Financial education has been left out of the US school system yet experience with money may be the single most important life skill. It's no surprise the US banking system mirrors this unexplainable exclusion. There's math, science, social studies & English in every grade but finance is always absent. The unspoken message is kids are not responsible and capable enough to handle their own money until they finish high school and start learning it on their own. They can't open a bank account until the age of 18 so why teach money in grades K-12? Can you sense the sarcasm?

Learning

In all fairness financial education is starting to creep in albeit sometimes from third party groups or clubs. It's hard to give this much credit though when money and finance should be right beside math and science. Young people can have a savings account in their name, but they can't make any withdraws. So they are allowed to learn one thing, how to save money. Saving money is one dimensional and...

I couldn't believe how fast the Banking Burnout Bonanza™ (BBB) struck again since the last blog. This one's been going for awhile though since March of 2016. It took 6 months before I got back to solving it again so you know it's a good one. By stories end l'll once again demonstrate how bitcoin effortlessly solves this headache. 

BBB Review

It never hurts to review the basics of the Banking Burnout Bonanza™ so here they are again:

1) Wait a long time to use your money

2) Pay lots of fees to use your money

3) Have lots of headaches to use your money 

A One Off

Unfortunately, I was paying one lonely bill via big bank online bill pay. This is the kind of bill pay where you click pay but a check spits out into the mail. Everybody is bound to have at least one of these for one reason or another. Surprisingly this worked for 2 years until the inevitable breakdown began. 

Vendor Call

One day the vendor emailed saying they hadn't received 2 months of payments....

For a W-2 employee or a classic under the table cash guy nothing feels better than getting paid on Friday after work. But don't get me wrong 'cause that's not what I'm talkin' about. I'm talkin' about a business that delivers services on terms and then waits to get paid. Actually it's more like hopes to get paid. Businesses shell out cash delivering excellent service to customers and then find themselves in a cash flow squeeze play.

47 Days Later

Back in July 2016 we completed a bitcoin tax and accounting engagement for our client, Coin Rack, LLC, and we proceeded to bill for the remaining 50% per the agreement. Forty-seven long days ticked by working for our money a second time to collect the balance due. If you don't follow up, then another company will and it's all about competition for limited resources. After all customers would pay on time is they weren't having cash flow issues. 

Insult to Injury 

Working for your money twice is bad enough. Then having to wait...

This is another blog post in a series called Banking Burnout Bonanza™ inspired by a chapter in my book, The Ultimate Bitcoin Business Guide™, of the same name. Let's review the 3 biggest Banking Burnouts draining your energy from everyday banking:

1) Having to wait a long time for your own money

2) Having to pay lots of fees to use you own money

3) Having to deal with lots of headaches when using your money

New Client

We were excitedly onboarding a new client, ABC, who finally got the power of The Ultimate Paperless Back Office™ by invizibiz.biz, our sister site. It's a virtual bookkeeping service of sorts that transforms every aspect of the business operations with technology and processes. The banking part of this transformation is always fun as we uncover a patchwork of dysfunctional processes assembled without forethought by clients. We didn't think this was possible but it continues to show up with every client. Our new client (embraced this transformation)...

Remember 2008? How many times do I have to say it? When we hear 2008 we immediately think of The Great Recession aka The Great Worldwide Recession of 2008 which then makes us think fraud and shenanigans in the financial markets. Michael Lewis does an excellent job telling the tale in his book, The Big Short, also brought to life in the theatre. This is required ready and watching.

For the First Time

I'm a Certified Fraud Examiner (CFE) among other specialties and I dedicated a chapter on explaining how 2008 episodes happen in my book, The Ultimate Bitcoin Business Guide™. My mind was completely ripped apart after watching the movie even though I've studied every other documentary on the topic. I was overwhelmed by the 2008 financial meltdown as told in The Big Short as if I was hearing it for the first time or it was from a time before I was born.  

The Choice

There's no better segue for spotlighting the raw power of bitcoin and cryptocurrencies than The Big Short. Do...

