Finance – Kyle's Shortcuts

Scrolling 𝕏, I saw a new AI called lovable make an app. I had to try it.

If you’re like me, you have ideas for software tools that aren’t available, and dream of one day learning how to code and making it come to life.

But you paid for a course, you got overwhelmed by a ton coding language, you hung in there for a month or so, deployed a basic app (readysketch.com), got frustrated hired a coder outside of the U.S. to finish it, and eventually quit because you we’re losing money.

Quitting is super lame, but sometimes you got to know which lane you’re in. I can’t do everything, even though I technically know how to do most things.

You need to focus on what you’re good at, and become great at it.

What is lovable.dev?

It’s a website where you can ideas for apps to life with little code knowledge.
Get front-end previews as you chat with the AI.
Connect databases, deploy to Github and even make it live on the web all from one dashboard.

You can start for free, for a certain limit of messages with the GPT but in that first few messages you get a fully functioning app that would have cost you thousands of dollars in development costs.

So, you find out soon that paying $20 a month for lovable.dev is a steal.

I wonder what is it about $19.99 that ChatGPT, Claude, Lovable, MidJourney and every other AI is on about.

Ladies and gentlemen, taxed af. My first project with loveable.

I’m wildly impressed by lovable’s understanding of what I wanted and how it changed code, and implemented it so quickly.

At times it was faster than just a standard ChatGPT request.

I really wanted lovable to help me code an app for Shopify, but at present, it doesn’t work with Shopify’s CLI.

…so I started with Cursor AI to help me get a ‘Save 10% with Bitcoin payment button’ at checkout. It only got me so far, and I realized I was in over my head, and since a strike.me dev rep told me they already have a bitcoin lightning payment Shopify app I figured I was beating a dead horse.

_{Although, the save 10% option would be awesome and implementing docs on how small businesses can start putting BTC on their balance sheets would be an excellent service, but until then I figured I’d try something that doesn’t require such technical prowess at the moment.}

So, weaving back into what taxedAF is:

Everyone hates paying taxes. I sure do. Especially if you’re self-employed like me.

You should know what you’re going to have to pay your state and the IRS in April, or every quarter as some suggest.

So this is what the app I developed with lovable.dev does:

It breaks down every payment you receive based on your invoices you send out, if you’re smart this will help you find out what to even charge your client, and also what to put away when your client pays up.

It’s an estimation of what you’d likely pay, not an exact. Because obviously, everyones tax bracket is different, how you file, is different (single or married), and everyone’s state/county is different.

But this is a pretty damn close approximation of what you’d owe because I told loveable to include every state (and it’s income tax obligations), what the federal government will charge you, and (news to me) self-employment tax.

God, living in CA with all these taxes you really get f*cked, thus the name I branded it with, taxedAF.

It’s nearly half of my pay check for each invoice that is paid to me.

This is insane.

So, in my infinite wisdom, I decided to save 30% of each pay check I receive to use to pay taxes with later.

But, this I guess in C.A. is not enough.

In one night I launched taxedaf.com

With all the tools connected to lovable.dev with netlify for domain hosting, supabase for SQL, and github for deployment I literally did what would normally take months, in one night.

It’s still a work in progress and with loveable’s help I can probably turn this into a stream of income for other self-employed IRS paranoid people like myself.

I could include some knowledge docs, some courses, some banking integration options, export to tax software options, assist with even filing taxes, damn loveable is my full stack developer, you know how much that saves me in costs for something this robust?

Over $100k easily is saved using loveable.

I get it, if you can afford a human full-stack dev, by all means. But for start-ups I’m sorry dev’s your job just got replaced → and eventually mine.

But until then, I’ll use AI tools to help all my clients, and myself.

Because bro it’s nearly 2025, this is America and here we go! 🇺🇸

Over the past decade bitcoin has had its supporters and its enemies. What does it even do for us? Do you see it as an invisible, fake coin, just a number on the screen?

What does Michael Saylor, who has aggressively been purchasing Bitcoin and now holds $5.6 billion worth, understand about bitcoin? Or what about Blackrocks ETF application? What do these billionaire and trillionaire asset managers find so interesting about bitcoin that has them gobbling up the supply of bitcoin?

If you’re not at all curious and your net worth is under $1 million you are going to lose to inflation.

