~snip~
You do have many advantages that's why i am the one asking the questions and you are answering them as best as you can so no contest here.
After I posted, I was kind of second-guessing whether I should have gone down that line of thought in terms of attempting to make some speculative comparisons because it is so difficult to extrapolate and compare because I even question how I would have handled myself if I had exposure to bitcoin in my earlier days of building various aspects of my investment portfolio, and on an ongoing basis there are going to be temptations to pull out some of the value along the way... and so maybe I am even thinking that I might have been too scared to have been in bitcoin in any kind of meaningful way in my earlier investment years.... so it is so difficult to extrapolate to the 80s and 90s in comparison to what are today's options.
I think that's where kids growing up/born in 90's had a slight edge over previous generation. You guys had a first mover advantage +money but there was no-one to guide you when you entered in
BTCland or any other investment, on the other hand my generation is lucky enough to get tons of guidance and info about almost anything, all we have to do is keep our head straight and get our act together as we are kinda reckless and bit cocky at some points.
Yeah, but I think that I keep trying to speculate about whether I would have had better success if bitcoin would have been around when I was younger, if I would have been able to identify it as a good investment vehicle, and not ending up my own techniques to have screwed myself out of what seems to be a great investment opportunity.
Of course, I can see bitcoin as a great investment opportunity NOW that I have accumulated a lot of capital, and after batting around the matter so much, I end up thinking that bitcoin does continue to be a really great investment vehicle because when I was growing up (I mean in my early investment years, especially in my 20s and early 30s), I always thought that one of my impediments was having access to investments that I can control on my own and just invest small amounts on a regular basis.
Frequently, I would choose various kinds of index funds, but there were frequently obstacles regarding how much interface that I could have, difficulties tweaking my approach, even management costs of the index funds, and I frequently felt like my options were way more limited than they currently are with bitcoin in terms of various ways to hold the bitcoin myself or to keep some bitcoin on exchanges. I could NOT just hold various index funds myself.
My other kinds of investments would frequently involve lump sums, too, so there is just so much power in being able to DCA into bitcoin and to be able to strategically go in and out of bitcoin in terms of being able to buy on dips in real time, and to make those kinds of choices whenever i want, almost immediately and fairly minimal levels of fees to carry out such changes in my BTC holdings.
So, I keep trying to get away from any kind of presumption that one generation has it better than the other, because the underlying presumption should still be that when you leave your parents house (when you are in your late teens or early 20s or at least you start trying to build on your own), you are frequently starting out with nearly nothing, and sure culturally there might be some differences, but I am just presuming in my case whether I was leaving home in the 80s or maybe I might have been leaving home in the 2010 or later time frame (30 years difference), I am presuming that I still would be starting out with hardly anything in my investment holdings that I have to build from, but my options would be different, and sure I am not sure whether credit options are different, either. Probably my first 10 years away from home, I had difficulties getting much if any credit, and so sure these days credit might be easier to get, but I am still presuming starting out with hardly any capital, having to build from scratch and having bitcoin as one of the options.
And, I continue to conclude that bitcoin is a way better option, even if I consider it while presuming that I would have been naive to investments and having to learn about them, which was the case with me when I was leaving home and trying to build my own cashflow, my living expenses cushion and then having an emergency fund and investments that came soon thereafter.
Yeah based on fiat value.. 60%-80% payment comes in btc depending on the different contracts/clients. So far I never felt cashing out my BTC salary, except 2-3 times, Profit-lose swings both ways continuously due to volatility but i don't trade so its automatically goes into my Hodl stash and i don't care much about when BTC goes down 1k or something as its temporary IMO .
During my building of my investment formative years, which was largely in the late 80s and through the 90s, I feel that I never really invested more than 10% of my overall cashflow into various investments, but I continued to make those kinds of investments steadily, even when i started with some mediocre jobs during that time, and even when I went to college and used some of my interest-free student loans to build investment practices, I largely stuck with about 10% of my cashflow that was dedicated to investment, but some of that cashflow involved leveraging debt.
Seems that I did not really go beyond 10% until I landed a fairly decent job, after quite a bit of college, and then at that point, I could dedicate more cashflow towards investing that maybe lasted a bit over 12 years.. and maybe there were periods that I invested 30% of my cashflow into various investments... so it seems that I never got anywhere near 60% that I allocated towards investing, and I can hardly even imagine investing 80% of my cashflow... gosh I feel like I must have been lacking a lot of discipline compared to you, JSRAW.
Rest of the remaining fiat salary is enough to get things going irl because i have virtually 0 debt and i try to avoid spending money on unnecessary stuff so it helps my cause in some extent.
Of course, living within your means remains important, and I have always had access to a decent amount of debt that I could draw from and to circulate for my investments, and perhaps that could have been a bad practice for me to be using debt; however, I doubt that I could have landed high paying jobs without my education debt, and then even when I had jobs, I still would leverage some of my investments with debt, and frequently, the servicing of the debts were NOT very bad, so I am NOT sure in the end whether i could have reached as high of levels of capital accumulation if I had not been given access to very cheap debt.
