The Liquidity Event | Money and Finance with Shane and Ally Jane

Happy Bobby Bonilla Day. Every July 1st, the New York Mets pay Bobby Bonilla $1.2 million, and they will continue to do so until 2035. It is one of the most entertaining stories in the history of sports finance, and it involves Bernie Madoff, a deferred annuity, and a baseball player who got cut in 1999 and is still cashing checks. In Episode 194 of The Liquidity Event, AJ is joined by Kody Sherlu...

AJ is joined by Ethan, BKFi's bookkeeper extraordinaire and tax expert, for a wide-ranging episode recorded on the actual day of the SpaceX IPO. They dig into whether SpaceX should be fast-tracked into the S&P 500, what BKFi clients with the opportunity to buy shares at IPO price should actually be thinking about, and a Brooklyn brownstone being listed for Anthropic stock that is either clever mar...

AJ is fresh off the best concert of her life, and Shane is headed to the World Cup, so episode 192 kicks off with appropriate energy before diving into some of the meatiest topics the pod has covered in a while. They start with a Wall Street Journal piece about an elite retreat where children of ultra-high-net-worth families learn how not to blow their inheritance. AJ renames it Slumlord Training...

AJ is joined by special guest Lauren Makler, co-founder and CEO of Cofertility, for one of the most honest and eye-opening conversations The Liquidity Event has had to date. Lauren spent almost a decade at Uber before founding Cofertility, a company that helps women freeze their eggs for free when they donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents who need an egg donor to have a baby. AJ a...

IPO season is heating up and AJ and Shane West are back after a whirlwind few weeks that included a company retreat upstate, a client event in Williamsburg, the launch of Gemifi at FPA NorCal in San Francisco, and a pod of orcas off the coast of Seattle. In Episode 190 of The Liquidity Event, they dig into Carta's proposal to allow employees to contribute vested equity directly into a 401k or IRA,...

AJ and Shane are back and gearing up for two weeks of back-to-back travel, a BKFi team retreat in New York and the launch of Gemifi at FPA NorCal in San Francisco. They kick off with the SEC proposal to move public companies from quarterly to semi-annual reporting and why the real story is what fewer reporting periods mean for employees with equity compensation and their trading windows. Then they...

AJ is in Minneapolis keynoting at NAPFA, so Shane holds down the fort with BKFi Tax Manager, Tiffini Parker. They kick off with the official end of Spirit Airlines and why its collapse is actually bad news for everyday flyers, then Tiffini gives a behind-the-scenes look at tax season at BKFi, four hundred plus returns filed and one of the smoothest seasons yet. From there, they dig into Deloitte a...

Corporate America is printing money. Everyday Americans are paying $7 for a gallon of gas. And somehow both things are true at the same time. In Episode 187 of The Liquidity Event, AJ and Shane dig into a Wall Street Journal piece on the growing divide between corporate profits and consumer reality, why the Amex CEO's earnings call comments should give everyone pause, and what a 90% marginal tax r...

What if the most important financial conversation you ever have isn't with your advisor, it's with your kids? In Episode 186 of The Liquidity Event, AJ is joined by Charlotte Geletka, CFP and author of the children's book "Battery the Bulldog and the Funny Money Tree," for a wide ranging conversation about raising financially literate kids in a world where cash is disappearing and TikTok is handin...

It's Tax Day, and Shane and Kody are in their element. In Episode 185 of The Liquidity Event, they kick off with a behind-the-scenes look at what tax season actually looks like for financial planners, from correcting misclassified stock options to saving clients tens of thousands of dollars that TurboTax Live told them they owed. They also dig into how Intuit used large language models to compress...

Can you keep your 401k when you move abroad? What happens to your Roth IRA if you live in France? And is a baby registry company really worth watching as an IPO? In Episode 184 of The Liquidity Event, Shane and AJ tackle one of the most common questions they get from American expats and dual citizens: how do you build a retirement plan when you're living abroad, paying taxes in another country, an...

Q1 started strong and then the final stretch changed everything. In Episode 183 of The Liquidity Event, AJ and John break down what actually happened in the markets this quarter, from oil's sharp rise and renewed inflation concerns to why both stocks and bonds felt pressure. They walk through how global conflict impacts commodities, rate cut expectations, and what investors should really be paying...

