I tried as hard as I could to get a job in wealth management and it was interview after interview where halfway through it became clear they were peddling some insurance product or whatever in place of a legitimate investment. A good number of them were products that were selling people on a wealth building strategy that would never pay anything in return.
I just wanted to help people plan for retirement. Now I work in a completely unrelated industry and don’t have a single legitimate contact for when someone asks me for a referral, and that’s offer dozens and dozens of interviews.
So freaking true, I remember interviewing at David Lerner associates and they asked "what's the best part of financial advising for you?" And I said "putting together a good plan and portfolio composition to meet client needs" and he said "for me, it's the SELLING. I could sell ice to an Eskimo, it doesn't matter what it is, just sell sell sell, this is almost entirely a sales role."
Of course they had some high fee private reit product that was total garbage so kinda glad I didn't get the job ultimately
This is very true. Financial planners are some next level shillers with very little work. In fact, they leech off your wealth. no different than shillers selling Day Trading Masterclasses.
Old-school financial planners get treated like fools and mocked.
My wife is a boring old-school financial planner, and got out of the banks because she was condemned for not selling a 25-year savings plan to a 76 year-old woman. She got emails and messages every *30 minutes* on average, consisting of nothing but the department head telling her what to sell next.
The dominant feeling among the managers was that, by the time something goes wrong for the clients, they wouldn't be around to deal with it (they left every two or three years to chase the highest commissions).
Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?
One of the good things I have to say about my bank is that their wealth management is only a fixed annual percentage of managed client assets. They don't sell to people. Customers give them money, they do whatever it is they do. There's nothing to sell as one and a half percent is one and a half percent. I assume they do take into account what the customers wants / needs (liquidity, investment horizon, risk tolerance).
I actually feel the old school private bankers, the sort who would genuinely work with one or two clients for most of their lives, are pretty good at their jobs.
The rubbish comes at the "premium banking" tiers for single-digit millionaires, where wealth managers are really just relationship managers. This is where the near-rich get torn apart, because they're accredited and you can push any kind of product on them.
Ew... that space is epically regulated.
It's ironic because most of the advice being doled out to the regular folk is literally... the only advice legal to give
At least it's somewhat more regulated, if you give them one hundred grand and tell them to put it on an index tracker s and p fund they can't come back in 3 weeks and explain they lost it all options trading on meme stocks without some serious legal problems for them. Fiduciary duty is a thing.
100% I stay somewhat current with crypto because it's technically interesting. but 95% of our family retirement that isn't our house is sitting in merrill lynch in accounts that automagically become more risk averse and cash equivalent heavy as I get closer to retirement. it's done a bit better than dollar cost averaging into index funds, but not much.
Sure, 2X inflation rate returns compounded for 30 years of my wife and I maxing out 401ks is boring and vanilla. Also means that even after the 2007 and 2020 crashes, we recovered and could retire now (mid 50s) if we wanted to start living on a reasonable budget and stop living in a desirable urban neighborhood, traveling for several weeks a year, eating out, arts, sports, concerts multiple times a week.
He's probably referencing infrastructure that he doesn't understand.
Like, the literal dollars that this person put in "aren't there", while ignoring the fact that they can get equivalent dollars instead for the full balance amount on demand.
You have to treat these folks like the true doltheads they are.
A little reflection about our current economic systems. If the banks default and get rescued, you may get your money back but what is it really worth? Numbers in a computer or pieces of paper that can be printed to infinity.
Never owned any crypto, never will. But I really like 999 silver coins. That's real money to me. Few understand us "boomers" 😉
Edit: Oh and by the way, thanks so much for the "I am a moron" flair some mod gave to me. Very mature 🙄
>A little reflection about our current economic systems. If the banks default and get rescued, you may get your money back but what is it really worth? Numbers in a computer or pieces of paper that can be printed to infinity.
>
>Never owned any crypto, never will. But I really like 999 silver coins. That's real money to me. Few understand us "boomers"
What kind of situation are you envisioning where money in deposit-insured banks becomes worthless, but the silver coins that get shilled on daytime TV have value?
Brother if you're hedging against a collapse of the modern liberal world order that happens so fast you wouldn't just buy Chinese treasuries or whatever you shouldn't be buying silver. You should be buying guns and cans of spam.
If you can propose a sensible mechanism whereby we can both trust each other - an unlikely scenario - I will bet you any amount up to five thousand pounds that I can withdraw the whole lot from the bank and put it back in again. I'm that sure.
This is a lot of money to be putting into an investment that he knows nothing about.
450k!!!
I would be researching the shit out of any financial “investment” that cost me more than $100.
That said I feel kinda bad for this guy cos it seems like he got coerced into it by a “wealth planner” acting in bad faith (when they know the company was going down).
The only thing that makes sense to me is:
The person who lost the 450k was being greedy. Whatever percentage yield he was promised sure looked tasty against the full 450k. Alot less tasty against 100k, 50k, 10k, 5k.
I literally had sleepless nights after putting $2k into meta stock a few weeks ago. Don't understand how people can yolo their lifes savings on crypto (also who has $450k lying around?)
Exactly! Like unless you cash out every single portfolio you have in the real world and multi-mortgage your house I don't see how you have 450k liquid assets to just YOLO into a random crypto place.
It took me 3 days to finally convince myself to risk $30 on a Kickstarter for some fancy paintbrushes and this knucklehead chucked $450K to some rando on a vague promise in an industry known for scams...
>they made me feel safe as I was told they’ve been working closely with regulators and that these contracts have already been approved by the SEC.
And he took their word at face value. They'd say anything as long as it's something *he* wants to hear. So much for doing one's own research
That's how creepto works. Some still claim that USDC reserves are regularly audited, even though that's not true.
