure to that whole mess. With such little notice between hearing of the AZ property sale and the end of the year, this was not unfortunately an option I was able to execute.

I am not a financial expert, nor am I qualified to give financial advice. I simply write about my own experiences, and if my ventures into crypto and individual stock picking has taught me anything, it’s that I still have so much to learn about. Hopefully some of the stuff I talk about helps others avoid similar mistakes and come out ahead. Hope everyone is having a good start to their new year!

Lesson Learned

investing

On the evening of June 12th, 2022, I received an e-mail alert from the Celsius Network to the effect that withdrawals were being halted on account of ‘extreme market conditions.’ Which was true, the global cryptocurrency market was in the red, with practically all coins shedding 10% or more within a rapid 24 hours.

Fresh off of the downfall of Luna and TerraUSD, I initially thought that the move Celsius was doing (in freezing transactions) was genuinely in the best interest of its ‘community.’ Preventing a mass exodus of investments would give them time to stabilize their liquidity issues and protect the assets of the depositors (like myself).

In the last couple weeks, the company has been frustratingly silent about the current status of their operations and consequently, access to our funds. Many Tweets and news articles that have come out lately about the company all seem to suggest the company is moving towards bankruptcy filing – which, Alex Mashinsky (CEO of Celsius Network) and his company have given us little reason to think otherwise.

I had a generous amount of my families money invested with this company. I was drawn in by the impressive yield and a charismatic charlatan of a CEO. If you’ve read my previous post about the company, I (initially and foolishly) complimented the company for their ‘transparency.’

Only after being involuntarily locked out of access to my funds do I finally have some clarity as to how scammy this whole thing was. I trusted my families hard-earned money to a company solely based on reassurances of its salesman CEO; and what’s worse is I promoted it to others on this very blog. While I constantly caution my readers that I am not offering financial advice, and self-describe myself as an amateur investor at best; I falsely (and blindly) believed this company to be one of the good guys and truly saw it as a movement against the establishment.

It is through suffering that learning comes.
– Aeschylus

As of writing this post, nearly 3 weeks after the Celsius lock-out – I have come to terms with the real likelihood that I will never see those funds again. I am hoping for the best, but have mentally prepared myself for the worst. I have been a victim of a Ponzi scheme before; but this took me for significantly more money and left me feeling much more moronic then my past encounter. Rather than waste another minute more of anxiety or suffering on it, I am hoping this experience will teach me to be a better investor.

I am reminded of the news story about the young boy who committed suicide when the Robinhood trading app allowed him to over-leverage his investments and the kid accrued losses of over $730,000. (By the way – something a little eerie I just noticed was his suicide note was found by his parents on June 12th, 2020 – exactly two years to the day from my Celsuis email.) For me, especially as a father of two boys, this article was devastating to know that some child took their own precious life over financial problems.

Fortunately, first and foremost, I value how precious life is. Monetary loss, deep in debt, being broke – it sucks while you are in the thick of it, but everyone is capable of rebuilding and recovering from the worst financial situations. For me, that means learning the lesson of ‘if it seems too good to be true, it probably is.’

Honestly, I am not sure what my investing strategy looks like moving forward. I still continue to dollar-cost average into this tumultuous stock market. I most likely will shy away from crypto for a while. And probably get my real-estate exposure with REITs versus enrolling in more risky syndication deals. Really I just want to come out of this a lot wiser.

Hopefully none of you have had to endure being the victim of something like this, but feel free to share with me your story if you are so inclined! Thanks for taking the time to read this post!

Starting into Real Estate Syndications

investing

Life at the moment has been somewhat hectic. I am undergoing some PRP treatment for my hair loss, been busy scheduling and planning a family vacation, working on my 2021 tax returns, trying to exercise regularly while incorporating some dietary changes, and – last but not least – playing some tennis with my boys. Lots of content there for a blog post I suppose – I will write updates to many of these topics soon.

Today, though, I want to talk about investing in real estate syndications. As with every post I write; be it about investments, parenting, medical issues – please know it is not meant to be advisory in nature, and I always encourage seeking professional expertise and doing your own additional research where appropriate.

So, rather then reinvent the wheel, I would recommend you visit Investopedia’s Real Estate Investing guide for some of the fundamentals. It is a great overview, discusses a variety of real estate investing terms and options, and offers up some hard data on the historical pricing of this asset class.

If you are like me, and watched the fluctuations in the stock market these past several months; it gets unbelievably unnerving watching your account balance plummet so quickly. And while I feel investing in the market is a necessary evil, and (ultimately, over the long run) will bring in decent returns – diversifying a bit beyond Wall St. cannot hurt, right?