In Episode 182 of The Liquidity Event, Shane and Kody break down a week of major financial headlines that highlight just how fast markets and technology are shifting. They discuss BuzzFeed's dramatic fall after its aggressive AI pivot, why Coinbase's push into stablecoin yields has traditional banks on edge, and what SpaceX's potential record-breaking IPO could mean for employees and investors ali...

AI is everywhere right now. In IPO markets, in SaaS business models and in your day to day workflow. On this week's episode of The Liquidity Event , Shane and AJ break down why mega IPOs like OpenAI and SpaceX are creating a gravity well in the public markets, what that means for smaller companies waiting to go public and whether the IPO pipeline is actually reopening in 2026. They also dig into t...

On this week's episode of The Liquidity Event , AJ and Shane unpack what's happening at the intersection of AI, financial advice, and investor behavior. Shane joins from the T3 technology conference in New Orleans, where artificial intelligence dominated nearly every conversation. They explore how AI tools are being integrated into advisory firms, whether real-time financial planning during client...

On this week's episode of The Liquidity Event , Shane and AJ break down the viral "Settrini Report," a fictional yet plausible AI scenario that rattled markets and raised serious questions about productivity, white-collar job displacement, and the future of labor's share of GDP. They discuss whether AI pricing is sustainable, what new data center infrastructure means for small-town America, and wh...

Are AI companies about to clash with the U.S. government? On this week's episode of The Liquidity Event , AJ and Shane break down rising tensions between Anthropic and the Pentagon, what it means when an AI company draws ethical lines around military use, and why vendor dependency at scale is becoming a real risk — even for the Department of Defense. They also dig into new data showing Americans o...

Is SpaceX about to break the IPO playbook? And what happens when AI salaries completely reshape relationship dynamics? On this week's episode of The Liquidity Event , Shane is joined by BKFi Senior Tax Associate Ethan Burroff to break down SpaceX's potential $50 billion IPO and what it means for retail investors, equity holders, and tax planning. They also dig into how massive AI compensation is s...

In Episode 176 of The Liquidity Event, Shane is joined by Brooklyn Fi Senior Financial Planner Kody Sherlund to unpack a mix of personal finance headlines and real-world planning questions. They kick things off with an IRS agent who moonlights as an NFL referee and what that says about modern "two-job" America. Then they break down what happens when a 529 plan is overfunded, whether insider stock...

In this episode of The Liquidity Event , Shane is joined by John Owens to dig into wealth, concentration, and how quickly the winners in American capitalism can change. They start with a look at the richest Americans in history, adjusted for inflation, and why names like Rockefeller and Carnegie still matter when thinking about today's tech billionaires. The conversation explores why extreme wealt...

In this episode of The Liquidity Event , AJ is joined by Caitlin, Brooklyn Fi's Director of Financial Planning, to unpack why the math of modern life feels so broken. They start with the true cost of having a stay-at-home parent, breaking down why headlines claiming it only takes $90,000 a year fall apart once you factor in taxes, housing, childcare backups, and real-world spending. From there, th...

Note: This episode is a rebroadcast of Shane Mason's appearance on the Only Fee-Only podcast. This week on The Liquidity Event , we're sharing a rebroadcast of a recent conversation featuring Shane Mason on the Only Fee-Only podcast. In this episode, Shane shares his unconventional founder story, from Big Four tax to touring life, before teaming up with AJ to build Brooklyn FI into a 20-person adv...

In this episode of The Liquidity Event , AJ and Shane cover a wide-ranging mix of energy policy, tax reform, tech culture, and the strange economics of looking younger. They dig into nuclear energy's comeback in the U.S. and why AI, data centers, and crypto are driving a massive surge in energy demand, leaving America far behind countries like China and France. The conversation then shifts to Mitt...

In this episode of The Liquidity Event , AJ and Shane kick off the new year with a wide-ranging conversation that spans data privacy, tax policy, real estate, and retirement planning, with a few dragon-filled detours along the way. They start with California's push to rein in data brokers, breaking down how personal data is bought and sold, why spam calls are nearly impossible to stop, and whether...

In this episode of The Liquidity Event , AJ and Shane kick off the new year by breaking down why leaving New York to avoid taxes is far harder than many high earners expect. Using a recent New York Times article as a starting point, they explain how New York residency audits actually work, the difference between quantitative and qualitative tests, and why most people who try to leave the state ult...