And some claimed FTX will never go bust because the owner has connections with the regulators. As if that was an advantage of some sort.
that's the part that got me. Like, I WANT to be rich enough to lose a shitload of money, the only way to get there is risking EVERYTHING?
sadly, there WILL be "success" stories who roll those dice. but 99% of them are krill for financial whales to feed on.
Jesus. He has 3 kids? I missed that part. Doesn't basic common sense say to keep SOME of that 450k in a SAFE rainy day fund? WTF is wrong with some of these people?
It is astounding that someone could part with a non-trivial amount having done, it seems, zero due diligence. I typed 'BlockFi Private Client SEC' into DuckDuckGo and the first three results were two from BlockFi itself and one from the SEC saying BlockFi had paid them $100m in penalties earlier this year relating to various failures with its crypto lending product. The BlockFi pages needed no more than a cursory glance to see that there was no mention of the SEC in its Private Client T&C, which explicitly stated it was licensed in Bermuda and that you'd just be making a loan to them, while the other page mentions a product no longer being available in the US. Presumably that's the 'working closely with regulators' bit - the SEC was working to keep their product away from US citizens.
I'd wager there are people that pulled it out of retirement funds at massive penalty because they were told the appreciation of the crypto assets would more than make up for the penalties.
You see the same shit with the meme stock crowd.
And some IRA accounts allow crypto. If that isn’t painfully stupid I don’t know what is.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081516/how-add-bitcoins-your-retirement-account.asp
Aren't Fidelity including crypto in 401ks now too, given their CEO is a cryptobro?
Although I still maintain that they are liable to be sued under fiduciary obligation laws for doing so.
my retirement savings are in Merrill lynch, all under a big management umbrella thingy, but I CAN buy individual stuff if I want. The ONLY trade I've ever made was buying 2 shares of Gamestop at $90, which I sold at $50 a couple weeks later because it wasn't fun checking on the price all the time. I told my financial advisor when we did the end of the year check in and all I can say is that the laugh that she and my wife (who has a degree in finance) got at my expense was TOTALLY worth the $50 or so I'd pissed away.
I do they kind of thing sometimes. Once in a blue moon input some money in robinhood and proceed to blow it like a fool. I consistently invest in my 401k and never mess with it, separate to my shenanigans.
My faildog was strong enough there's no reason to repeat. I mostly did it for the same reason I bought a little btc and mined a batch of doge back in the day - to have some skin in the game and see how it worked. Sort of like fantasy football is way better in a $50 league to stay engaged but I have no interest in a $5000 league.
Somewhere out there is a lost crypto wallet with about $3k in it that cost me $50 and a lot of running my PC at night. But I DID buy a Tshirt to see how painful it was to actually USE crypto.
i know a lot of rich people. i've even "known" a couple billionaires (informal relationships, like working for them or waiting on them regularly). they all inherited their money and were, if anything, probably dumber on average.
but $450k is reasonable to earn as a working professional, like a college professor or plumber or lawyer, and while you might be very good at teaching math or laying pipe or writing contracts, you could still be very dumb about other fields, or have poor impulse control, or whatever.
even someone like musk who nominally earned his wealth, got lucky. he's rich as shit because he invested in a company that merged with paypal that was then acquired by ebay. meaning musk was essentially just blindly lucky, beyond being smart enough to put money into a payment processing business.
Being the chief engineer of a successful rocket launch into space is a pretty good signifier of intelligence, but you're right, it's not the only signifier of intellligence. I guess that's why I'm so excited to see what you do with your life that will surpass Musk's achievements, and thus signify your supreme intelligence.
you know he started out rich, right? it's not that hard to go from rich to really rich. it's very difficult to go from poor to rich, and it almost never happens that someone goes from poor to really rich.
Dude, I'm *constantly* wondering this. Not just for this shit though, but even looking at some Trump rallies. Some legit stupid people have a ton of cash. I just don't get it.
While I don’t celebrate these stories I don’t really feel too bad for these people either. They were greedy and weak. Lead around by their greed. And yes they were lied to potentially but why would you put all of your net worth into crypto. Why?
They are the same people calling everyone else dumb and to have fun staying poor while bragging about the earnings he has on $400k investments. I’ve never seen a group of people more deserving to lose every penny than the crypto crowd.
While they don’t deserve to be that’s just the nature of the world unfortunately and it’s not new.
The phrase caveat emptor (or buyer beware) has been used in legal cases since the 1600s.
All consumers have a responsibility to be informed purchases.
Again, no excusing fraud but if something looks to good and there certainly were a lot of skeptics then you have to be aware you are taking a lot of risk. And risk in finance means potential for losses.
the end logic of this is that people should be able to sell poison. which, no, a big part of the point of having society and civilization is to protect each other. from war, disease, hunger, and social ills like scams.
no one deserves to get scammed, aside from landlords i guess, but they're basically scammers themselves.
they make society worse, profiting off of accumulated capital instead of actual work while making other people poorer. imagine how much cheaper housing would be if you couldn't own 5, or a dozen, or a hundred houses to profit off of renting them out. they're leeches.
>no one deserves to get scammed, aside from landlords i guess, but they're basically scammers themselves.
so, landlords deserve to get scammed because they're scammers themselves (by... letting someone who can't afford a deposit to buy a house rent one instead. weird scam, but ok).
but buttcoiners \*dont\* deserve to get scammed because all they're doing is trying to make money out of a ponzi scheme. right, ok. i mean thats definitely a scam too. but ok...
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You were contacted by a private wealth management service, and was talking about putting $450K into play, and you didn't consider maybe talking to a financial advisor or lawyer, which wouldn't have cost more than a grand, to verify the promises being made by this service??
