The $100M Retirement Mistake: Why Crypto Belongs in Your IRA with Chris Kline

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. Today we'll be breaking down the$100 million retirement mistake, why crypto belongs in your IRA. And to drop these value bombs, I brought Chris Kline into EO Fire Studios. Chris is the co-founder of Bitcoin IRA, building a full-service platform that enables individuals to invest in cryptocurrency for retirement through secure turnkey solutions and strategic industry partnerships and provides nationwide investor access. And today we talk about crypto and retirement accounts, turnkey digital asset solutions, avoiding costly mistakes, market impact, crypto made simple, and oh, so much more.

0:43John Lee Dumas:And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Chris and our sponsors. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support. Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 Days to Something, a step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days.

1:27John Lee Dumas:Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube. Chris, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. It's actually kind of lonely. I think a lot of people disagree with that. And it is. It can be, it's not all the time, but, you know, when you're, if you're an entrepreneur, you're building businesses, the decision making and the kind of not having a lot of sound boards within your organization for those deep, dark thoughts that you have at two or three o 'clock in the morning. So it can be, it can feel a little lonely sometimes, but that's, I think what drives the good ones and the really great ones live in that space because it keeps them hyper-focused too, is, you know, this is, I've got to get through these levels.

2:15I have a team, but I've got to stay hyper-focused and kind of like my hyper-drive tunnel to get there. So I think that's probably a big thing.

2:22John Lee Dumas:The$100 million retirement mistake, why crypto belongs in your IRA. I want to talk about crypto in retirement accounts specifically, Chris. So a lot of people that are listening right now, they still do not think this is possible. So how could investors structure Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies inside retirement accounts without overcomplicating the process? Absolutely. Well, you know, the fundamental tool available is known as the self-directed IRA. It allows you, it opens up this modern world of alternatives. Earlier users were real estate, land, private equity. We've seen errors of precious metals and a lot of gold and silver physical holdings.

3:06It's really where you get an alternative that's not a paper derivative like ETF or REIT or something like that. And then you use that tool, but then you've got to, like you said, make it simple. And that's what the Bitcoin IRA platform really brings to the top layer is this middleware that allows you to engage with your retirement 24-7, 365 using asset classes like Bitcoin, which basically those are the prerequisites if you're going to be using those types of asset classes. They move a lot. They never sleep. It's 24-7, right?

3:37John Lee Dumas:I want to talk about turnkey digital asset solutions. What do you, Chris, think a truly seamless and secure done-for-you crypto investing experience could look like today in today's world? Having a place where you can have it inside of the tax-sheltered umbrella or the tax-advantaged umbrella, that's the first thing. You need to keep it in a custody solution that keeps up with the IRS standards and the guidelines so that those assets stay in a Roth or a traditional setting post or pre-tax. So you get to keep that advantage that they give us with IRA investing. And then you have the ability to log in and have complete control of any of the asset types that you're looking for.

4:21And you know, that exists today at Bitcoin IRA. I think we're up to like 85 different cryptocurrencies now. And we just launched a pretty unique concept known as crypto bundles, where a lot of folks were coming to us and saying, hey, I like the blue chips, or I'm looking for an AI type mix or something else. And those are kind of really popular programs that we just brought to market where it's like, okay, I want to take this amount and spread it across these six AI oriented coins so that I have exposure to crypto and AI at the same time, that kind of stuff. That's the world that I think people are looking for.

4:55John Lee Dumas:Now, here's what people freak out. Nobody wants to make mistakes, especially around money. And I mean, most people, they're terrified about taxes. So where do most investors get crypto taxes wrong? And how can they optimize their retirement savings from the very beginning? Yeah, I think one of the early misnomers was that since it's crypto and it's different, that you don't have capital gains implications. And the truth of that is you do. And there's forms now when you do your, everybody just finished off, right? We just got through tax season. So there's forms now associated with it. When you're inside of a retirement umbrella, you can eliminate that.

5:32And with such a volatile asset, that's to your advantage because you may be moving, making a lot of different transactions. You might be holding and making a lot of gains. You might be staking and making yield. And all those are taxable events outside of a retirement account. But inside of it, you don't have to lose that purchasing power and have to lose somewhere between 12.5 on the low side up to 37 on the high side every time you win with one of your crypto investments.