“But land is land, and it’s safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers”
Eugene O’neil

Just like my introduction to crypto and the Celcius Network started with a brief conversation with a friend, so too did my entrance into real estate investing. Several years ago (early 2019), a friend in Phoenix told me of a group of ladies (all professionals, one with a particularly successful family history in RE investing) that were looking to buy over 100 acre property in Arizona and needed investors.

At the time, the phrase “real estate syndication” was new to me, and little did I know that was what I was about to invest into. Essentially, a person or team (typically known as the sponsor or operator) identifies a property and/or project to purchase; and gathers a group of investors (a.k.a. limited partners) so to pool the capital together in order to buy real estate on a larger scale then we may individually have been able to do. This affords a small fry like me the ability to partake in partial ownership of shopping or strip malls, multi-family residential complexes, etc. without necessarily having any of the time demands or expertise needed to manage such projects. The sponsor I invest(ed) with has a niche of only buying vacant land in AZ with anticipation of future sales to a land developer for a significant profit. Again, the syndication is run by people that have expertise and insight that I do not possess, and are usually privy to off-the-market listings and can close on deals that would normally be too high dollar amount for me to afford alone.

When we started, some initial conference and Zoom calls were held among the syndicators and the investors to present the investment opportunity and to host a little Q&A. This was followed by an influx of paper work (i.e. subscription and operating agreements, confidential private placement memorandums, etc.) that needed to be signed. To be honest, much of the legal jargon in these documents go way over my head (and is scarily ironclad); but a big part of performing the due diligence on these investment opportunities is carefully evaluating these legal agreements – even if that means hiring a real estate attorney to review them. Within them are information such as management fees, distribution details, limitations on liquidity – content that is quite critical to weight the risks and benefits of entering into such an investment.

Another thing I learned along the way is that many syndication deals only take investments from “accredited investors“. Again, Investopedia to the rescue! I met a couple of the (income/net worth) requirements of becoming an accredited investor, had my CPA compose a letter stating as such – but basically it is a title given to those “who are deemed financially sophisticated enough to bear the risks.”

One of the general partners of the syndication stated that it would behoove me to set up a Limited Liability Company (LLC) in Arizona before I enter into this investment with them. What’s that? You don’t know what an LLC is? Investopedia has just what you need to learn more. I went to the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) website and registered a Domestic LLC. Then, immediately followed that by going to the IRS website and submitting an application for an Employer Identification Number (EIN) so that I could create a business checking bank account to transfer funds through.

Once the business bank account was created and funded, the final step was sending off the cashier check. I have gone sky diving before, and the scariest moment was the point where you’re kneeled over the open doorway of the plane about to freefall into the unknown. I liken that rush of adrenaline to sitting at the bank tellers desk signing away our hard-earned money into a risky and new investing endeavor.

“If you can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.”
Stephen King

Our families goal was to try and do at least one real estate investment every year. Last month (March of 2022) we closed on our fourth syndication deal – with this same group. Each one has gotten progressively smoother to complete, the repetition makes the process easier to understand. Truthfully though, I am slightly unsettled by the fact that we have “put all our eggs in one basket” – and though my friend vouched for this syndication group, we have yet to see any deals come to fruition (although in fairness, the managers have been quite honest about their long-term projected timeline for sale of each property).

In the past, I have come close to entering into deals with CityVest and DLP Capital Partners. Now that I am in this space, I pay attention to various crowd funding opportunities so much more readily. Believe it or not, Investopedia has a page devoted to just that.

My wife and I (along with a friend) recently purchased a condominium unit as a rental property – now we are even landlords. We also, quite regularly, invest in Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) with Vanguard. We currently have real estate as 12% of our overall investment portfolio and would love to see it grow to mid-twenties. Another goal is to get more cash flowing/passive income and tax benefits out of it. I will certainly keep you apprise of what we do next!

Since this post got quite lengthy, I’ll commit to writing more about those ventures in a future post.

Believe it or not, I have no financial interest in Investopedia or any other site referenced above. Investopedia just has lots of great info on it, so much to learn from. Thank you very much for taking the time to read this post, and I am always curious to know about ways in which people diversify their own investment portfolios. Please let me know what you do! Have a wonderful day!

Weather the Storm

investing, Lifestyle

If this blog affords me anything, it is the opportunity to write about the things that occupy my attention. Day after day, since 2022 started, I wearily watch as the stock market plummets and any profits and gains from the last several years get wiped out within a matter of months. Like the gray, rainy weather in Seattle that leads some to experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD); so to can the chronic red and sharp declines in the stock market lead to gloom and mental anguish.