Have you heard the buzz about bitcoin and blockchains? It's actually been going on for 8 years now and gaining momentum everyday. The actions are louder than words cliché couldn't apply more in the world of bitcoin. Many people are saying bitcoin is the best money innovation in the last 500 years. We're in the midst of a technological renaissance we haven't seen since the 1500's. 

Money Unchanged

Many things have been used as a medium of exchange over the centuries from clam shells and salt to pottery. The oldest form of exchange is the barter but the matching problem, you don't always want what the other person has to trade, transformed more valuable stuff into money. For example, the preservation properties of salt were highly valued so everybody wanted and needed it. Salt went from a barter item to money where anyone could use it to buy anything. Rolling forward, salt morphed into coins and bills issued by central governments and that's the only choice we've had...

You've probably heard of both bitcoin and blockchains by now however you may not have known they're one and the same thing. If someone says they like one and not the other, then they don't know what there're talking about. There are numerous other crytocurrencies residing on their own blockchain and bitcoin's revolutionary protocol was the path blazing pioneer. Start thinking of Bitcoin as a technology with an infinite number of applications. 

Immutability

Bitcoin is a way to exchange value by transferring ownership on the Blockchain. The power of the Blockchain resides in the one version of the truth immutability of a publicly accessible ledger. So everyone uses and views one tamper-proof ledger. What happens when the past is altered by rolling back a blockchain?

Shenanigans

The estimated worldwide cost of fraud is 5% of all revenues or 3 trillion plus dollars. That's a lot of fraud millionaires. The "fraud tax" is an invisible expense among line items on already strained...

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can be converted to and from almost every fiat money. Bitcoin is essentially created from computer code and fiat money is created by governments. Both are mediums of exchange and bitcoin conversion provides a choice to hold value in cryptocurrency or fiat currency.

NOTE: Altcoins and cryptocurrency are used interchangably. 

Everyone uses fiat money on a daily basis in their own country. Fiat is latin for "it shall be" or said another way, "because I said so", which is an appropriate term considering all fiat money is issued by central banks within central governments.

Conversion Clarified
Bitcoin conversion means different things to different people so it requires some clarification of the three dimensions, calculators, trading and data. Most people who search the term want to know how much their bitcoin is worth in U.S. dollars on a given day or time. Instead of U.S. dollars someone could be searching conversion value such as Euros, Britsh...

Why should you accept bitcoin? The answer is very simple. Having bitcoin eliminates the following in your life and business:

1) Waiting to use your own money

2) Paying outrageous and surprise fees to use your money

3) Headaches and frustrations when using your money

Keep reading and find out how to remove yourself and your business from the Banking Burnout Bonanza™.

The 8 Drivers of Effortless Adoption

There are many bitcoin payment solutions available depending on the type of business, online presence, size of business, number of locations and more. The 5 Weapons for Getting Paid Instantly gave you the platforms while this blog gives you the Easy 8's of Effortless Bitcoin Adoption for putting the platforms into action. When the following conditions are present you can accept bitcoin in your business with less work. 

Driver #1) You have a microbusiness

Driver #2) You have an online business

Driver #3) Your business has fewer locations

Driver #4) Your business...

I was excited to order 50 copies of my new book, The Ultimate Bitcoin Business Guide, to give away as part of our shock and awe thank you package to various book contributors. I logged into Create Space, a great paperback publishing platform, and proceeded to place the order with our business Visa debit card. I stopped at the pay button realizing I should buy my own bitcoin book with bitcoin. Since Create Space doesn't accept bitcoin, I simply whipped out my Coinbase bitcoin debit card to make the purchase of $299.93.

A Pair of email Confirmations

I happened to peak at emails and noticed two confirmation emails from Create Space with two different confirmation numbers. This forced me to call and find out whether or not we'd been charged two times for the same order. Julie, the customer service rep, quickly confirmed my worst fears of a double charge. 

The Bad News 

The whole course of events took place in under 5 minutes so I automatically expected the second erroneous...