10 years ago, I graduated Uni with no debt and about $1,000 net worth.
My first job (engineer) paid $100k/yr. After taxes & expenses, I saved $70k per year for 3 years.
With $200k net worth, I lived on $5k per year and for the past 7 years, I worked only 30% of the time – just enough to cover my expenses without dipping into my savings.
This year I sold bitcoin (bought for $7,000. sold for $1,000,000). My target to retire-retire was $800,000, so I've finally reached my goal.
The sell orders executed so fast that I don't know where to put it. I already stuffed every US bank that I have to the $250k FDIC max, but my last sell order exceeds that. I've applied to open bank accounts with maybe 100 banks in the US, and I've only succeeded in opening 1. My requirements:
[1] No monthly fees
[2] No inactivity fees
[3] No phone or phone number required
[4] Online Banking with 2FA support (TOTP, Webauthn, or email)
99% of the banks that I've tried to open with auto-deny me. My credit is great. When I call and ask why, they say something about the information I gave them not matching their records. The ones that have an appeal process told me "the system" denied me, and there's nothing they can do – even supervisors.
My long-term plan is to buy a small condo in a city and a lot of land in the country. But it'll probably take me 6-24 months to find and finish those deals, and in the meantime I want to keep my money somewhere safe.
I'm also a bit worried about the USD tanking. I've looked into banks in Europe and Canada, but Canada requires a tax ID and I only speak English. Can anyone recommend a very stable bank abroad (with English language support) that a US American can open remotely that meets the above requirements?
Where would you put your money if you were in my situation?
Wow! Congrats!
Some things to know. The $250k FDIC limit has been a bit of a joke for decades. If the bank goes under, FDIC covers all deposits, basically everything.
Pay a tax attorney, follow their advice.
Open a Vanguard account put most of it on VTSAX their total stock market index.
Then read. I recommend:
The Richest Man in Babylon A Random Walk Down Wallstreet The Index Card
Then take some time to relax.
From the sound of it, OP sold BTC but hasn't transferred the proceeds off the exchange since they are getting bank accounts in order. If this money is in Coinbase for example, either as USDC or in a USD Wallet, that is not FDIC insured at all. This is significantly riskier than going over the $250k limit at bank with FDIC. The priority should be to get the money off the exchange ASAP, especially as there's maximum daily/weekly/monthly withdrawal amounts, so it will take time. As others have mentioned, you can just open 4-5 accounts with the same institution if the FDIC limit is a concern, but the main concern should be getting the money out of the exchange and then figure out where to keep the money long term later.
Also, be sure to set aside $148,950 for the long term capital gain taxes for April.
Wow, that's a very interesting take. One I'm very skeptical-of..
I try very hard to avoid investing in anything unethical, and when I look at the holdings of VTSAX, I see Apple, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Tesla, JPMorgan Chase, Exxon, Walmart. Fuck, they're even holding stock in UnitedHealtcare.
You got rich off of Bitcoin which destroys the environment just as much as Apple.
The money you deposited in the bank isn't sitting in a vault. Banks don't just loan out the money deposited. The bank is putting part of your money in the market.
My biggest concern about Apple, Amazon, Tesla, and Walmart is their history of abusing workers.
Bitcoin uses magnitudes less energy than the financial industry companies, it doesn't use any additional energy as it scales-up, and most of that is renewable energy. So bitcoin is definitely the ethical option for the environment when it comes to non-physical money (despite the disinformation on the net about this).
I prefer to put my money in credit unions (non-profit banks in the US) that do not invest in war, animal exploitation, or fossil fuels. Most credit unions loan out their money to their local community to support small business. That, bitcoin, and buying stocks in other ethical companies has been my approach to ethical investing.
No, Bitcoin uses 100,000 times the energy per transaction compared to credit cards.
https://buybitcoinworldwide.com/bitcoin-mining-statistics/
It absolutely does use more energy as it scales.
It is currently using 2% of all electricity in the US.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364
The carbon emissions from Bitcoin mining are significant.
https://unu.edu/press-release/un-study-reveals-hidden-environmental-impacts-bitcoin-carbon-not-only-harmful-product
"To offset this footprint, 3.9 billion trees should be planted, covering an area almost equal to the area of the Netherlands, Switzerland, or Denmark or 7% of the Amazon rainforest."
