THE Cambridge Connection - Episode 25

Yes. And maybe it’s not filet mignon and lobster time. Maybe it’s- It might be potatoes. It might be potatoes and rice. Yeah.

Insurance deductibles and paycheck withholding tips

Right. For now, until things calm down a little bit. You know, one thing that I do recommend, and again, you have to be careful if you’re going to do this, but raise the deductible of your insurance if you can. Some people carry a $500 deductible per year. Raise it to $1,000 so your insurance goes down.

But try to set aside that additional $500 in a bank account somewhere. And that way, your monthly expense will decrease a little bit. But you’re still prepared. God forbid you do have to use the insurance and you do have to pay that deductible. And it’s tax time.

Perfect time to talk to your tax preparer about looking at the deductions that are coming out of your paycheck and seeing if it’s in line. If you’re getting too much money back, you’re probably having too much money taken out. And right now, people could use a little bit more money in their paycheck than they can- You need it now. In a year from now. Absolutely.

St Patrick’s Day trivia game

I firmly agree with that, Gordon. So, how do I save on whiskey? Well- Because you know what’s coming up. You buy the cheap stuff. All right.

So maybe whiskey with St. Patrick’s Day coming up is somewhere where you should try to pull it back a little bit. I’ve got a little bit of a trivia for you this week, if you don’t mind. I want to see where you are as far as your knowledge of St. Patty’s Day, if you don’t mind.

Bring it on. You ready for me? Okay. First question, Gordon. Where is believed to be St.

Patrick’s place of birth? I’m going to say- No cheating either. Keep your phone away. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to say- Drum roll.

Well, it was a Christian missionary. Ireland. Well, Britannia. Britannia. All right.

Okay. All right. Do you know where St. Patrick’s Day is? I don’t.

I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.

Do you know? Just a little extra added. Do you know what his name was at birth? I’m going to say Patrick. You know what?

Mawin Sukhat, if I’m pronouncing that correctly. Wow. I definitely didn’t know that. Yeah, I wouldn’t have known that either. I had to look that one up.

Okay. So if I’m on Family Feud, you know what I’m getting every time I put it in there, right? Yeah. You’re getting pass. That’s fine.

Pass. Okay. All right. Now, this one’s going to be a multiple choice. So let’s see how you do with this.

And it’s kind of interesting. I found this interesting. Where was the first St. Patrick’s Day parade held? A, the United Kingdom, B, New Zealand, or C, the United States?

So we have United Kingdom, New Zealand. That seems like it’s what it should be, but go ahead. Okay. United Kingdom, New Zealand, or the United States? I’m going New Zealand.

There it is again. The United States and New York. Of course it was. The United States? Find a way to party.

Come on. The melting pot. The melting pot. Okay. Here we go.

I’m shutting you down soon, by the way. No, I think you’re going to know this one. What am I, 0 for 3? Yeah, you’re 0 for... Kind of like the Giants.

Anyway. All right. Here is the last one. I know you’re going to get this one. All right.

Ireland till eternity. That’s close. All right. I’m giving you one. All right.

I’m giving you this one. What is the culinary tradition of St. Patty’s Day, besides whiskey and beer? Corned beef and cold canned. American beef.

I’m in the know on that. Here’s the last one. I know you’re going to get this one. What is the meaning of the phrase, Erin go bra? Ah!

All right. Ireland till eternity. All right. That’s close. All right.

I’m giving you one. I’m giving you this one. What is the culinary tradition of St. Patty’s Day besides whiskey and beer? Corned beef and cold canned.

All right. And what? Cold canned. It’s like a potato dish, I believe. Okay.

Cold canned. All right. We’ll give you that. We’ll give you that. Good for you.

Good for you. All right. Well, I’m definitely going to have some of all of the above for St. Patty’s Day. So that’s where I’ll celebrate my lack of knowledge of this holiday.

Teasing the cryptocurrency segment

There you go. Don’t forget the Guinness. See the Reddit. All right. So we have an amazing show here, and we’re going to take a quick break.

Coming up, we have Ben Noble, who is an expert in something that people have no idea about. I’m sure of this, because it’s so confusing. We’re going to talk cryptocurrency today. I’m excited about that. Me too, because I want to know about it.

It’s almost like a foreign language to me right now. Yeah. I’ve been doing my little beginner, like Dell, sit my toe into the water, but it really is confusing. And for financial wellness and wisdom, you know there are going to be people that don’t know what they’re doing and investing their money in this, so we’re not going to give investment advice on this show, but we are going to talk about the basics so that people can start looking further and see if they want to get involved in it. Yeah.

