There wasn't necessarily anything wrong with the current setup.
But an expression that I really like is
"What got you here isn't necessarily going to get you there."
Welcome to BitBoy Crypto!
My name is Ben.
And today we got a very special interview for you guys from iTrustCapital.
This is the top Bitcoin IRA company in the business.
When many other of these companies have been going down insolvent,
they've been playing by the rules the entire time and they've kept all their customers afloat.
Now, this is a sponsored video.
We have been working with iTrustCapital.
So I do want to get that out of the way first.
And thank you to iTrustCapital for supporting the channel
and allowing us to do all the free content that we do.
But what I would say here is pay attention.
You're going to learn things from how to save on taxes,
the different product offerings they have,
how you can go into your retirement maybe sooner rather than later.
And, guys, don't forget,
we've got a link down below in the description
if you guys are interested in anything you hear today.
Make sure to click that link.
Go investigate iTrustCapital and their website,
see if there's anything in there that you like.
And if there is, hey, you know, not financial advice,
maybe you want to go with them.
Alright, guys. Let's go ahead jump into the video.
Hey, guys! Today, we are pleased to be joined by Jared Feldman.
He is the VP of Client Experience at iTrust.
And we're going to be talking about what iTrust is, what they offer,
and a big, new, exciting partnership that they actually have
that's going to allow them to offer more to you, guys.
Let's start with this, Jared. First of all, kind of tell people who you are,
and what is iTrust?
Thanks for having me.
Really excited to be here.
My name is Jared Feldman.
I'm the VP of Client Experience at iTrustCapital.
My background is actually more legacy finance.
So I used to be in the financial planning world,
helping people allocate their savings in the most tax-efficient way possible.
I ended up at iTrustCapital just over two years ago.
And we're an IRA provider.
So we deal with individual retirement accounts only.
We have retirement accounts for just the regular people
who want to fund one.
We also have retirement accounts for people who are self-employed, right?
So business owners who want to be able to make a contribution into a SEP IRA.
So we have different IRA types.
We also have three ways that people can fund an account.
People will make an annual cash contribution
like they normally do to any individual retirement account.
We have people who have IRAs with a current provider,
one of the legacy providers, and they want to move it over
to allocate into our digital assets as well as gold and silver
because we have precious metals, physical precious metals,
on our platform as well.
What about soybeans?
- Not yet. - No? Okay.
We don't have any requests for that.
- We sometimes will get a request or two for palladium. - Okay.
But in terms of precious metals and the commodities, you know,
- people are pretty content with that one. - Okay.
It's a good question though on the soybeans.
Not sure if you're joking, but--
- I was 90% joking, 10% serious. - Not serious.
Fair enough. You never know.
We like to have fun here, I guess.
But, ultimately, we allow individuals to also move over former retirement plans.
So a previous 401(k) or a 403(b) or a 401(a) with an employer that they used to work for,
and then they can move it over to us and roll it over into an IRA.
This usually catches people by surprise
because a lot of folks don't realize that you can actually do that
with one of your previous retirement plans with an old employer.
You can just roll it over to another retirement plan of your choosing
and then be able to self-direct those assets.
I guess one important thing for people to understand here,
it's the most to talk about, the IRA, individual retirement account,
that's what that stands for,
is a way for people to have a cushion, you know, when they get done working.
Maybe hopefully for some of the people in crypto,
they're going to be able retire a little bit earlier than, you know, they would have otherwise.
But what are the benefits of a Bitcoin IRA as opposed to just your normal run-of-the-mill IRA
that most people would have?
So people want to be able to self-direct where their retirement assets are invested into.
So a lot of people are content with investing with a legacy provider.
Maybe they go into a mutual fund,
or maybe they get exposure to crypto through one of the trust products
or other ETF, quasi-ETF products that are out there.
Our platform allows our clients to directly allocate funds into physical crypto.
Now, what do I mean by physical crypto?
- Our-- - A Bitcoin you can hold in your hand.
Well, people can take distributions whenever they'd like.
- Of the crypto itself. - Oh, nice.
So if you have an account with a legacy provider that is offering digital asset exposure,
you can't necessarily take that crypto out.
They make you go back to cash,
whereas our clients, when they're ready for distribution,
let's say it's a required minimum distribution per their retirement,
they can take it out in crypto.
So we'll send them Bitcoin or Ethereum, or any of our digital assets,
to a crypto wallet of their choice, and that can be their RMD for the year.
So it's a really powerful concept that no one else in the game is really offering.
Another really critical component of what we do is the qualified custody of the assets themselves.
There's a lot of regulatory compliance baked into what we do
because we're an IRA provider
and we have to work with a chartered trust company,
the qualified custodian.
So they have to keep their assets off balance sheet.
And that's a really interesting concept that we've always felt really strongly about.
And it wasn't necessarily a sexy concept until the last couple of weeks
where we've had a lot of news coming through about qualified custodianship,
- assets being off balance sheet, - Right.
and people feel really safe by the fact that we have those sort of safeguards in place.
When you look at some of the announcements that have been coming around,
and just in the last year,
a lot of people realized last year that their assets on exchanges were not their assets.
Those are on balance sheet assets.
So if something were to happen to the underlying company,
those assets are actually subject to creditors.
And that's a business move for the exchange or the liquidity provider itself.
For us, it's off balance sheet.
And our qualified custodian keeps everything off balance sheet
as per regulatory compliance standards.
So there's a lot that's, just as I said, baked into the cake
which is a huge boon for our clients and then for our company as well
because we feel like we're very well positioned,
given the direction that regulatory is going right now.
Yeah. I mean, when you look at a lot of the exchanges that were insolvent
over the last year, obviously, FTX, Celsius, Voyager, the whole nine yards,
they were all skirting around a lot of regulatory issues.
