@JJG
I was a lot worse in 2014 as we were slicing downwards like a knife through hot butter. I invested £xx,000 of my hard earned fiat & I thought for a long time that I’d seriously fucked up (obviously I’ve been buying ever since but my maximum fear came in 2014).
Obviously that all turned out well & I’m sitting on huge profits atm, more than I could ever achieve in life anywhere else probably.
Ok, even though our experiences are a bit different, and I likely have 20 years on you, so that makes a difference, too, but in the end, we are still saying similar things, which is that Bitcoin provides an investment avenue that is either not really available to regular people or regular people do not want to jump through such hoops in order to be able to participate in some of the investments that would have been available in years gone by (and might still be available to some insider people).
Anyhow, I felt that I had been making decent investments all of my life, but I tended to invest in index funds and things like that and also I tended not to venture out too much, but even before I had gotten into bitcoin in late 2013, some of my investments had gone up 30% or more in some years, and did not perform as well in other years, but still overall I was ONLY getting a return of an average of about 6% per year, and I have not completely gotten rid of those traditional investments (many of them index funds that are tied into 401ks), but they still are only returning in about an 6% per year average.
So, I figured that even if bitcoin returned a bit less than 6%, at least it seems to have a decent sized asymmetric bet component that also allows a hedge against my dollar investment and nothing else had even come close, even though I used to consider that gold could be in the hedge category, but not necessarily in the asymmetric category.
So, anyhow, it seems to me (and you seem to recognize it too) that largely, historically regular pleebs did not tend to have access to these kinds of investments.
And, having said all of that both you and I recognize that our portfolios are performing way beyond expectations, and so I was actually getting into a very comfortable status in my regular investments (that I still have), but bitcoin ends up being icing on the cake for me, in terms of propelling me into an area of riches that are greater than I had expected to have (almost like winning the lottery).....
So, yeah, you are in a similar category, whereby you are going to be able to contemplate retiring a lot earlier than expected, yet I still believe that since you are not quite there yet (not quite to the "can retire" level), you should keep planning, preparing and doing what you can to facilitate continued movement in that direction, but still don't get too anxious or take it for granted.. even though the odds remain quite great, and likely continue to be great as long as you keep plodding along towards doing what you have been doing (which seems to be largely the right thing to continue to bring you in the right direction). Psychologically, it is not good to lock yourself in too much for a plan having to play out within a particular timeline, because as long as you continue to make measurable progress that you can see then you can figure out if there is something reasonable and/or prudent that you should do in order to tweak your system a bit in order to improve getting the results that you would prefer.
I do panic when we get big corrections though because I start doing calculations & then it makes me realise that net worth wise, I’ve lost a lot.
At least you say that you believe that you have gotten better regarding this anxiety, but your thinking does seem to be a bit messed up when you are considering "what you had lost" because that part is on paper and it is going to fluctuate, even several years at a time, so perhaps you spend time beating yourself up too much but there might still be ways to consider whether there are reasonable and prudent ways to tweak what you are doing a bit more. Everyone is likely to come to slightly differing results in terms of what tweaks to make, and you might even be different from your girlfriend/partner (but fuck her... hahahahahahaha)... Anywhooo, you know that we differ in terms of the things that we always list as being individualizations that we each have to measure, which are at minimum: our other investments, cashflow, risk tolerance, views about bitcoin as compared with other investments, timeline, our skills, times and abilities to play around with our investments).
I’m a pessimist sometimes though & you should never read too much into my instant reactions to a bad situation. I usually think things are worse than they are & I calm down later
Actually, maybe I do read too much into it from time to time, but in the end, I am just using whatever outrageous (or not) thing that you posted as a spring board to post about the idea, and you do come up with some good ones from time to time, and yeah, I recognize that your posts go both ways, and sometimes some of them are just thoughts of the moment.. and that is fine, too.
We’re still well on track to being, as you say, filthy rich. I’d just be a lot happier if it happened quickly haha.
I am saying that I have already become richer than expected, I expect to become even richer, but also, I have enough cushion in my investment and even my strategy and even my psychology that I am also o.k. if I neither become rich as fuck, even if I do not maintain the same level of excessive richness that I have already achieved and even if I become more poor.
Of course, my preference is up or even maintaining, but even while I am ready, willing and able to accept going down a bit, in the end, there is also a certain level of going lower that would start to bother me, especially if I am having to go back to being a lot more frugal like I was in my earlier years and what got me to where I am today, but I have also gotten used to a bit of a splurging lifestyle that I prefer to continue and to even increase the amount of splurging that is possible.
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