Very exciting to talk with Ben today. All right. We’ll be right back. This is Gordon Oliver with The Cambridge Connection. Hi.

Sponsor message and scam warning

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Introducing Ben Noble and crypto basics

This is Gordon Oliver here with my co-host, Tina Marie. io. And we’re going to get into cryptocurrency and try to cover the basics. Welcome to the show, Ben. We’re so grateful to have you.

Thank you. Grateful to be here. Hi, Ben. Nice having you. All right, so before Tina Marie and my head spins, if you could just give us your backgrounds as you get to today so we can talk about your knowledge in the cryptocurrency world.

Of course, and I’ll try to condense it for everyone. But I’d like to start by saying, first, this isn’t financial advice. I’m not a financial advisor. However, I’ve spent a lot of time in cryptocurrency. So I’ll give my perspective.

So the best way to start is to explain that I was already working in the tech world and really got pulled into cryptocurrency in 2017 when there was a lot of hype around the potential of this technology. And since then, I’ve had the chance to work with the industry greats, Binance. I’ve worked with Steve Aoki. I’ve worked with Tom Bilyeu on the NFT side. I’ve even helped with the Quentin Tarantino NFT drop.

And then I’ve worked with financial institutions and everything from protocols to applications, you name it. I’ve helped with it. And so that’s kind of where I’m drawing from in terms of my expertise or knowledge. So for our listeners, what is cryptocurrency? What are the basics, and how does it work?

Sure, so cryptocurrency really is underpinning a technology called blockchain. And really what that is boiled down into is distributed ledger technology. And it’s about as dry as it sounds, which is funny because as sexy as the media likes to address a blockchain, what it comes down to is creating a system of trust between two parties where no trust has existed before. And so in the banking world, we use intermediaries. We use cashiers.

We use people to essentially verify our transactions. Anytime we process a credit card, anytime we spend capital, we’re transacting on a ledger system. There is bookkeeping that says there’s this much money in circulation, there’s this much money in your account, and it has left your account and then gone into this other person’s account. The old way of doing that is to have somebody sit in the middle and verify each process of the in-between of money left my bank account and entered your bank account. With cryptocurrency and blockchain technology, really where the innovation is is taking that middleman out of the equation and replacing it with an algorithmic process that is using really complicated math to validate that something has, in fact, left one person’s account and entered another person’s account, and then using a whole system of computers to provide the checks and balances that otherwise would be the bankers.

So electronic funds transfers is what most people got used to, I would say, what, in the last 10 or 15 years about dealing with authorizing funds transfers through apps and having the bank available on your phone now. And this is just completely taking that middle ground out of it with a different form of value. Is that right? Right, and I think we started with the financial world because that’s the most obvious place where we’re using ledger technology. But since this has expanded, and this is why people are starting to talk about, NFTs and digital assets, ledgers can be used to keep track of a number of different things and provide a book of truth, essentially, that we can check for digital asset ownership.

And so money has largely become digital, and so that’s where we’re applying the technology first. Now we’re talking about expanding into everything, really from your driver’s license at the DMV could be on the blockchain to medical records to songs and video games. So this is where we’re starting to see this kambryotic explosion, if you will, of different use cases that are applying this technology set. And one would have complete access to all of the transactions? I mean, you can monitor it daily or rather than?

Yes, it’s very transparent. You can go on the blockchain, and you can, essentially, if you know what you’re doing. And a lot of people, this is kind of the magic sauce behind the internet. You don’t need to know how the internet works to take advantage of it, but if you were curious and you wanted to peek behind the hood, something like Etherscan or going into Bitcoin’s nodes would inform you of all the transactions. But what you’re seeing is essentially not a name, but a long numeral character, like let’s say it’s like 32 characters long, of just numbers and letters that identify each wallet.

And so that’s how we’re keeping track of things. So it’s almost like a code, right? It’s a code, everything has a code to it? It is a code, yeah, it’s cryptography, yep. Cryptography, I see.

Well, so if you’re just joining us, this is the Cambridge Connection. We’re here with Ben Noble talking about cryptocurrency. And for me, Ben, this show is about financial wellness and financial wisdom and financial empowerment. So for those that are just either getting into it, and I’ll even talk personally. Before I started doing a little bit of research, I thought Bitcoin was everything.

I thought everything was Bitcoin. But now I obviously have realized that there’s Bitcoin, and the investment part, there’s Bitcoin, the engine, if I’m not mistaken. So can you kind of break down maybe what the segments of cryptocurrency are? Yeah, it’s very nuanced, isn’t it? Bitcoin is the poster child for cryptocurrency, because again, it was trying to handle probably the most basic problem, which is moving money from one location to another.

