Founder and managing partner of Nagel & Associates, Joel Nagel, was recently invited onto The Pomp Podcast by host Anthony “Pomp” Pompliano. The purpose of Pompliano’s podcast is to help viewers develop their business acumen by listening to interviews with the world’s leading businessmen, financiers, and crypto experts. The Pomp Podcast is featured on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube, and has received over 50 million downloads lifetime. In tandem, Pompliano’s daily newsletter reaches around 225,000 investors, and he reportedly manages a portfolio with control of around $500 million in assets.
Pompliano developed his business experience and reputation over the past few years after early investments in AirBnB and Reddit, and a period spent working on growth teams at Facebook and Snapchat. Later, he helped to found Morgan Creek Digital, an asset manager helping investors find footing in the crypto space. Recent guests on The Pomp Podcast have ranged from retired military personnel such as General Tony Thomas, to ten-day White House staff members like Anthony Scaramucci and innovative businessmen, including Mark Cuban. As Pompliano explains, the podcast features everyone, “From billionaires to cultural icons, [and] helps you get smarter every day.”
Joel Nagel was invited to have a conversation with Pompliano thanks to his many years of experience fostering international business exchanges between the US, Europe, and South and Central America. Pompliano also made it a point to discuss Nagel’s opinions about international corporate strategy and his projections for the so-called “bear market” which the world is currently experiencing.
Stories from Life Experiences
The Pomp Podcast usually features discussions about crypto. During his talk with Nagel, however, Pompliano avoided discussions of the subject, choosing instead to focus on asset protection and managing taxes. The podcast began with anecdotal stories from Nagel about the challenges his family faced in his youth, including losing his father at a very young age and growing up with a single mother who had to try to hold down the fort.
“It really impressed upon me,” Joel Nagel tells Pompliano, “this notion at an early age of trying to protect your wealth, preserve it, pass it on.” Nagel continues to explain that whether it is his most wealthy clients or the schoolteachers and nurses who use his financial services, asset protection always ranks at the top of their list of priorities. Especially as is the case for lower income individuals, making back lost assets can be incredibly hard and a large part of Nagel’s job is advising his clients on how to best protect their nest eggs and finances.
“If you want to think about it like a sports analogy,” Nagel explains, “we are the defense.” Unlike the people coming onto Pomp’s podcast and discussing crypto or trying to provide people with advice on how to grow their money, Nagel says his job is to help clients create the right strategies to protect what is already theirs and he has several different methods in order to achieve that goal.
Discussing Methodology
The main method, Joel Nagel argues, is placing assets into trusts. “There are elements of trust law that go back to Roman times,” Nagel tells Pompliano with a smile. In ancient Rome, he further explains, property could only be passed down to a man. So, if someone wanted to give land to their daughter at the time of their passing, they would need to find a workaround and legally give that land to a male, while that man had specific agreements in place to then give the land to the daughter in question. Things aren’t much different now, Nagel argues, there are just different tax workarounds to keep in mind.
After Nagel’s explanation, Pomp fires back with a question about the tax implications of some of Nagel’s suggestions. “How much of this is legal liability protection or mitigation, versus maybe taxation, which seems to be another thing people very much focus on when it comes to estate planning and a lot of this asset protection?”
“That’s a great question,” Nagel responds. “That’s a question people always ask. Trusts on the surface are tax neutral, meaning they don’t increase your taxes, they don’t decrease your taxes– at least from an income tax perspective,” Nagel explains further. “However, there are some generational wealth and estate benefits [with trusts].”
This part of Nagel and Pompliano’s discussion makes up the majority of the podcast. The two also converse about trust structure, as well as protection of assets in an international context, before winding down with a story from Nagel about the craziest instance of tax mitigation he has seen over his illustrious 30-plus year career. To summarize, the story focuses on tax deferment, IRA accounts, and offshore accounting.
To listen to the full podcast, click here.
For more information about Anthony Pompliano’s portfolio and projects, visit his website.
To follow Joel Nagel and Caye International Bank’s various ventures and projects, be sure to check their events page, found here.