By definition, a correction is a market decline that is more than 10%, but less than 20% off of a recent market high. A bear market is usually defined as a decline of 20% or greater. The S&P 500 index is the overall representation of the market’s performance. There are plenty of other terms (i.e. market dip, crash, etc.) that are pertinent but could just as easily be Investopedia‘d.

Again, graphs like the one above present the performance of the overall S&P 500 Index. If you are like me, and your portfolio is a composite of index funds, stocks and bonds, and other asset classes – you may fare significantly better, catastrophically worse, or somewhere in-between.

Individual stocks are prone to much more volatility. A character on an HBO show rides his Peloton, suffers a heart-attack and dies – causing the stock to sink nearly 12% the next trading day. A large group of traders on the r/WallStreetBets Reddit forum helped drive GameStop’s stock surging up over 400% once upon a time. A misinterpreted tweet by Elon Musk stating to ‘use Signal’ confused investors and sent the wrong stock up soaring over 6300%.

More recently it is the Ukraine and Russia conflict and the question of an impending war? The Federal Reserve and possibility of several interest rate hikes? Certainly economy-related concerns but also lots of other miscellaneous events and outside influences can spook investors and cause the fear that lead to sharp market declines and panic selling.

Probably a totally irrational skepticism on my part – but I think the news media has manipulation tactics and selectively seeds content, stock analysts have their own obvious biases and agenda, and of course corrupt politicians have access to insider information that allow them the ability to execute privileged and personally advantageous trades. It is hard to find trustworthy sources to believe. Just my opinion.

In a past blog, I briefly introduced a bit about my investing approach. Certainly trying times like these test our conviction. Lots of different investment philosophies exist – each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I subscribe to a philosophy known as Dollar-Cost Averaging (DCA). You can read about it a bit more here, but essentially you put same amount of money in the same stock (or index fund, etc.) on a regular basis over time, regardless of the share price.

“Our favorite holding period is forever.”
– Warren Buffett

In terms of personal investing, the February-March 2020 bear market was the only one I have actually had to endure. Before that, I was dirt broke and too busy suffering through dental school and multiple residency programs. Even though I know many others are experiencing these same tribulations right now, there is a unexplainable loneliness and depression that sets in when you see these steep market declines. I used Vanguard’s financial advisor services for a short while, and while I ultimately decided to stop and take things into my own hands, I did appreciate that I was not constantly worrying about how the markets were doing.

I dare not try and predict where the bottom of this latest market crash will be. However, I find some solace in knowing, if we stay the course and weather this storm, the market will do what it historically has – deliver some dependable returns.

In a future post, I will go over a few other investment strategies I do to minimize risk, including: invest in syndication real estate deals, invest in REITs and rental properties, and more recently – dare I say it – cryptocurrencies. Diversification is the name of the game!?

As always, thank you for taking the time to read through this post. Hope that some of this information can be useful to you, and please feel free to share in your own experiences!

Interest in the Celsius Network

investing

UPDATE: On July 13, 2022, Celsius and several of its affiliates commenced voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings. See my latest post on the matter at Lesson Learned.

I was never great at staying on track with new year’s resolutions. Sure, we all start out ambitious enough – try and exercise more, eat healthier, take up a new hobby, etc. – but my goals usually start to obscure within a few weeks from their nascence. Perhaps therein lies the problem – I need to be better about being goal oriented. I have read we should write goals down, being specific and keeping things measurable and attainable. For example, my goal is to write at least two blog posts a month this year. Okay 2022, let’s go!

In today’s post, I wanted to introduce a new investment vehicle I started to use last month. However, before I go any further, as always – I am but a mere amateur investor and rookie blogger, everything I suggest should be investigated further and probably presented to a financial professional.

At an ugly sweater Christmas party last month, I struck up a conversation with a friend about investing. As an introvert, I do not always like attending these events. Predominantly, however, I find I not only thoroughly end up enjoying myself but also learning quite a bit of useful information from other people’s ideas and experiences. As was the case here.

Now, terms like cryptocurrency, blockchain technology, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) – some of it still confuses and frankly scares me a little. Nonetheless, it does appear that it is here to stay. Therefore, (and perhaps another potential 2022 goal?) I have vowed to keep an open mind to it and slowly incorporate it into my overall investment portfolio.

Where was I? Oh yeah, at the social event I so courageously attended last Christmas, my friend turned me on to a company (and app) called Celsius. The hook for me was that he had been receiving a steady 10-12% interest on his money, WEEKLY! According to Bankrate.com, the national average interest rate on savings accounts as of last week was 0.06 percent. Another recent interesting statistic, consumer prices jumped 7% in 2021. When our savings do not grow at or above the same rate as inflation, essentially we are losing money because our purchasing power diminishes as time goes on.