If you don’t even know what that means, let’s take a step back and let’s ask ourselves how much we even understand about the financial system on the most basic level, interest rates.

Borrowing money with a credit card or for a house is kind of the same. The bank borrows money from the federal reserve to lend to you to make a profit on you not paying it back over time.

Interest charges fluctuate.

When there’s nothing tangible that’s being lent out like gold coins, they print numbers on screens or paper that are attached to an interest rate that charges somebody to issue that money and the fed can rise these rates or lower rates at any time depending on the amount of money in circulation to combat inflation.

Inflation means rising the price of goods to try to balance the amount of money in circulation.

The money in circulation is debt, so to balance the debt rising the price you pay for the goods will go toward paying the bill on that debt.

Imagine the government taking at a credit loan for a trillion dollars. It didn’t exist before, but to help pay the debt on that loan the government makes the costs of everything a little more expensive so that the profits rise and they can make the payments on that loan.

Does that make sense? Lesson over.

Now that you understand that, what is Bitcoin and how can it benefit you?

It’s the first sophisticated monetary system that mathematically can not be fraudulent or printed in any way other than its core mechanism, WORK.

You may hear environmentalists complain about how much energy is needed for bitcoin to reward miners for blocks. Without getting into the weeds of that, have you tried to understand why it uses so much energy, and what does that mean for the production of energy?

Every 4 years it gets more difficult to produce bitcoins, they call these events a halving. Actually 93% of all bitcoin has already been mined, and over the next 120 years 7% of the remaining bitcoin will be mined.

It will cost more and more energy to mine bitcoin because the difficulty to adjustment is made on that 4th year effectively cutting in half the rewards for miners to produce a block (in the blockchain).

An example would be like mining for gold, and you know theres an exact amount under the ground because you can see it on lidar, and the first 4 years there’s only loose soil in the way, the next 4 years, maybe some mulch, then some rock, then some booby traps, then some water caves, then some titanium in the way all the way until the year 2140 when the final amount of gold will be mined after it has grossly gotten more difficult you find yourself wading through lava to get to it and hiring thousands of people to help you reach it.

But in that example when you have mined all the gold you have to store it somewhere like a vault, and if it’s a lot of gold and worth billions you have to install a security system or hire guards. With bitcoin, you can remember 24 words in your head and walk around the world through air ports, countries with a billion dollars worth of value just waiting to be unlocked anywhere.

See, the more energy it takes to produce it is a core variable in what makes it valuable over time. This mechanism is called proof of work and uses the likes of physics to secure its software.

When bitcoin gets passed up by people who don’t bother to understand its beauty in software design, its poetic and liberating behavior it has on preserving wealth, it’s inherit state-less issued monetary policy and unconfiscatable nature I just sigh.

It’s the same feeling I get when I wish everyone could see the reality of humanity that I see. We’re all free people sharing the same identity on a finite planet and we all need love, yet every authority on the planet is preventing you from seeing it this way. Just as they are trying to prevent you from seeing bitcoin as the only transcendental hard monetary asset in the universe (far as we know).

So to conclude my statement on the benefits of bitcoin I will issue you some reading material and podcasts to gain an understanding of it so that you do not miss out on a once in a lifetime flight to a global asset.

Bitcoin White Paper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf – this is written by the infamous Satoshi and if you want to read it there you go.

The Bitcoin Standard: https://www.amazon.com/Bitcoin-Standard-Decentralized-Alternative-Central/dp/1119473861 – written by Saifedean Ammous, now advisor to the president of El Salvador a country that is aggressively buying bitcoin, this book will fill you in completely.

The Network State: https://www.amazon.com/Network-State-How-Start-Country-ebook/dp/B09VPKZR3G/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2NZBRK3IMNRCY&keywords=network+state&qid=1698969967&s=books&sprefix=network+stat%2Cstripbooks%2C180&sr=1-1 – not so far off topic but this book is essentially painting for you the vision of a decentralized future.

Finish by watching this long form podcast with Lex Fridman and Michael Saylor. Good luck on your retirement journey. I’ll know what I’ll be buying in my IRA.

Where to buy?

Buy bitcoin with Strike

Where to store it securely?

Send bitcoin to a hardware wallet like Ledger

Write down your 24 word seed phrase and store it somewhere securely!