5:58John Lee Dumas:So can you give an example of like what you feel like an ideal person right now? Like where are they at in their life? Like your avatar for your company, like where are they at in their life? Like where are they maybe investing in? Like what should they be thinking allocation wise percentage? I mean, when you get these kind of people that are inquiring about your company, what do you look for? What do you tell them? Well, I think the first thing you have to acknowledge when you understand the perfect avatar is that there's only 50 % of them, which is sad. Americans generally are not well equipped for retirement across all many generations right now.

6:31I just read something where we're where there's a reality that there are two retirement ages. There's at least three to five percent of 80 year olds that are still working, a phenomenon that's never been seen before. While simultaneously, there's a higher number of 35 to 40 year olds retiring, like entrepreneurs that have exits or other things like that. And so this is a unique landscape that we're in. And so everybody has some purpose for diversifying their overall portfolio. Now you look at Bitcoin and crypto in general, outperformed for the last decade every traditional asset class. So getting off zero and having some allocation to it is critical.

7:05You've seen Fidelity will say somewhere between, I think they just recently increased between either 3 % or 4 % that they have on theirs. versus you have folks, we've seen folks that will put full 401ks and other things inside of it. But who you really are is somebody that's invested. You've followed the rules. You've worked, and you said, okay, I've got a 401k. I'm going to put my money in because the company matches. That's free money. Oh, that's great. Now also I've got these funds here. But then, okay, on top of all the other things I have to do, now I have to be my 401k advisor. I have to figure out what to do with these things.

7:42And you'll see folks just sit in cash, which is pretty detrimental if you think about inflation and the debasement of currency. And those folks are, since they're not investing anything, they're not keeping up with all the other things that are happening. So they're getting left behind with these 401ks. And in fact, sometimes they leave them at their old employer, like two, I think almost$2 trillion have been left behind in old 401ks. Because people bounce jobs, right? And when you leave your job, you are able to move your 401k and roll it into an IRA that you can control. So folks that are in that world that are like, oh, I didn't, I forgot I had that.

8:15Or yes, that's definitely something that I need to do. I need to get it out of a savings account and make it a real retirement account that's investing and making money for me while I sleep. Those are the folks, I think that's your avatar, that's your archetype.

8:26John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, we're going to talk regulation and adoption, market impact, crypto made simple and more when we get back from thanking our sponsors. When a simple landing page somehow turns into endless tickets, handoffs, and back and forth, frustration can quickly set in. Framer changes that. With Framer, your whole team can collaborate in real time, make updates together, and publish instantly. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams, and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. The best part, agents in Framer work alongside teams to streamline collaborations on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings, and ship everything all in one place.

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10:53John Lee Dumas:Everything you need to succeed, all under one roof. No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business, and their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most. When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Chris, we're back and I want to talk about regulation.

11:33John Lee Dumas:I want to talk about adoption. I mean, what do investors need to understand about the current regulatory landscape as crypto continues to go mainstream? Yeah, I agree. amazing question. I've actually had the privilege and honor to be in crypto as Bitcoin IRA's co founder and now COO about 11 years now. So I've almost personally witnessed the whole process from where it was Wild West a decade ago, and there was barely any conversation about it when we met with our regulators to put it in the first time in 2016. It was definitely a process of explanations through analogy, getting over a lot of learning curves.

12:16You know, most people just pushed away. You have to really break down those walls. Then now you're, we're at a point where the Senate and the House, the House has already done it. The Senate has to finish the negotiation, which is really crypto lobby versus banking lobby. And that's a whole, and that's just in 11 years that it's been from, we weren't talking about it to it's sitting at the house at the floor of Congress. and when those elements come through i think i agree with kevin o 'leary said something about a month or two ago that there's probably five trillion that's waiting to walk into the market space or a trillion that's waiting to mark if if and when it gets that clear yeah this is a big thing you know these rewards and all this it's a really big element i know we just kind of all call it just clarity and but the debate is at its core is this is good for the consumer bad for the infrastructure so banking has been the traditional infrastructure and it's got a huge lobby just like big oil big pharma big farm big everything right um and so uh crypto has has this advantage as stable coins where folks can make rewards off of holding them which sounds and looks a lot like interest the thing is the interest rewards or the rewards are much higher than what traditional houses are giving up right now uh and that they don't like that feeling right and so that's kind of really what's at the core of the debate there's other things but uh those there will be more debates about cryptocurrency than just this bill too it's this is an ongoing living breathing organism crypto and ai too has its has its day in regulations headlights very soon i'm sure it's going very fast and there's a lot of wild things happening and so this is this is an era of you know i was a i was little but this is like i was five years old and this is the what the i think this is what the internet dot to com bubble felt like i was just too young it is crazy what's