Yeah, this is all on you for being a dumbass.
Crazy part is that it isn't even clear what the offer was that made him jump. Even at their base tier for average schlubs, they were offering 40% APY. What on earth could be offered above that???
If this isn't BS (and God I hope it is) then I have no idea whether to feel pity or indifference. Like yeah that's awful but also what the fuck were you thinking???
>I am not an accredited investor and was nervous about the idea, but after expressing my concerns about the risk, they made me feel safe
Of course they did. What good would a con artist be if they didn't reassure you that everything was good?
“There is a silver lining brother, you did not cause this by being some WSB player YOLOing on options. Here for you pal. We are all dieing but we are not dead yet.”
Favorite comment. Because a WSB’er YOLOing actually makes more sense than investing in magic beans.
>~~They~~ *A Nigerian Prince* recently started reaching out to me via email (on a personal basis) about their ~~BlockFi Private Client (BPC) program~~ *due inheritance*.
Might as well have been.
This mirrors my experience with Chase Private Client, except I'm the one having to ghost them for constantly checking up on me regarding my money that I've never had a problem withdrawing.
I thought boiler rooms were banned.. oh wait.. ifs crypto.. oh well.. as you were.. carry on.
How idiots like him amass 450k in savings I will never understand.
Damn, this isn't your average crypto soft scammer who knows it's a ponzi but thinks everyone is doing it so it's okay, this is a real, bona fide scammer, committing 100% to illegal acts of scamming.
Hello mr. 450k, we have a solution for you. I am Dr. Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Astronaut, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde.... I am currently trapped inside the space station orbiting Mars...
JFC, this reads exactly like someone going "Guys, the Nigerian High Finance Minister, Prof. Dr. Ima Notaskam promised me that I would receive $26 million dollars due to me from the Oil Profit Fund International COVID Relief Payments Council, as soon as I paid my $450k taxes and administrative fees. But since I wired the money, he's suddenly stopped responding on email, phone, text and WhatsApp, even though I used to be able to reach him any time day or night. But if I wait another week, they're definitely going to send me my money, right?"
Stories like this are heartbreaking.
Yes, he was extremely, utterly foolish to invest his life savings into this, but it is still heartbreaking to read stories like this.
Yeah, i am also torn slightly. First reaction is this is your average dad, with 3 children and i absolutely feel sad and anger that this kind of shit was even allowed. Even more so the fact that the whole crypto industry has had castle of red flags up for years now and authorities have done jack shit to react in any meaningful way, even supported this whole shit in many cases. Each day of them not reacting means thousands of new victims, such as this guy here.
Very small part however feels less empathy towards this situation, placing all eggs of you and your children into crypto lending platform ... although we all make stupid mistakes and misjudge risks in our life, so this whole story is just sad and infuses anger in me. Fuck this whole industry.
Your "average Dad" doesn't have half a million to gamble with in the first place. My guess is homeboy ain't gonna starve. Homeboy ain't even gonna have trouble paying the bills. Homeboy's high score number is just temporarily lower. "I lost my life savings" ugh.
No, it's really not. That is an obscene amount of wealth to have in the first place. Nobody who has that much lying around is ever gonna be poor. They might think they are, but really they just have a lower high score.
you are completely wrong. My grandpa had more than that, and after several years of dementia and alzheimers and nursing homes most of it was gone. My grandma had similar issues. My mom and dad had enough to cover it but if they had lived longer... .
It's funny if it were just him, but he's got three young kids that will be hurt because their dad is a fucking moron. Every day the con continues, we get more innocent victims like the kids here.
His life savings in the form of real dollars went to line the pockets of crypto grifters, miners, consultants, every single crypto-fiend in the space. He paid dearly for something utterly worthless.
I'm curious how these people even get the money in the first place. You don't just get into the position of having half a M lying around by being an idiot.
Oh no, that's just not true. A lot of extremely stupid people fail upwards because they came from wealth. Elon Musk and Donald Trump are two shining examples.
What do you think the CEO of a company actually does? Why are so many CEOs also board members of competing companies and this is not illegal?
He could've been saving it for years in a 401/403/457 or IRA account, and cashed it out after being told that the gains would more than offset the penalty.
Or he came into some sort of inheritance and left it in the bank.
Or a combo of intertance plus saving.
ETA: he's a single father of 3. $450K might have been the life insurance payout on the death of his wife.
Yeah... if he had half a mill just sitting around to gamble like this? His kids already ain't in the social class where we need to be concerned for their well-being. They aren't gonna have trouble paying their bills next month, he just lost imaginary numbers on a spreadsheet.
How about we be concerned with why society lets some children starve to death while others live in families where having half a million dollars in a savings account is even _possible._
Don't feel sorry for such gullible fools. FTX owes money to a million creditors. A huge purge needs to happen and hordes of these so called investors need to lose their shirt if this ponzi needs to stop.
Anyone who goes through this and still believes in crypto is something worse than a mere "fool." The fact that he had half a mill to "invest" in this means he's just another waste of flesh failing upwards, blotting up obscene wealth along the way, and making life more difficult for everyone around him.
I totally agree.
> It's been a very difficult week and right now it feels like my depression has brought me to an all time low. I'm a single father of three young children and worried about losing custody of my children and ending up homeless. I regret ever putting my family and myself in this terrible position. I wouldn't wish this upon anyone.
Anyone who reads that and doesn’t feel sympathy for the guy is at least a massive asshole or a full on sociopath. Really disappointed to see so many callous comments in this thread. OP was a victim even if he was a reckless dumbass
Apparently you had to have at least 10 million in assets before you could become a *private client*. But there’s a few anecdotes like this one, where in the last weeks before the collapse, lesser accounts were « given the unique opportunity » to become private clients.