When Ethereum came out, which is kind of the followed shortly behind Bitcoin, it was adding a layer of complexity to that, where it was saying, what if you could program this money to do a multitude of things? Think like a, almost like a complicated Rube Goldberg machine. I don’t even know if I’m saying that right. Yeah, that’s fine. The idea being that you could send money with contingencies on it, where it’s saying if you fulfill this digital task, or essentially creating parameters for when money gets released from one person’s wallet into another.

And so this is where we started to see more complicated paradigms, lending applications, other things layered on top of this solution. And so now there’s a multitude of cryptocurrencies out there that represent a bunch of different industries. And like I said, some of them are essentially mapping to a very specific problem of conveying value within things like, let’s say, a video game or something like that, or it’s as complicated as, or not complicated, but rather like taking out a loan. And how do you deal with credit default where you don’t have middlemen involved? So that’s what we’re seeing right now is just kind of the proliferation from the original Bitcoin idea into other avenues with the understanding that, like I said, ledgers can be used to keep track of a bunch of different things.

Getting started safely with crypto investing

And if we really think about where ledgers are being used in the world, I think you’ll find that there’s a lot of use cases. Yeah. Along the theme of financial wisdom and protecting consumers, there’s a headline from the Institutional Investor where, and the headline says, big investors are finally serious about crypto, but experienced talent is still scarce. So when I read a headline like that, and I’m just doing my own research, I know there’s, it seems like there’s not many places for people to turn where they actually know they can get sound advice. And if you look on Twitter, and if you look on social media, there’s all kinds of people opining and not saying they’re not giving financial advice, but they’re pushing like a certain coin, I see like Shiba Inu and Dogecoin.

So how does, if someone’s going to work to get into this investment vehicle, what’s a safe way to do that? Where would they start? You know, start, oh, go ahead, sorry. No, exactly. That’s what that, where would one start?

Yeah, so I start top to bottom, right? If you want to understand the system, it’s good to kind of explore Bitcoin at first and try to generate some understanding of where the value comes from in that world. And I think once that starts to click, and you start to understand, okay, this is the utility of this thing, you can advance yourself into Ethereum. And the way I look at it is I go on something like CoinMarketCap or CoinGecko, and these are things that track the market cap, and the daily value of these different cryptocurrencies. And you can programmatically go through and look at their websites, look at some of the research papers and things that are behind it.

I think at this stage, we’ve seen Bitcoin kind of defend its line, even though it’s still incredibly volatile, it’s largely moved up and to the right over the past few years. So you know, it’s going to go safest bet to riskiest bet, in my opinion, as you move down that market cap line, because the amount of money that’s propping it up, as it diminishes the likelihood of a project failing or something becomes that much greater, like if I only have $2 million of essentially capital propping up my token, it could fall apart tomorrow versus if I have, you know, billions and billions of dollars, trillions even, it’s going to take a lot more of a psychological mechanism to make that fall apart. That said, right, here’s my biggest concern. The sponsor of this program, Cambridge Credit Counseling, helps people with credit card debt. And my concern in this space is that people use credit cards for gambling, they use it for...

Because now you have sports books all over the place where states are accepting gambling. You’ve got fantasy sports where people are able to use their credit cards to invest in competing in that. I am also concerned in this arena that when people don’t know what they’re doing, investing money from credit cards and getting so knee-deep in debt where they’re looking to be that story where you invested $1,000 and all of a sudden it went 5,000% and they think that every single investment out there is going to do that. What is your advice as far as risk versus reward? Yeah, short-termers’ mindset is a killer.

And that is for anybody who’s dabbling in investment. I think the rule of thumb is you never invest more than you’re willing to lose. And that’s something that I... You know, I’m not the first person to say that. I’m probably not the first person to say that on this show.

It really just is a tried and true. And that’s if you’re going to take money and put it into something like cryptocurrency, creating a risk barometer for where you want to be. Some people are capable of taking whatever money they were going to spend on a beer that weekend and throw it into Bitcoin for a mild appreciation. And then other people want to get rich quick and they throw in thousands and thousands of dollars. Mortgaging your house against crypto is not something I would ever advise, right?

Of course. But at the same time, there’s a lot of vertical potential. Just like if there’s a software company that IPOs and you’re able to get in that stock early and it ends up outperforming... Like imagine you got into Tesla early. That would be amazing, right?