I started my first job when i was 16yo and recently turned 31. Never went to college so here goes major debt etc, going to college and spending 3 years was bit luxury for me back then anyway, had important things to care of. like everyone else i did all kinds of menial jobs in my initial years and luckily got into my current profession. Apart from real state
BTC is my first ever investment (2017) and i am bit late here so i am just catching up by putting fiat in
BTC. Percentage of investment might change in future according to situation.
I think that I was using my description of college as a means to suggest that it kind of screwed up my cashflow to invest. I mean I did not go to college right out of high school. I worked several years and had already started trying to invest a portion of my cashflow, but then maybe I was also suggesting that after I finished college, the income from the job opportunities kind of made up for those more mediocre years of investing or even debt that outweighed investments (even though I felt that I was investing into my own abilities to learn how to learn - even though now college learning seems to be getting a lot of bad rap for how expensive it is and perhaps how some people might be able to learn adequate skills without going to college.. which is kind of difficult to learn how to learn without some structure and guidance.. in my thinking).
Just based on your description there, JSRAW, I am not going to presume that you were late to bitcoin, because who gives any fucks about when you got into bitcoin exactly, but perhaps if you are in your late 20s you might have been a little bit late to investing, but even that is questionable because it tends to take people a decent amount of time to really start to make progress with their investing strategies, and I would NOT consider getting your investing perspective shit together in your late 20s to be late to the party.
Of course, you can start getting your investment shit together anywhere, but late 20s can be considered to be fairly reasonable... especially in terms of getting involved in bitcoin, and surely you could establish a 20 year investment horizon and have pretty decent prospects to really have fuck you money by the time that you are in your early 50s.. and surely it could happen sooner, but my philosophy has always been trying to avoid fucking up too much in order that plans are realistic rather than trying to rush and then ending up gambling too much.
Will revise my strategy after BTC cross $15-$20k and i am sure things might change drastically once i get married or when babies comes.
Overall, it seems that your percentage of your cashflow going into BTC does seem to be quite high, but so long as you feel that you can cover your remaining living and emergency expenses with whatever fiat that you have coming in, then I suppose that those systems will serve you decently well, too.
Of course, baby and wifey are likely to cause additional expenses.. and also maybe some changes in your allocation and even investment opportunities... but sounds like you are, at least, attempting to engage with your situation and to plan ahead.... but a similar thing was going on with mindrust, too. At several points he had said that he was putting so damned much of his total percentage into BTC (it was like 40% without any other investments), so part of an anticipated problem can come if the BTC price moves against you when you start to have so much value in one asset or a narrow set of assets, and then you see so much loss of value on paper if the price moves against you.. or even the BTC price might fail/refuse to rally.. so then you have to account for those possibilities too.. which might just mean, NOT investing so much into BTC and just letting what you have already invested ride while you just make sure that you have plenty on your fiat side to ride through the various waves including any emergencies that might come, too.
Surely, it is good to hear about differing perspectives and approaches, and I like the idea of changed dynamic with zero debt, because it is likely a bit more straight forward, and surely bitcoin still seems to serve as a kind of asymmetric bet, so it is not exactly necessary to use any debt or leverage and still to be able to potentially profit stupendously by merely ongoingly stacking sats within an ongoing reasonable budget.
Its seems high but like i mentioned i started investing very late so for me its - Catching up- strategy and when i first found out about
BTC during China fud back in 2017, I didn't waste much time and took a gamble by investing almost all my saving into
BTC then sold big chunk of portfolio during the bull run, although it was panic sell. This panic sell and investing everything was risky but this gamble worked out pretty well and it helped me in my ongoing investing. I am now more careful and prepare with the investing and price swings.
Almost no matter what none of us are really going to get around the facts of our own situation and the likelihood that we are going to screw up a decently large number of times in our 20s and maybe even into our 30s, and in my thinking BIGGER mistakes are made when any of us start to become anxious about being too late rather than attempting to make the best plan that we can make based on our own circumstances that involves attempting to build and preserve capital.
I would think that few people want to get into their 50s or 60s and to have to struggle because they consumed way too much, they gambled too much and they end up having to struggle at a time when their abilities to physically perform are NOT as high as it was in their youth. Of course, there are jobs and positions that allow people to keep on working late into their lives, but that should be a choice rather than being something that any of us feels that we have to do because of lack of adequate capital preservation and building.
So, early 30s should be more than enough time to consider a 20 year timeline that might end up getting shorter, but you do have enough time to build, seems to me.
Baby and wifey are big one so yeah trying.
NOT a bad thing.. if that is what you want.
You are right mindrust and my strategy was same, but we both have different personality with different mindset when looking at the same thing. for ex; he saw recent crash as doomsday and sold everything and for me it was doomsday situation too but another opportunity to grab some more BTC, even though i missed the sub $4k.