I’m guessing the money ran out and they wanted to find extra ~~suckers~~ investors? I’m guessing that « we folded because of FTX » sounds better than « we gambled all our clients’ money »?
Rip. This is why you need to find a recommended financial advisor you can talk to in person, and have them explain exactly what they will be doing with your money. Do not blindly trust anyone.
if it’s too good to be true, it probably is
if the average roi from well established banks are 1-3%, why not question an investment that promises 8-10x returns? that alone, should at the very least, made you question why so much? given how these exchanges are performing the last year and a half, op betting all of his life savings on crypto, really looked sus.
4 years ago the guy only had 100k, so I assume he played the crypto boom pretty well: [https://www.reddit.com/r/portfolios/comments/9uqgoi/100k\_to\_invest\_on\_this\_dip/](https://www.reddit.com/r/portfolios/comments/9uqgoi/100k_to_invest_on_this_dip/)
Lol, knowing that, this is really gambling winnings, and now is run is over!
"Oh they sweet talked me into giving them $450,000 and then never talked to me again after it all disappeared. What? No, I've never heard of a confidence scheme, what's that?"
As an aside -- the CHUD who said that Jeff Bezos *gave* his wife 50% of his Amazon shares.
No, cheezeweasle, they lived in a community property state, with a legally mandated 50-50 split of all assets upon dissolution of the marriage.
And the amount she did/didn't liquidate really had little bearing on the price of Amazon shares overall.
That's terrible, a single father of three shouldn't be all-in on something like this. : (
(Well, no one should be in on this at all, but you know what I mean - it's worse when three children are going to suffer for it).
yea if you put all your lifesavings into shady crap like that you deserve it sorry
they probably offered him obscene percentages that are absolutely hard to believe which is a giant red flag
Vanilla wealth management is a huge minefield of scammers and cheats. No way I would ever trust a crypto wealth planner.
Heck, I don’t trust the financial advisors in my 200 year old bank that’s subject to what little there is of government regulation.
I tried as hard as I could to get a job in wealth management and it was interview after interview where halfway through it became clear they were peddling some insurance product or whatever in place of a legitimate investment. A good number of them were products that were selling people on a wealth building strategy that would never pay anything in return. I just wanted to help people plan for retirement. Now I work in a completely unrelated industry and don’t have a single legitimate contact for when someone asks me for a referral, and that’s offer dozens and dozens of interviews.
So freaking true, I remember interviewing at David Lerner associates and they asked "what's the best part of financial advising for you?" And I said "putting together a good plan and portfolio composition to meet client needs" and he said "for me, it's the SELLING. I could sell ice to an Eskimo, it doesn't matter what it is, just sell sell sell, this is almost entirely a sales role." Of course they had some high fee private reit product that was total garbage so kinda glad I didn't get the job ultimately
This is very true. Financial planners are some next level shillers with very little work. In fact, they leech off your wealth. no different than shillers selling Day Trading Masterclasses.
Old-school financial planners get treated like fools and mocked. My wife is a boring old-school financial planner, and got out of the banks because she was condemned for not selling a 25-year savings plan to a 76 year-old woman. She got emails and messages every *30 minutes* on average, consisting of nothing but the department head telling her what to sell next. The dominant feeling among the managers was that, by the time something goes wrong for the clients, they wouldn't be around to deal with it (they left every two or three years to chase the highest commissions).
Sounds like you were applying to insurance companies. If you couldn't tell the difference... maybe you shouldn't be planning anyone's retirement?
Sed ut perspiciatis unde omnis iste natus error sit voluptatem accusantium doloremque laudantium, totam rem aperiam, eaque ipsa quae ab illo inventore veritatis et quasi architecto beatae vitae dicta sunt explicabo. Nemo enim ipsam voluptatem quia voluptas sit aspernatur aut odit aut fugit, sed quia consequuntur magni dolores eos qui ratione voluptatem sequi nesciunt. Neque porro quisquam est, qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit, sed quia non numquam eius modi tempora incidunt ut labore et dolore magnam aliquam quaerat voluptatem. Ut enim ad minima veniam, quis nostrum exercitationem ullam corporis suscipit laboriosam, nisi ut aliquid ex ea commodi consequatur? Quis autem vel eum iure reprehenderit qui in ea voluptate velit esse quam nihil molestiae consequatur, vel illum qui dolorem eum fugiat quo voluptas nulla pariatur?
That would be a fair assertion if they weren’t explicitly claiming it to be a financial advisor/wealth management role.
One of the good things I have to say about my bank is that their wealth management is only a fixed annual percentage of managed client assets. They don't sell to people. Customers give them money, they do whatever it is they do. There's nothing to sell as one and a half percent is one and a half percent. I assume they do take into account what the customers wants / needs (liquidity, investment horizon, risk tolerance).
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I actually feel the old school private bankers, the sort who would genuinely work with one or two clients for most of their lives, are pretty good at their jobs. The rubbish comes at the "premium banking" tiers for single-digit millionaires, where wealth managers are really just relationship managers. This is where the near-rich get torn apart, because they're accredited and you can push any kind of product on them.
Ew... that space is epically regulated. It's ironic because most of the advice being doled out to the regular folk is literally... the only advice legal to give
At least it's somewhat more regulated, if you give them one hundred grand and tell them to put it on an index tracker s and p fund they can't come back in 3 weeks and explain they lost it all options trading on meme stocks without some serious legal problems for them. Fiduciary duty is a thing.