13:59John Lee Dumas:happening and you know i mean i don't want to quite put this maybe much of a marker on the banks but But it could be the reality. Back when the big cigarette companies would just troop in all of these doctors who would be like, no, smoking is not bad for you at all. It's kind of like what you're seeing now where the big banks are coming in there being like, no, this would just be so terrible if you did this. And it's like, no, this is what's good for the consumer. Like, yes, we realize that your business will be negatively impacted and that's why you're fighting for this. But, you know, who's more important, like the big banks or the 9 billion people in the world who deserve better?

14:34John Lee Dumas:And that's what we really need to be thinking about. So I want to talk about the market impact and how digital assets are transforming traditional financial markets and long term investing strategies. What's that market impact? Yeah, I mean, the first, obviously, we just talked about one layer is the exact competition with stable coins. With things like, especially let's focus in on Bitcoin for this conversation. They are, their impact is now you've got the ETF that has gone out from BlackRock and IBIT and others that had like record intake. So you're talking about like record breaking off charts, chart breaking really inflows throughout last year.

15:17And then even as times have gotten market price has gotten tough, the outflows have not gone insane. And so there's that's what you get when you get an institutional layer involved. So it's stabilizing somewhat of the volatility because there's just so much more of it there. And that's in play. But also, I think the markets in general are doing some wild things. If you can go you go down the list quickly and say, look at gold and silver. Silver heck look like a mean coin stock about a month ago. and this is when you would think when we're when there's war or issues like what's happening with iran around the strata res and the canal and oil and all those things that would traditionally be a place where gold is doing really well but now it's moving so much day day in day out that it's hard to really say well the peace accord happens and gold goes up but then when it goes away gold goes down nothing really makes complete sense there's a lot of i think not controlled chaos but expected chaos in these types of situations when you also have AI that's really changing a lot of things across the board.

16:18It's having its impact, whether it's really direct and you can see it, but it's there. And so I think that's kind of where crypto is having its impact. And it's, you know, from 10 years ago when it was just a bunch of guys, you know, I think at one point a congressman actually called us a bunch of guys in our pajamas in our mom's basements out of California a long time ago. And I think it was actually our congressman where our offices were at. We're in Sherman Oaks, California before COVID. And then we went remote. And so we're everywhere. And we're regulated by the state of Nevada. So we have offices in Nashville, Kentucky, also in a small town in Kentucky, Nevada.

16:56And we still have offices in Los Angeles, but not much happening there. Everybody's remote now, right? And so, but I think it was our congressman that said that.

17:03John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, so many things are moving so fast. That's why I love bringing people like Chris on because they just keep their finger on the pulse. And I want to talk about crypto made simple, because a lot of people are like, okay, this is all exciting, but break it down for me. Like, let's go down for someone new to the space. How do you break down crypto 101 while still helping them think like a long-term investor? Being able to sit at the crossroads of retirement in crypto has been helpful for me to see a really simple way to understand having crypto in your life. So once you decide, yeah, OK, I want to get off zero, I want to invest in it.

17:39There are so many ways to get access to it. Obviously, we talked about ETFs. You can just go to an exchange like a Coinbase or a Kraken, open up an account relatively easily and experience it, you know, buy it, move it, sell it, et cetera. When you want to think long term, then you want to think about your tax advantages. So with Bitcoin IRA, you can simply go online to our site, Bitcoin IRA.com and access an online application that takes a couple of minutes, verifies you and sets you up. And then you have to decide how am I going to fund it? So if you don't have any existing retirement accounts, that's okay.

18:09You can get started. You can open up a new one, a Roth or a traditional based upon what works for you. You can fund it by a simple ACH, like a Plaid injection, like most folks do. So you'll have funds in a matter of a day. And then you're off buying and selling and trading cryptocurrencies. And there's a whole bunch of education along the way. And what we have done differently is we've kept it real crypto, real people. So instead of talking to bots or chats and things like that, there's actually a number you can call and talk to a real human. Retirement's not one size fits all. So they'll sit down and do a web conference with you and walk through all the details of our platform and make sure that you get the account type you're looking for.

