Had to sell a bit to cover Q3 taxes and equipment. I hate selling on a dip, drat....
A sign of being overly invested.. in other words, you do not have your expenses projected out on a long enough timeline in order to provide you a large enough float.. whether that float needs to be $1k or $10k or $20k is something for you to determine ( but seems like you don't quite have it down, yet).
I tend to project my expenses out a minimum of 6 months and frequently into the 18months or more timeline... so a lillie dip like this (and only for about 2 weeks) has not been going on long enough to cause anything close to cash flow pressures - Sure, if it goes on for 6 months or it goes down another 50%, then that could be another story for me, and I would want to start adjusting now for what could happen 6 months from now so I am not selling at the bottom, if that were the case.
hello JayJuanGee,
How do you know it will go down for 6 months or another 50%, before such event happens?
Hello btcbeliever..... I don't really have too many clues about which way the price is going to go in any kind of concrete way, so maybe I will project fairly conservative estimates about the price direction with an anticipation of a bit of an upward trend in the long term. Any price appreciation beyond my projects is gravy, and should be leveraged to some extent in order to prepare for possible downturns.
So, yeah, if I am preparing for a gradual up - yet the price goes down, then the fact that I am preparing in a gradual way should allow me to tweak here and there and adjust and to NOT have cashflow problems.
One of the easier ways to not have cashflow problems is not to leverage your investment, either by borrowing or using short term monies that will be needed by regular expenses or unexpected extra expenses (which in the end, there are always going to be some unexpected extra expenses beyond the regular expenses that can kind of be budgeted in, too.)
One more point, regarding actual upwards price movements that come above and beyond expectations, some of that money can be (and I would argue should be) taken out on incremental bases in order to prepare for down - and sure, sometimes, we might start to get a bit cocky and buy back more than we should while the price is still dropping, and then the price might drop far beyond our expectations... so we should attempt to be careful in that regards, too. I doubt that there are methods that are completely foolproof - and I think that my earlier point was that a two week downturn should not be causing cashflow issues (or issues in which you have to sell based on cashflow issues).. so the level of fault would become less and less the longer the downtrend or a bear market (if we were to enter into such), but we should even be attempting to prepare for that kind of transition as well (even though I don't believe that we are currently entering into a bear market transition, just a short term correction that is still to be determined how long it will last or how low it will go).
I have what I hope is a float of at least 4-6 years, which seems reasonable since we were in a prolonged bear market after 2013 and we should assume that history will repeat... How do you avoid forced sales with only 6-18 months of float, based on the 2014-2016 bear market?
We might be using the concept of float in different ways, and I will admit that I was being a bit general about the whole concept.. but just to suggest that I am projecting out my cashflow for 6 to 18 months does not mean that I do not have any fucking clue after 18months.
I have been doing this kind of cashflow projection for more than 20 years (and probably right around 20 years using excel spreadsheets), so I have some practice and tweaking of my system over the years in order to account for things that I learn and also in order to account for my different business activities that affect cashflow, and a few things happen when you do you engage in a projection. You can project out general expenses and specfics, but of course some of those specifics are going to change when you actually spend the money or receive the income, and then new specifics come up that might be in the short term or might be in the longer term, and if there is some difference in the longer term, and you might not be sure how it is going to play out, then you might want to plug in some of those specifics to attempt to verify a kind of manageable scenario for a longer period and to help in brainstorming about whether you may need to make any tweaks in the shorter term to meet the longer term projections.. and to keep a cashflow cushion throughout.
In other words, you could still have a plan that goes out beyond 18 months, such as 3 years or 5 years or even 10 years, but it may not be too fruitful to plug in too many specifics into the shorter term plan because the longer term plans are already accounted for in a general way.. and so long as x, y and z stay in place towards the end of the 18month period (or whenever the more specific projection ends), then aspects of those longer term projections can be plugged in later, if needed.
By the way I wish I could be confident about holding less float in fiat, but just a correction of a couple of weeks messes with my head since I decided to resign from my regular job/steady income since I became a high net-worth bitcoiner.
Probably each of us has our own proclivities and comfort level whether we are sleeping in a higher percentage of BTC or a higher percentage of fiat, and surely if there are significant life changing circumstances in your life, such as a loss of an income source, you may have to create a larger float, including having a larger percentage of that float in dollars or dollar related assets, to account for some of the swings and unexpectedness that your changed cashflow has caused.
So yeah, there can also be ways to cause some of the income to become more stable, even though it may provide a smaller return (but at least it is less volatile and can be counted on a bit more).
So one thing is to place some money into an income generating asset that is somewhat stable or guaranteed (maybe dollar based.. possibly with lower but stable returns), and another thing would be to establish income from the more volatile source (bitcoin in this case) that is much higher than what is needed in order to survive of the cashflow from bitcoin.
For example, to create a system in which even a 80% drop in btc is not going to cause you to panic.. .. because there is enough profit or income on the asset… sure easier said than done, but if you are relying on keeping your income generation revenue in a volatile asset, such as bitcoin, then you would have to be prepared for possible price drops of 80% and possibly even more (by the way, currently a price drop of 80% would put bitcoin from $5k to around $1k, and we were only at that $1k price point about 5 months ago.. so it is not impossible to return to such “low” prices – even though maybe it seems to be a less likely scenario, at this time… and quite a few support points would need to be broken before getting there.. so it seems.
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