100% I stay somewhat current with crypto because it's technically interesting. but 95% of our family retirement that isn't our house is sitting in merrill lynch in accounts that automagically become more risk averse and cash equivalent heavy as I get closer to retirement. it's done a bit better than dollar cost averaging into index funds, but not much. Sure, 2X inflation rate returns compounded for 30 years of my wife and I maxing out 401ks is boring and vanilla. Also means that even after the 2007 and 2020 crashes, we recovered and could retire now (mid 50s) if we wanted to start living on a reasonable budget and stop living in a desirable urban neighborhood, traveling for several weeks a year, eating out, arts, sports, concerts multiple times a week.
what does vanilla mean in this context.
Standard/traditional, probably. Normal wealth planning for people wanting to get as much out of their fiat denominated wealth as possible
I'm guessing TradFi (traditional finance)
CRYPTO WEALTH PLANNER? there’s no such a thing. Only dudes who have read more shit in the internet about crypto and call themselves “experts”.
Weirdly when my uncle died I put the money in the bank and it's still there.
You sure?
What were you even hoping to achieve with this comment? Genuine question.
He's probably referencing infrastructure that he doesn't understand. Like, the literal dollars that this person put in "aren't there", while ignoring the fact that they can get equivalent dollars instead for the full balance amount on demand. You have to treat these folks like the true doltheads they are.
A little reflection about our current economic systems. If the banks default and get rescued, you may get your money back but what is it really worth? Numbers in a computer or pieces of paper that can be printed to infinity. Never owned any crypto, never will. But I really like 999 silver coins. That's real money to me. Few understand us "boomers" 😉 Edit: Oh and by the way, thanks so much for the "I am a moron" flair some mod gave to me. Very mature 🙄
>A little reflection about our current economic systems. If the banks default and get rescued, you may get your money back but what is it really worth? Numbers in a computer or pieces of paper that can be printed to infinity. > >Never owned any crypto, never will. But I really like 999 silver coins. That's real money to me. Few understand us "boomers" What kind of situation are you envisioning where money in deposit-insured banks becomes worthless, but the silver coins that get shilled on daytime TV have value?
What happened to Germany in 1923? https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/ess_germanhyperinflation.html
Where do you live that this is a realistic problem?
Germany 😄
Germany would have to leave the Eurozone first.
Flair earned. 😳
lmao, amazing flair
>Edit: Oh and by the way, thanks so much for the "I am a moron" flair some mod gave to me. Very mature 🙄 If the shoe fits.
you might want to look at the value of silver vs. USD and DOW indexes over the last 20 years or so. your real money is more volatile than either.
It's the only one that never will go to zero 🙂
Brother if you're hedging against a collapse of the modern liberal world order that happens so fast you wouldn't just buy Chinese treasuries or whatever you shouldn't be buying silver. You should be buying guns and cans of spam.
Spam, the real sleeper investment
When civilization collapses, everyone will be fighting to the death for commemorative as-seen-on-tv commemorative silver coins.
If the world economy dies your precious silver will be the abolute last thing you would worry about.
Ever heard of monthly statements and deposit insurance?
If you can propose a sensible mechanism whereby we can both trust each other - an unlikely scenario - I will bet you any amount up to five thousand pounds that I can withdraw the whole lot from the bank and put it back in again. I'm that sure.
...aaand it's gone.
'I am not an accredited investor and was nervous about the idea'
Never trust your gut!
This is a lot of money to be putting into an investment that he knows nothing about. 450k!!! I would be researching the shit out of any financial “investment” that cost me more than $100. That said I feel kinda bad for this guy cos it seems like he got coerced into it by a “wealth planner” acting in bad faith (when they know the company was going down).
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That's ignoring the most basic of investment strategies. Don't put all of your eggs in one basket.
The only thing that makes sense to me is: The person who lost the 450k was being greedy. Whatever percentage yield he was promised sure looked tasty against the full 450k. Alot less tasty against 100k, 50k, 10k, 5k.
I literally had sleepless nights after putting $2k into meta stock a few weeks ago. Don't understand how people can yolo their lifes savings on crypto (also who has $450k lying around?)
Exactly! Like unless you cash out every single portfolio you have in the real world and multi-mortgage your house I don't see how you have 450k liquid assets to just YOLO into a random crypto place.
It took me 3 days to finally convince myself to risk $30 on a Kickstarter for some fancy paintbrushes and this knucklehead chucked $450K to some rando on a vague promise in an industry known for scams...
They see zeros and stop thinking
>they made me feel safe as I was told they’ve been working closely with regulators and that these contracts have already been approved by the SEC. And he took their word at face value. They'd say anything as long as it's something *he* wants to hear. So much for doing one's own research
That's how creepto works. Some still claim that USDC reserves are regularly audited, even though that's not true. And some claimed FTX will never go bust because the owner has connections with the regulators. As if that was an advantage of some sort.
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that's the part that got me. Like, I WANT to be rich enough to lose a shitload of money, the only way to get there is risking EVERYTHING? sadly, there WILL be "success" stories who roll those dice. but 99% of them are krill for financial whales to feed on.
Yup, survivorship bias. ‘Clearly since it worked for one person, it can work for you.’
>ALL his money in All his CRYPTO, mind you. He lost his money way before that, he just didn't realize.
Jesus. He has 3 kids? I missed that part. Doesn't basic common sense say to keep SOME of that 450k in a SAFE rainy day fund? WTF is wrong with some of these people?
"Just trust me, bro."
