Yesterday, both of my children bought their first ICP. Madeline is nine years old, and she has four ICP. Jack is six years old, and he has 2.5 ICP. I explained to them yesterday what investing is, and they had questions.
So I said, investing is the way you really make money. Investing is where you can make money without working, but you have to be very careful that you pick an investment that actually goes up, and you have to be patient. You can't just put money into something and then expect that it's going to go up the next day. Investing is also a great way to save money.
The conversation on the ride home from Home Depot
I was telling my son this on the ride home from Home Depot yesterday. And I said, the best investment I'm currently aware of is Internet Computer Protocol. And he said, "Dad, I want some Internet Computer Protocol," after I explained it to him. So he bought 2.5 ICP yesterday for $20, when ICP was about $8. And he said, "Dad, I want to sell it when the price of ICP hits $20, because then I will get $50 back."
So I told my daughter about this yesterday, and she said, "Wait a minute. Jack gave you $20, and if he waits, and he picked a good investment, you're going to give him back $50 someday." And I said, yes, that's how investing works — as long as you pick something that actually is going to go up in value.
If you pick most of these crypto coins, you are more likely to be giving $20 in and getting $10, if that, out. Now, Internet Computer Protocol, the way I see it, is different. And I told them, I've already done the research for you.
I could have sold them on anything
At the same time, I did feel a little bit like — you know, I could have sold them on anything. They literally would have, because they trust me, given me money for Bitcoin, for Ethereum, for anything else. I could have made something up and they would have given it to me.
Now, that's pretty scary when you look at the rest of the crypto environment — that a lot of crypto investors are acting basically as trusting as my children are. They totally took my word that I've been in crypto 10 years. I've looked at thousands of altcoins over the years, and hundreds within the last year by itself. Almost everything, to me, except ICP, is garbage. It's a copy of Bitcoin, a copy of Ethereum. And they just literally took my word for it. I keep walking through exactly why I land on ICP over everything else in my ICP Crypto playlist, and it's the same conclusion I came to when I invested my life savings into ICP.
How my kids have money to invest
You might be wondering, well, how do your kids have money to invest? I talked to my wife, and we decided we want to teach the kids how to use money as soon as possible. And money, unfortunately, is also a great way to control people. So to help the kids have the behavior we want them to have, we give them money when they do things they should be doing anyway, like cooperating at bedtime or getting to school on time. They get a dollar here, a dollar there. It adds up to a few dollars a day.
Plus, they get bonuses. The hurricane just came through and annihilated a bunch of their toys and stuffed animals that were on the floor, and they helped clean up for an entire day. So we gave them $100 each as a bonus for the day. Then they bought some toys, but they wanted to save some of it.
I want to be teaching my kids about investing as soon as possible, because, the way I see it, what most people in the world are not able to do is make money by investing. Most people are just stuck working and getting paid, and then, because of inflation, the currency value is getting destroyed. So you can't even save money and really get ahead financially without investing. The sooner my kids learn — like Rich Dad, Poor Dad — the sooner I can teach them that if you want to be rich, you need to be investing, and if you want to be poor, just work all the time and try to save your money and then fail at it most of the time. That's my opinion, anyway.
So my kids are very excited about ICP. And my daughter, when she heard Jack bought 2.5, said, "I want to have more than him, so I want to buy four ICP." So now she's looking at it. They can choose to sell whenever they want to. But then I told them you have to pay capital gains tax as well when you sell, depending on the amount of profit you've made — although I'll just pay it for them if it's a really small amount. This is a valuable learning opportunity.
This helped me look at the bigger picture of crypto
This has really helped me look at the bigger picture of crypto. It's sad to me to see how many people are coming into crypto YouTube as trusting as my kids are, and then getting ripped off by so many people who are dishonest. Because I love you each just like my kids. I wouldn't rip you off any more than I would rip them off. To me, you're somebody else's child. That's the whole reason I stay in such direct contact with everyone in the Jerry Banfield Family — I'd rather you be able to ask me directly than take anyone's word secondhand.
A lot of people are giving their own family one kind of advice — often not even to buy crypto, or to stay away from trading crypto meme coins — and then what they're doing publicly in crypto versus what they're doing privately is often drastically different. So you can have confidence that I would not sell my kids anything I didn't absolutely believe in. And I sold them my ICP.