"During this time period, Bitcoin's water footprint was similar to the amount of water required to fill over 660,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools, enough to meet the current domestic water needs of more than 300 million people in rural sub-Saharan Africa."
This is misinformation.
You sold the Bitcoin, you're free of the HODL mentality, and can think rationally again. You don't need to dismiss information because it is critical of cryptocurrency and is counter to your financial interests anymore.
Do you also think smoking tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer? Or that burning fossil fuels doesn't cause climate change?
I am the one thinking rationally. You seem to be incapable of detecting junk science published by big corporations.
It's the same government and university research institutions that say tobacco causes lung cancer that also says Bitcoin uses more energy per transaction than a credit card.
You trust their findings that tobacco causes lung cancer yet you don't trust their findings on crypto.
The key to your misunderstanding is the "per transaction" part. It's a common misconception.
Now look at how much energy the whole financial industry uses. Put it on a line graph next to bitcoin's energy usage. You can almost not even see the blip of bitcoin's energy usage compared to the harm that the financial industry is causing.
Then learn how the energy does not increase as the transactions increases. This is a fact. The difficulty increases. It's mathematical. Read the white paper.
Then maybe you can finally see the lie perpetuated by the financial industry, which is a disaster to our environment compared to the greener alternative of bitcoin.
This is correct, the difficulty doesn't increase proportional to the number of transactions directly, but instead to ensure that blocks are mined every 10 minutes on average. This means that if there are a million miners and a single transaction in a block, the difficulty will be very high, requiring a lot of compute, for just a single transaction. Sure this is unlikely, but illustrates how mining can be disproportionately intensive for a low volume of transactions.
The reason the carbon emissions per transaction is a useful metric is to put into context the environmental impact that would happen if a significant amount of current banking transactions happening now were moved over to using Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency that uses proof of work to mine blocks. This was the intention behind the creation of Bitcoin as outlined in the whitepaper, so it's reasonable to model the environmental impact of continuing to use proof of work for Bitcoin mining at the scale of the financial industry which is where some people want to see Bitcoin be in the future.
If all global monetary transactions moved to Bitcoin, the amount of energy used by bitcoin would not increase, and global emissions caused by financial transactions would decrease by nearly 100%.
So I can start dumping my used motor oil in the local river because looking at "per transaction" pollution is a misconception? As long as it's just me, my friends, and a few large companies profiting by polluting, it's fine, right? Compare me to the entire rest of global pollution and it's insignificant. So with your logic, I'm not damaging the environment.
This analogy is only valid if you don't have a bank account.
It is valid criticism for me to say that I'm moving the bitcoin into the bank account, because that is the equivalent of dumping a truck load of motor oil in the lake, whereas bitcoin is the equivalent of dropping one drop of motor oil in the lake.
I also fly once per year. Honestly that's worse. I'm aware of the harm that I'm causing. I try to minimize it. But bitcoin is far better for the environment than tradfi companies.
No, the analogy is comparing disposing motor oil at the county recycling center which causes some pollution to dumping it in the river which saves me money but causes 100,000 times the pollution.
Using my bank for a transaction causes pollution but 100,000x less than if I used Bitcoin.
You can't say my dumping used oil in the river to make money is wrong then. It's a drop in the ocean compared to what the entire planet does with pollution.
Per transaction energy use is the correct way of looking at the problem.
Imagine you had an alternative like an electric powered jumbo jet that was just as fast and convenient but was 100,000 times less polluting per passenger.
Even in the recent Silicon Valley credit union failure. Where companies had 10s of millions in their accounts, it all got covered. It's literally been decades since the government let account holders loose money in a bank failure. The PR is just too bad to let it happen.
Now in investment banks that's a different story. You control the investments. Not the bank. The value of your account isn't at risk if the bank goes down. Your assets can and would simply be transfered to another investment bank.
Investing isn't condoning. Avoiding certain companies will only cost you money. It won't effect them at all. A broad total stock market fund is the simplest option to start with. After you do more research, you can spread out to more places.
And the BTC network burns massive amounts of energy for no practical purpose.