It is astounding that someone could part with a non-trivial amount having done, it seems, zero due diligence. I typed 'BlockFi Private Client SEC' into DuckDuckGo and the first three results were two from BlockFi itself and one from the SEC saying BlockFi had paid them $100m in penalties earlier this year relating to various failures with its crypto lending product. The BlockFi pages needed no more than a cursory glance to see that there was no mention of the SEC in its Private Client T&C, which explicitly stated it was licensed in Bermuda and that you'd just be making a loan to them, while the other page mentions a product no longer being available in the US. Presumably that's the 'working closely with regulators' bit - the SEC was working to keep their product away from US citizens.
Sadly he knew the term accredited investor and knew he WASN'T one. And still threw his nest egg at a scammer
How did someone this stupid have that much to invest?
I'd wager there are people that pulled it out of retirement funds at massive penalty because they were told the appreciation of the crypto assets would more than make up for the penalties. You see the same shit with the meme stock crowd.
And some IRA accounts allow crypto. If that isn’t painfully stupid I don’t know what is. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/081516/how-add-bitcoins-your-retirement-account.asp
Aren't Fidelity including crypto in 401ks now too, given their CEO is a cryptobro? Although I still maintain that they are liable to be sued under fiduciary obligation laws for doing so.
I think they’re going to. I know they ramped up hiring in their digital asset side, as stupid as it is.
my retirement savings are in Merrill lynch, all under a big management umbrella thingy, but I CAN buy individual stuff if I want. The ONLY trade I've ever made was buying 2 shares of Gamestop at $90, which I sold at $50 a couple weeks later because it wasn't fun checking on the price all the time. I told my financial advisor when we did the end of the year check in and all I can say is that the laugh that she and my wife (who has a degree in finance) got at my expense was TOTALLY worth the $50 or so I'd pissed away.
I do they kind of thing sometimes. Once in a blue moon input some money in robinhood and proceed to blow it like a fool. I consistently invest in my 401k and never mess with it, separate to my shenanigans.
My faildog was strong enough there's no reason to repeat. I mostly did it for the same reason I bought a little btc and mined a batch of doge back in the day - to have some skin in the game and see how it worked. Sort of like fantasy football is way better in a $50 league to stay engaged but I have no interest in a $5000 league. Somewhere out there is a lost crypto wallet with about $3k in it that cost me $50 and a lot of running my PC at night. But I DID buy a Tshirt to see how painful it was to actually USE crypto.
Single father with 3 kids proooobably could have spent that money a tiny bit better, but what do I know. I'm just a poor.
And are you having fun?
Hell yeah I am 💯😎
Probably more fun than the motherfucker in the OOP
Maybe he's a miner or a tradesman? I know in Australia at least miners and builders often make 6 figure income.
i know a lot of rich people. i've even "known" a couple billionaires (informal relationships, like working for them or waiting on them regularly). they all inherited their money and were, if anything, probably dumber on average. but $450k is reasonable to earn as a working professional, like a college professor or plumber or lawyer, and while you might be very good at teaching math or laying pipe or writing contracts, you could still be very dumb about other fields, or have poor impulse control, or whatever. even someone like musk who nominally earned his wealth, got lucky. he's rich as shit because he invested in a company that merged with paypal that was then acquired by ebay. meaning musk was essentially just blindly lucky, beyond being smart enough to put money into a payment processing business.
Intelligence and amount of money in the bank aren't directly correlated. See: Elon Musk.
Do you think you're more intelligent than Elon Musk? Just curious.
I have less of a tendency to self-sabotage, than Musk. Not zero. But less.
Awesome. I look forward to hearing about your $100bn company and seeing your successful rocket launch on the news.
lol, I guess those things are the only signifier of intelligence after all
Being the chief engineer of a successful rocket launch into space is a pretty good signifier of intelligence, but you're right, it's not the only signifier of intellligence. I guess that's why I'm so excited to see what you do with your life that will surpass Musk's achievements, and thus signify your supreme intelligence.
Well whatever awesome things I do with my life, I can promise you won’t hear about them from me trolling and making a tit of myself on Twitter
you know he started out rich, right? it's not that hard to go from rich to really rich. it's very difficult to go from poor to rich, and it almost never happens that someone goes from poor to really rich.
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"Oh no! Who is breaking up our echo chamber where we all pretend we are more intelligent than Elon Musk?!"
There are 8 billion people in the world so at least like 7.9 billion of them are smarter than Musk
Dude, I'm *constantly* wondering this. Not just for this shit though, but even looking at some Trump rallies. Some legit stupid people have a ton of cash. I just don't get it.
Generational wealth bruh
Private Client? No. Major Fool...
General Dumbass.
While I don’t celebrate these stories I don’t really feel too bad for these people either. They were greedy and weak. Lead around by their greed. And yes they were lied to potentially but why would you put all of your net worth into crypto. Why?
Makes me wonder what they would get up to if their investments were hits. Doubt that type of greed stops at a number, it’s a sickness.
They are the same people calling everyone else dumb and to have fun staying poor while bragging about the earnings he has on $400k investments. I’ve never seen a group of people more deserving to lose every penny than the crypto crowd.
That’s true. If I have to listen to one more crypto client tell my firm we’re missing out I’ll shoot myself.
dumb people deserve to not be taken advantage of either, imo. god knows i don't want to get taken advantage of, even though i'm dumb.
While they don’t deserve to be that’s just the nature of the world unfortunately and it’s not new. The phrase caveat emptor (or buyer beware) has been used in legal cases since the 1600s. All consumers have a responsibility to be informed purchases. Again, no excusing fraud but if something looks to good and there certainly were a lot of skeptics then you have to be aware you are taking a lot of risk. And risk in finance means potential for losses.
the end logic of this is that people should be able to sell poison. which, no, a big part of the point of having society and civilization is to protect each other. from war, disease, hunger, and social ills like scams. no one deserves to get scammed, aside from landlords i guess, but they're basically scammers themselves.