I mostly mentioned mindrust and compared with you in terms of trying to suggest a potential tragedy of having such a high percentage of new cashflow going into bitcoin, so yeah, mindset can get screwed up at any time. Mindrust said the same thing, many times, he said something like: "no problem that I am investing everything into BTC and BTC is something like 40% of what I got, blah blah blah" So, I am just suggesting that it can be a damned potential BIG risk if any of us has too much into BTC.
Remember that mindrust was kind of hoping for lower BTC prices on an ongoing basis, which was also scary, yet we still had to take him at his word, but he really did not want lower prices, as we found out.
Surely, I did not want lower prices, either, but yeah, if you have money to buy as the price goes down then you are likely to be in much better shape than to say that you want lower prices, but you run out of money after the prices go below a certain price point.
I have had a few times that I either ran out of money to buy more or I had to decrease the quantity of BTC that I bought because the BTC price was going way lower than expected, and so I would error in terms of just buying less or just HODLing. My worser case scenario of a back up plan would be to wait for a BTC price rise and then to skim off a little bit of value from that in order to buy more BTC if the price continued to go down. It is way easier to error on the side of selling a little when the BTC price goes up a little, so long as you have bought those BTC that you are selling at a lower price.. which has always been the case for me.
I remember when BTC prices shot down to $158 in early 2015, I did not have any money and I only bought a little bit below $200.. maybe my lowest purchase was $180.. and it was way less than what I had been purchasing in the $400s just weeks earlier... So fuck, running out of money is kind of a NOT so good thing. I recall that in late 2015, I had authorized myself to start buying BTC, because largely throughout 2015, I had accumulated a decent amount of BTC in the lower $200s, so I was well within my authorizations to skim off a little profits in the upper $200s. Sure, I did not sell very much in the upper $200s, but it did provide me with a little bit of insurance to be able to feel comfortable using those proceeds to buy MOAR if the BTC price went below $200 again.
So, yes, it seems maybe that you are doing something that is much closer to what I am doing, JSRAW, rather than creating a possible collapse situation that could happen to anyone, and is merely symbolized by what mindrust ended up doing... which odds of that increase, too, when a real high percentage of your cashflow is going into BTC (which we have seen tends to be volatile as fuck, on an ongoing basis).
i am still happy that i successfully grabbed some at $5k.
None of us are likely to get the bottom exactly, and if we are buying on a regular basis and buying all the way down, then we might end up averaging buy prices that are way above the bottom.
My buy increments on March 12 were still around $250 between each buy order, so I had several buy orders in the $7ks, $6ks, in the $5ks and in the $4ks, and my next buy order that was at $3,800-ish did not fill... But, yeah, I had a fuck ton of buy orders fill that day between $4k and $7,400-ish, and that is fine...
I was not exactly feeling flush with fiat by the time all of those buy orders filled, and I even had to reset some of the orders in once the BTC price dropped into the lower $6ks because it was getting to levels that were not really expected, so after we hit the bottom at $3,850, and then when the BTC price went back up, I was already selling small amounts of BTC in the lower $5ks and all the way up to nearly $6k, and then when the BTC price dropped again into the mid to upper $4ks in the next 1-4 days, I bought back and then sold again a few days after that (getting to the 17th and 19th) in small increments when we went back above $6k... so overall what BTC I accumulated at bargain low prices was only slightly better than a wash in order to feel some comfort that I really would be able to feel somewhat comfortable (with less gut wrenchings) if we were going to get another test of sub $4k prices or even lower.
I don't want to treat him like a punching bag as its his decision whatever the hell he want to do with his life or BTC stash etc, Its not kindergarten anyway.
Surely, I don't want to treat him or anyone else like a punching bag, either, especially if they seem to be genuinely trying to do better for themselves, and of course, none of the involvement in BTC (and deciding how to build it or proportion it) is easy.. and surely if we are trying to teak our BTC investment system to make ourselves feel comfortable, then we have to really be seriously considering the "what ifs" from extreme scenarios, and be prepared to follow through and maybe even have some kind of back up plan and maybe even be able to tweak a bit in line with some solid long terms ideas, too.
When we look back at our December 2019 to May 2020 experiences in bitcoin, we are likely going to see some similar patterns as compared with previous bull periods and shake outs (maybe similar to 2016, but surely if you have gone through some similar period then it likely comes to your mind more easily than if such shake out periods had preceeded your experiences in bitcoin), and those of us who learned some things from any mistakes that we may have made in this most recent shake out attempt, then we may be able to put ourselves in a better position for any future shake out attempts.
Of course with BTC prices visiting $10,074 just prior to the halvening, correcting down to $8,109 and to $8,181 right around the halvening and now returning to $9,500 and seeming to want to push upwards (as I type), many of us likely feel pretty good about continuing to accumulate bitcoin through these times, even if there continues to be a lot of macro-uncertainties in the coming months and longer.
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