Or Bitcoin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You know, you just got to treat it kind of the same way and understand that there are going to be times where this goes down. And I think a lot of people overextend themselves and then bail out when the market gets red and sometimes bail out at a loss. I’m one of those that, you know, I put money in in 2017. I watched it go up. I watched it go down.

It appeared, it evaporated, and then it came back with, you know, full force. But I was ready to ride out a 5-10 year vision. And so if you’re looking to also put something in with a little bit more conviction, I think this is a place where you kind of have to be okay. I’m going to see if this blows up in the next 5 to 10 years or, you know, I’m going to ride it in the dirt. If you’re really caught day trading or trying to guess the market, that’s where things can get really ugly.

Sure. And people can make themselves lose money faster. Absolutely. Absolutely. So listen, we’re going to take a quick break and I want to, are you willing, can you stay with us for a few minutes?

I want to kind of get into wallets a little bit. Yeah, yeah. Totally. Okay, great. So this is The Cambridge Connection.

Cohost intro and closing thoughts

We’re going to take a short break. We’ll be right back. Hey y’all. I’m Gordie as Gordon Oliver’s co-pilot for The Cambridge Connection every Saturday morning. What you might not know is that I’ve known Gordie for a really long time and as a certified credit counselor at Cambridge Credit Counseling for over 20 years, I am thrilled to join Gordie every week to share and chat about real people with real financial problems, along with many success stories, both myself and all of the counselors at Cambridge Credit have been a part of.

We know it takes a village of support and inspiration if someone is struggling financially, so it’s nice to to know if that person is you, that you’re not alone out there. So join us every Saturday at 930 AM right here on WHMP for The Cambridge Connection. Because Gordy and I, we are here to help you have a better relationship with your money and hopefully make you smile. Right, Gordy? Couldn’t have said it better myself, Tina Marie.

Welcome back to The Cambridge Connection. 28 minutes flying by. io here to talk about cryptocurrency. Ben, this has been really great information. And please, will you come back for another show or two to help break this down even more to help protect consumers?

Yeah, I’d love to. And again, really appreciate your time. So before we let you go, can you just give us an elevator pitch on the difference between crypto, Bitcoin, blockchain? Sure. So the most basic way to explain this is cryptocurrency is the currency layer.

Blockchain is the technology. It is the ledger, if you will. And Bitcoin is the first to come out of that whole system. It is the premier asset for trying to solve the value equation. And so it is the thing from which all other cryptocurrencies sprung.

And that said, again, before you go, you obviously have a tremendous amount of knowledge here. Can you please tell our listeners where they can find you on social media and how they can meet up with you if necessary? Sure. So I’m big into the NFT space right now. So my Twitter handle is at the NFTs, spelled T-E-A-S-E.

I have a lot of fun on there. I’m posting mostly about NFTs these days, but I do share a little bit on the cryptocurrency side now and again. Also, I would highly recommend looking at Coinbase. They have a lot of great educational material, as does CoinMarketCap. So those would be my starting blocks if you’re just trying to find your way in this world.

Well, look, we know cryptocurrency is not going away. I mean, you see all the nonsense about, oh, it’s not here to stay. You know it’s here to stay. And we cannot thank you enough for spending this time and truly look forward to future shows with you to help consumers make sure that they’re making honest decisions or at least knowing where they can go to get educated. Yeah, I love it.

Let’s keep people safe. Let’s keep sharing the word about what’s happening out there. It’s the future. I think there’s a financial revolution brewing. Thanks, Ben.

We really appreciate your time today. Thank you, Ben. Thank you. Wow, Tina Marie, take your hands and just stop your head. I know it’s spinning because I just stopped mine.

And we unpacked an awful lot there. And the great news is we’re going to have Ben back again next week so we can break even further into this mystery that is cryptocurrency. I’m excited he agreed to come back because there is so much, so much confusion and just so much out there that we all need to learn. It’s a phenomenon. And we need to understand it.

Like I said earlier, it’s the future. So this is exciting. With that said, I leave with a quote every week. And here we go. Learning how cryptocurrency works is like learning a new language.

It is incredibly difficult at the beginning. But once it clicks, it’ll stick with you forever. And that’s from Oluwole Daniel. Huge thank you to Leah and Lisa, our producers. And as you’re seeing, again, we continue to bring great experts on the horizon to help you, the consumer, understand things like cryptocurrency to lead towards financial wisdom and financial wellness.

Join us Saturdays at 930 AM. com under podcasts or find us on SoundCloud or where you listen to your favorite podcasts. Once again, be part of the conversation. org. And if you need assistance with your credit card and unsecured debts, feel free to call 1-800-CAMBRIDGE.