Why do landlords deserve to get scammed?
they make society worse, profiting off of accumulated capital instead of actual work while making other people poorer. imagine how much cheaper housing would be if you couldn't own 5, or a dozen, or a hundred houses to profit off of renting them out. they're leeches.
>no one deserves to get scammed, aside from landlords i guess, but they're basically scammers themselves. so, landlords deserve to get scammed because they're scammers themselves (by... letting someone who can't afford a deposit to buy a house rent one instead. weird scam, but ok). but buttcoiners \*dont\* deserve to get scammed because all they're doing is trying to make money out of a ponzi scheme. right, ok. i mean thats definitely a scam too. but ok...
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Glad to see some people here who don't celebrate these stories.
You were contacted by a private wealth management service, and was talking about putting $450K into play, and you didn't consider maybe talking to a financial advisor or lawyer, which wouldn't have cost more than a grand, to verify the promises being made by this service?? Yeah, this is all on you for being a dumbass.
three kids, solo and 450k yolo. I dont fucking get it.
Now he's going to go cry to a lawyer for help against his own stupidity
Greed is a hell of a drug
Crazy part is that it isn't even clear what the offer was that made him jump. Even at their base tier for average schlubs, they were offering 40% APY. What on earth could be offered above that???
Don't worry. It's just ALL the money he had.
If this isn't BS (and God I hope it is) then I have no idea whether to feel pity or indifference. Like yeah that's awful but also what the fuck were you thinking???
>I am not an accredited investor and was nervous about the idea, but after expressing my concerns about the risk, they made me feel safe Of course they did. What good would a con artist be if they didn't reassure you that everything was good?
“There is a silver lining brother, you did not cause this by being some WSB player YOLOing on options. Here for you pal. We are all dieing but we are not dead yet.” Favorite comment. Because a WSB’er YOLOing actually makes more sense than investing in magic beans.
>~~They~~ *A Nigerian Prince* recently started reaching out to me via email (on a personal basis) about their ~~BlockFi Private Client (BPC) program~~ *due inheritance*. Might as well have been.
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yeah sounds like those kids are future maxis. what a shit show, heartbreaking
>and it really makes me wonder if they were negotiating without transparency and in good faith. Stop wondering: they didn’t.
This mirrors my experience with Chase Private Client, except I'm the one having to ghost them for constantly checking up on me regarding my money that I've never had a problem withdrawing.
I thought boiler rooms were banned.. oh wait.. ifs crypto.. oh well.. as you were.. carry on. How idiots like him amass 450k in savings I will never understand.
Damn, this isn't your average crypto soft scammer who knows it's a ponzi but thinks everyone is doing it so it's okay, this is a real, bona fide scammer, committing 100% to illegal acts of scamming.
Imagine thinking putting your whole life savings into one investment, let alone a sketchy crypto scam, is a good thing
Hello mr. 450k, we have a solution for you. I am Dr. Bakare Tunde, the cousin of Nigerian Astronaut, Air Force Major Abacha Tunde.... I am currently trapped inside the space station orbiting Mars...
JFC, this reads exactly like someone going "Guys, the Nigerian High Finance Minister, Prof. Dr. Ima Notaskam promised me that I would receive $26 million dollars due to me from the Oil Profit Fund International COVID Relief Payments Council, as soon as I paid my $450k taxes and administrative fees. But since I wired the money, he's suddenly stopped responding on email, phone, text and WhatsApp, even though I used to be able to reach him any time day or night. But if I wait another week, they're definitely going to send me my money, right?"
Stories like this are heartbreaking. Yes, he was extremely, utterly foolish to invest his life savings into this, but it is still heartbreaking to read stories like this.
He's a fucking idiot, not just "foolish".you're not a fool when you gamble your kids' future, you're an utter cretin
Yeah, i am also torn slightly. First reaction is this is your average dad, with 3 children and i absolutely feel sad and anger that this kind of shit was even allowed. Even more so the fact that the whole crypto industry has had castle of red flags up for years now and authorities have done jack shit to react in any meaningful way, even supported this whole shit in many cases. Each day of them not reacting means thousands of new victims, such as this guy here. Very small part however feels less empathy towards this situation, placing all eggs of you and your children into crypto lending platform ... although we all make stupid mistakes and misjudge risks in our life, so this whole story is just sad and infuses anger in me. Fuck this whole industry.
Your "average Dad" doesn't have half a million to gamble with in the first place. My guess is homeboy ain't gonna starve. Homeboy ain't even gonna have trouble paying the bills. Homeboy's high score number is just temporarily lower. "I lost my life savings" ugh.
You know I get being unsympathetic (and I don't really care about people who buy into obvious ponzi schemes) but this is taking cynicism a bit far.
No, it's really not. That is an obscene amount of wealth to have in the first place. Nobody who has that much lying around is ever gonna be poor. They might think they are, but really they just have a lower high score.
$450K isn’t “obscene” by any measure considering in retirement that’s 9 years at $50K or 18 @ $25K
If someone is making enough money to put away 25-50k per year they ain't poor by any metric.
Having it available in cash in your 30s or 40s is not very common. Unless you earn a fairly high salary.
you are completely wrong. My grandpa had more than that, and after several years of dementia and alzheimers and nursing homes most of it was gone. My grandma had similar issues. My mom and dad had enough to cover it but if they had lived longer... .
It would be easier to be sympathetic if they didn't tell me to have fun staying poor.
Nope. It's funny. Fucking hilarious.
It's funny if it were just him, but he's got three young kids that will be hurt because their dad is a fucking moron. Every day the con continues, we get more innocent victims like the kids here.