Even though Celcius’s motto is to “unbank yourself” from the traditional financial systems, their service is basically a bank for digital currency. The Celcius Network is a platform that offers interest-bearing savings accounts and loan borrowing at remarkably low rates. No withdrawl, transfer, transaction, origination nor termination fees (for their services). They tout a mission statement that aims to act in the best interest of the community; in large part by giving back 80% of revenue to customers in the form of interest.

In exchange for storing your cryptocurrency funds within the Celcius wallet (which the company in turn loans out retail and institutional borrows), every week you receive an interest payment into your account. You can choose to receive payments in like-kind or in CEL (Celcius’s native tokens – an option only available to accredited investors if you live within the U.S.).

A particular class of cryptocurrency, referred to as stablecoins, is a non-volatile and price-stable asset. Essentially, with Bitcoin and Ethereum, the level of volatility may be thrilling for some investors but it hinders its benefit as a medium of exchange for many businesses. At least with stablecoins, the stable value means the coin can always be redeemed for an equivalent currency amount at any time.

After the Xmas party, per my friends instructions, I went home and downloaded Coinbase, CoinbasePro and the Celcius app. I created accounts for each, set up all the two-factor verification security stuff, and set up the payment method within Coinbase to acquire funds from my checking account. Within Coinbase, I “traded” (i.e. purchased) a certain dollar amount of USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin. Unfortunately, while the coins may be added to your Coinbase wallet immediately, they are unable to be transferred out for short while after. Eventually you will receive an email from Coinbase stating

The $xxx.xx buy you made on (e.g.) January 01, 2022 is now available to withdraw or send. Please login to view your total available balance.

After the funds are available to be traded out (usually about a week after the initial trade took place), I opened up CoinbasePro, navigated to Portfolio, and under Wallets would locate the Deposit option. Fortunately, there are no fee’s to transfer from Coinbase to CoinbasePro. From what I was told, a CoinbasePro transfer to Celcius take less of a fee than transfers from Coinbase directly. Also, Celcius lets you purchase USDC directly within the Celcius app but the fees (standard credit card processing fees, bank transfer fees) are higher still then if you are using Coinbase and CoinbasePro. Fees vary based on the amounts being transferred. After the funds are in your CoinbasePro account, you are immediately able to get them into Celcius. Within the Celcius app, you follow the Receive Coins link and (very importantly) make sure to choose the right asset from the drop-down.

Celcius will then alert you that the address is meant to receive only that specific token or digital asset, and anything else being sent over may result in permanent loss of funds. BE CAREFUL HERE!

I hit Copy on the address they provide (making a mental note of the last 3 or 4 digits of the long alphanumeric address), go back into CoinbasePro and then choose the Withdraw option under the Portfolio tab. I select USDC (or whatever asset you choose to trade with), and then select the Crypto Address option. I make ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that when I paste the address, the last 4 digits matches the one Celcius Network gave me.

Here is the point you will encounter Network Fees, and the amount you send will have to account for those fees being available to be withdrawn.

On some final notes here, as with any investments, there is a possibility of loss of funds. Celcius Network is very established, is reviewed highly, and has an ever-growing following of Celcian users. However, they do not provide any insurance on our deposits, so if the company falls victim to a hack for instance, we may be screwed. Also, the Celcius interest rates vary weekly as well as from coin to coin. When my friend at the party started with them, it was 10-12%; I have consistently been getting 8.50% – which, in today’s market, is still nothing to sneeze at.

Lastly, the CEO – Alex Mashinsky – hosts a weekly broadcast called AMA – “Ask Mashinsky Anything.” I have tuned in to a few of these now, and have been loving the philosophy and transparency of the company, the leadership and support staff appear genuinely happy to work for company, and I get the sense they really do have a solid sense of community well-being.

Again, I am not a professional that you should be seeking any sort of financial advice from and cannot be held accountable if your cryptocurrency get lost in the blockchain metaverse. Please seek independent financial advice before dealing with digital assets. Within my own portfolio, Celcius Network is just another means to diversify a bit.

Thank you for reading this post! If I can help in anyway, with the understanding that I am a newb myself, I am most certainly happy to do so! Also, full disclosure, if you click on (and ultimately sign up for) the Celcius Network hyperlink I provided above (or use Referral ID 173697cff1) – we each receive their promotional reward. I have no other financial disclosures to report. Have a great day!