But the IRA world is a very, very, very regulated world.
And so picking up what you're putting down here,
is that because of the way the IRAs have already been regulated,
you guys are in a much better position
to allow your clients to have a much safer relationship with their funds.
Correct.
And when the news came out in 2022 with all the insolvencies,
the floodgates opened for us in terms of clients reaching out with question.
- Wanting clarity. - Yeah.
And we really did everything we could.
We produced other videos.
We produced articles.
We made a lot of statements to make it really, really clear where we stood.
- And education is just the most important part of being in the IRA space - Yeah.
and really in the digital asset space as well.
And that's really been the theme of your show, in particular, always,
but really over the last six to 12 months,
it's really become this kind of defensive theme of
"Hey, how can we protect ourselves?"
"What sort of safeguards exist in the industry already
that we can use as building blocks to make everything be, I guess,
a little bit stronger for the next uptick in the crypto markets?"
Yeah. And I think another thing that's really important for people to understand and realize,
one of these benefits of a Bitcoin IRA specifically,
and I would assume, you know, any IRA at large,
are the tax benefits.
Can you talk a little bit about the tax benefits of an IRA as opposed to--
if you had an IRA that, let's say, had 10 Bitcoin in it
as opposed to holding 10 Bitcoin and cashing it out,
like, what are the benefits for tax purposes for holding in the IRA?
Great question. So there's two main types of IRAs.
There's traditional and there's Roth.
When the Roth comes out, when you pull money out of a Roth,
it comes out tax-free.
When you pull the money out of a traditional,
it comes out taxable.
You have to wait until you're 59 and a half for qualified distributions for both.
What they both have in common is the tax sheltering
while the assets are inside of the account.
So let's just cover an example.
If you're trading on a regular exchange outside of an IRA,
and you do very, very well,
and you decide to take some risk off the table because you want to go back into stables
or you want to go back into USD,
if you made money on that,
you're going to be subject to capital gains,
- whether it's short term or long term. - Yeah.
If you do that same transaction in an IRA, you're completely sheltered from taxes.
It's sheltered for any transaction while it's inside the IRA.
So for digital asset investors,
they get to "grow their stack" over time in a tax-sheltered way,
whereas if you're doing the same strategy outside of an IRA,
unfortunately, you're going to be subject to capital gains.
So you're constantly doing that math.
- "Is it profitable? How profitable is it?" - Yeah.
"What's my tax exposure?"
In an IRA, you're not asking those questions.
You're not even reporting the actual transactions themselves.
Yeah. I think that's really good.
I mean, I think it's one of the things where it's the--
the long-term perspective of crypto over the short-term perspective.
If somebody's trying to make flips,
and, you know, you're trying to get a couple Bitcoin out of almost nothing,
then, you know, you're going to want to--
you're going to pay a lot of taxes, but you're going to want to do it a different way.
This is more for the person that is going to believe in this for the long term.
Protect your assets over time, grow your wealth and, you know,
have quite a cushion at some point.
So, lastly, I want to ask you,
you guys have a big partnership that you guys, you know, just signed
and it's going to allow you to offer some new products.
So, if you could kind of go into what that partnership is
and then, you know, what that may potentially allow you guys to do.
For sure.
We announced last week that we're going to be moving to a new qualified custodian,
which is going to be Fortress Trust.
There's a press release.
We have other documentation about it as well.
But it's really big news for us.
We're super excited.
There wasn't necessarily anything wrong with the current setup.
But an expression that I really like is
"What got you here isn't necessarily going to get you there."
- Yeah. - And this is a great example of that
because the custodian that we were using, M2 Trust,
it's a great legacy custodian, self-directed IRAs, alternative assets,
but at the end of the day, we really wanted to align with a trust company
that has modern infrastructure for digital assets
that have people on board who are familiar with how
not just qualified custodianship works with having assets off balance sheet,
but can also help us build and innovate to have new order types, new offerings,
as well as have just much smoother onboarding,
as well as offboarding for people who need to take money out.
So it's really just reflective of our ambition.
We are not complacent.
We didn't just want to sit around and be happy about the fact that
we were one of the companies who are thriving in crypto
while other people were not doing as well.
We want to be able to capitalize on this momentum.
And that's what the move to Fortress was really about.
Glad to hear it. It looks like there's going to be a pretty good result for you guys.
For anybody that wants to sign up for iTrustCapital,
we have a link down below for you guys in the description.
And I think that pretty much sums it up.
I think, Jared, you did a great job by explaining.
I look forward to having somebody from iTrust,
you or someone else, back on the show again in the future.
And is there anything else you kind of want to leave everybody with?
I would just say don't hesitate to reach out to us.
We have an open phone line.
It's a really unique aspect of our platform.
Customer service is something that a lot of people would say is dying in a lot of ways.
And it's something that we're really leaning into.
Whether the market was on the way down or on the way up,
we were there to answer calls and we're here to answer calls now.
So I think that's something that makes us really unique.
And we look forward to hearing from you.
Yeah. I love it. Love the consistency.
That's what, you know, we--
we never slowed down making videos on this channel or educating people
even when the market wasn't good and, you know.
Glad to hear you guys have those same principles.
- So thank you so much for joining us. - Thanks for having me. Take care.
Alright. What an interview that was!
I hope you guys learned a lot.
I know I got a lot out of it myself.
Reminder, if you do want to take advantage of iTrustCapital,
we do have a link down below in the description.
And thank you to iTrust for sponsoring this video.
I look forward to having Jared on the channel again,
maybe on a live stream in the future.
Alright, guys. That's all I got.
Be blessed.
BitBoy out.