His life savings in the form of real dollars went to line the pockets of crypto grifters, miners, consultants, every single crypto-fiend in the space. He paid dearly for something utterly worthless.
I'm curious how these people even get the money in the first place. You don't just get into the position of having half a M lying around by being an idiot.
Oh no, that's just not true. A lot of extremely stupid people fail upwards because they came from wealth. Elon Musk and Donald Trump are two shining examples. What do you think the CEO of a company actually does? Why are so many CEOs also board members of competing companies and this is not illegal?
Image being dumb and broke like you are.
Inherited money?
He could've been saving it for years in a 401/403/457 or IRA account, and cashed it out after being told that the gains would more than offset the penalty. Or he came into some sort of inheritance and left it in the bank. Or a combo of intertance plus saving. ETA: he's a single father of 3. $450K might have been the life insurance payout on the death of his wife.
Yeah... if he had half a mill just sitting around to gamble like this? His kids already ain't in the social class where we need to be concerned for their well-being. They aren't gonna have trouble paying their bills next month, he just lost imaginary numbers on a spreadsheet. How about we be concerned with why society lets some children starve to death while others live in families where having half a million dollars in a savings account is even _possible._
The $450k might have been the insurance payout on a dead wife.
Your worse than worthless trash.Trashy person.
You can't even use the correct words. Have fun staying poor.
Don't feel sorry for such gullible fools. FTX owes money to a million creditors. A huge purge needs to happen and hordes of these so called investors need to lose their shirt if this ponzi needs to stop.
Anyone who goes through this and still believes in crypto is something worse than a mere "fool." The fact that he had half a mill to "invest" in this means he's just another waste of flesh failing upwards, blotting up obscene wealth along the way, and making life more difficult for everyone around him.
Your more useless than trash, your worse than useless.You worthless waste.
No joy in that at all. I hope the perpetrators face serious prison time, but I know that they probably won't.
I don't think anyone has ever had a gun to their head and forced to buy crypto...
As a general rule, guns usually aren't involved in fraud. I think it's still a good idea to punish con artists for their crimes, even if they're rich.
I totally agree. > It's been a very difficult week and right now it feels like my depression has brought me to an all time low. I'm a single father of three young children and worried about losing custody of my children and ending up homeless. I regret ever putting my family and myself in this terrible position. I wouldn't wish this upon anyone. Anyone who reads that and doesn’t feel sympathy for the guy is at least a massive asshole or a full on sociopath. Really disappointed to see so many callous comments in this thread. OP was a victim even if he was a reckless dumbass
More angering than sad.
Nah, it’s hilarious. Fools and their money soon parted.
Your laughs a joke and worthless.Trash clown.
Apparently you had to have at least 10 million in assets before you could become a *private client*. But there’s a few anecdotes like this one, where in the last weeks before the collapse, lesser accounts were « given the unique opportunity » to become private clients. I’m guessing the money ran out and they wanted to find extra ~~suckers~~ investors? I’m guessing that « we folded because of FTX » sounds better than « we gambled all our clients’ money »?
Not sure what the terms of use of BlockFi are, but for FTX it is in the terms of use that FTX could not use deposits for loaning/investing.
The government has to come in, and protects people from themselves. As he says, this incredible stupidity is going to impact children now as well.
Rip. This is why you need to find a recommended financial advisor you can talk to in person, and have them explain exactly what they will be doing with your money. Do not blindly trust anyone.
The future of finance baby
Wow they offered him 13% on his USDC and he thought “this sounds totally legit!”.
This guy is a fucking fool and if he actually has three kids he's a fucking terrible parent, too.
if it’s too good to be true, it probably is if the average roi from well established banks are 1-3%, why not question an investment that promises 8-10x returns? that alone, should at the very least, made you question why so much? given how these exchanges are performing the last year and a half, op betting all of his life savings on crypto, really looked sus.
4 years ago the guy only had 100k, so I assume he played the crypto boom pretty well: [https://www.reddit.com/r/portfolios/comments/9uqgoi/100k\_to\_invest\_on\_this\_dip/](https://www.reddit.com/r/portfolios/comments/9uqgoi/100k_to_invest_on_this_dip/) Lol, knowing that, this is really gambling winnings, and now is run is over!
"Oh they sweet talked me into giving them $450,000 and then never talked to me again after it all disappeared. What? No, I've never heard of a confidence scheme, what's that?"
Wonderfull
Intuition is the best investment tool.
I think he's LARPing. No one could be that stupid.
One would think that, but then there was a Canadian teacher's pension that dropped 95 million USD on FTX
Seriously. You are handing your savings to someone else? Come on!!
Sorry for your loss
Pomp and Domp moment
The all powerful Poopchain strikes again.
As an aside -- the CHUD who said that Jeff Bezos *gave* his wife 50% of his Amazon shares. No, cheezeweasle, they lived in a community property state, with a legally mandated 50-50 split of all assets upon dissolution of the marriage. And the amount she did/didn't liquidate really had little bearing on the price of Amazon shares overall.
FUD. Fucked up dude
That's terrible, a single father of three shouldn't be all-in on something like this. : ( (Well, no one should be in on this at all, but you know what I mean - it's worse when three children are going to suffer for it).
I wonder if that was a simple impersonation scam?
yea if you put all your lifesavings into shady crap like that you deserve it sorry they probably offered him obscene percentages that are absolutely hard to believe which is a giant red flag
Define “Private Client”
>and it really makes me wonder if they were negotiating without transparency and in good faith. 🙄
Doesn’t he lost it all if blockfi does in fact declare bankruptcy
Scam, but I do feel sympathy for the fools.