18:46And then if you're going to fund from an existing, you can do a transfer from an existing IRA if you have one, or you can roll over funds from an old employer plan like an old 401k, 403b, TSP if you worked for the government. All those different account types are eligible to go into IRAs. And then you have the self-directed control to invest in the cryptocurrency as your choice. Then, you know, you can even have more fun with it. We have staking, limit orders. You know, people really once, I don't know about you, John, but when I went down the rabbit hole, it was, it gets really exciting really fast.

19:15just like with AI.

19:17John Lee Dumas:It does get really exciting really fast, especially you have to learn about this new universe that's literally being created before our eyes. Because Chris, as you mentioned earlier, I was super young when the internet was being born. I was able to kind of play around, but I didn't really know what I was doing. And of course, I didn't have any money. But now here I am in my mid-40s and I'm seeing the birth of this industry and I've seen it for the past 15 years. And now, something that we've already talked about a little bit, about some of the big catalysts, but now Morgan Stanley is launching a Bitcoin ETF to their 16 ,000 advisors and their trillions and trillions of dollars that are under management.

19:54John Lee Dumas:I mean, it's just crazy what is happening in this world. It's so exciting. I do a whole other show besides this Entrepreneurs on Fire show that I do every single day for 14 years. Another daily show called MSTR Today because I'm so obsessed with Michael Saylor and what strategy is doing that I just can't get enough of it. So I'm like, I'm just gonna start a show about it because it's so clear to me, this is the future. So Chris, close it down for us. What do you want Fire Nation to do? Give us a call to action about how we can learn more about you, your company, and what do you want our listeners to take action on?

20:28Yeah, absolutely. So you can obviously visit bitcoinira.com. I think we even might have a dedicated link for you as the audience of Entrepreneur on Fire, which will give you some extra rewards. I think it's like up to$1 ,000 in savings for the pod and some cool swag. So usually once people get into the orange pill moment, they want to brag about it. So a hat or a T-shirt for you so you can tell your friends. We have an awesome referral program, too. So if you decide to, once you open an account, refer friends and family, I think each of you get like$200 or$250, which is awesome. But you can do you can visit there or, like I said, you can actually call.

21:05And it's a number I've used for over a decade. It's 877-936-7175. And we've got folks that have been doing this for over a decade, almost all of them, and have been helping almost 10 ,000 each new account holders get into this world. And it's pretty cool. We've got some life-changing stories. You know, I'm very close with our 11th client, Rocket Ron. He worked for NASA and specializes in the heat shield technology. So he was coming in like right after Apollo and then as the space shuttle program started. And he retired. But then in 08, he got wiped out by the financial crisis, the housing crisis, whatever we call that, recession of 2007 to 2008.

21:48And had to go back into the workspace at Siemens or something like that. And it was, you know, just the nature of the beast. And he found us. And he's so happy. He's the 11th client. He's actually got a hockey jersey made that says Bitcoin IRA, Roy number 11. And got me one made as number one, which is kind of was really nice of him. But he was able to re-retire within a year of working with us. And since then now does all kinds of crypto stuff. He's a consultant. He does some really unique things. And he still works for, it's either SpaceX or Blue Origin, because these guys, these older timer guys, know all the heat shield stuff.

22:19And these new guys that are building over there, they know the software. The hardware is the hardest part of rocketry sometimes. So he still has, he gets to do that basically for fun.

22:28John Lee Dumas:Well, Fire Nation, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And you've been hanging out with CK and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And for links to everything we talked about, if you visit eofire.com and type Chris in the search bar, the show notes page will pop right up. And you are correct that we will have a special link for you, Fire Nation, with some extra, extra goodies from Bitcoin IRA for sure. So check that out and make it happen. And Chris, I want to say thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation. For that, we salute you, and we will catch you on the flip side.

23:01John Lee Dumas:Hey, Firing Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Chris for sponsoring today's episode. And Firing Nation, are you an entrepreneur on FIRE who's looking to share your amazing message with the world? If yes, we are now accepting applications for EO FIRE. So to learn more about becoming a guest, visit EOFIRE.com slash guest. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support.