I'm holding the ICP for them in my wallet at this point, which is basically like a centralized exchange. They just gave me their cash and they didn't really get anything physical out of it. If I were dishonest like these exchanges, I could go sell a whole bunch of other kids on crypto, take all their cash, and tell them I've got all their crypto. And as long as all the kids don't come to me for all their crypto at the same time, I could run a nice little game, couldn't I? That is exactly the setup that I think makes the crypto exchanges so threatened by ICP.
This is a world that's really hard sometimes, because it would be nice if we could all just approach it like children with loving, trusting, honest, transparent parents, and just trust and go forward. But crypto, unfortunately, is very dangerous. There are a lot of people living double lives who are blatantly lying, blatantly cheating, and who have been lied to and cheated themselves. There are so many crypto influencers just parroting the same things other people have said. But ICP, from what I see, is the truth, and the truth will get out.
Selling my kids ICP made me question everything I think I know
I'm really excited to be on this journey with my kids, and selling them ICP has brought me to question everything I think I know about ICP, too. It's one thing to put my own money into it. But my kids' $30, my kids' $20 — that's a big deal to them. That's a Lego set they could buy. That's a movie ticket they could buy, given up in exchange for handing me their money for the things they're doing every week.
If they do things like vacuuming, weeding, or mopping, I pay them $20 an hour to do that. Some of you — and my wife — say that's way too much. And I said, we're the ones starting them off with their first hourly rate ever. We should set their hourly rate high, so that ideally they would never value their time less than that, and they wouldn't even bother taking a job lower in the future.
However, we do require them to buy everything besides their own basic necessities. We'll buy food for them, we'll buy shelter for them. But if they want toys, they have to buy the toys themselves. If they want to go to a movie, they have to buy their own movie ticket. If they want fast food, they have to buy their own fast food. I'll buy them healthy foods, fruits, and vegetables, but I'm not going to buy them fast food. So my son spent a good bit of money, probably a hundred dollars, on McDonald's himself. This is all part of the same money lessons I've been working through with them, like the day we spent at Legoland teaching them about money.
The reminder I needed about investing
I'm hoping we can help them learn how to do some investing, because investing can be a great way to take your money out of the bank and put it toward the future. Whereas just having money sitting in the bank — sometimes we get itchy trigger fingers. But selling my kids this ICP has been a good reminder of the fundamentals. You don't want to put in money that you might need to take out tomorrow. Both of my kids put in money they could afford to leave in there indefinitely. I think my son has 40 or 50 more dollars, and my daughter has about the same. So they don't need the money back right away that they put in.
Where I've gone wrong in crypto so many times, including recently, is I put so much money in that then I get anxious about the crypto price. I needed it to pump, I needed it to go up, because I don't have any cash in a bank. And this is a spot I've gotten myself into again, where I hoarded and loaded up so much ICP. I've got about 4,000 now, and then I'm looking at my bank account and I've got barely enough to pay the bills for this month. So I'm looking around at my life thinking I'd better get my butt out there and make some more crypto videos, or otherwise I'm going to have to dump all my crypto and miss out on ICP potentially going to at least $20 relatively soon, hopefully, and then maybe a hundred to even a thousand-plus dollars someday.
I wouldn't buy any crypto I wouldn't sell my kids on
So I'm proud to be on this journey with my kids. I look at all of you as equals, as I do with my kids, and in some respects, when it comes to crypto, I look at you all as my kids. I know a whole lot about this, and you're trusting me to give you good information.
Even though I hate making these videos — making these crypto videos disgusts me, and I feel like I'm just selling my body and mind for time and for money — you all seem to like them. You don't seem to like my crypto music videos as much. I made a song about my kids being ICP holders, and even in my own opinion it was so bad that I knew you all would hate it. But this is a really important conversation.
To me, I wouldn't personally buy any crypto that I also wouldn't sell my kids on. If all of us in crypto approached it like that — hey, we want to be in stuff we're rock solid about, not things that are maybe speculative, but things so solid that we'd sell our own kids on them — it would be a very different space. So I'm in here with my kids. I hope this has been useful for you, and if you ever want to talk it through with me directly, that's exactly what the Family is for.