To be honest, I want to be more flexible in this regard, it doesn't mean I'm inconsistent, but in reality I sometimes have to divert the money that I intended to do DCA for more urgent needs.
That happens to me quite a bit... and that is one of the advantages of already projecting out your cashflows in advance so you can see exactly how much you may have allocated for certain things, and if you have some flexibilities in your incoming or outgoing amounts, you will already know from which areas that you might take from first, second third, and then pretty soon you might have had some plans about some amounts that were strict, but then you realize that it is better that you reduce your DCA or maybe even bring it down to zero for a certain period of time than to resort to some other less preferable actions, which might be selling some asset that you do not want to sell, including but not limited to BTC... there should be an order to these things that you have mostly already thought through and you have some ideas about how flexible you are able to be in light of how well you have planned it out and maintained some flexibilities in your system.
That's what I mean by flexibility, I feel that even with a well thought out plan, sometimes I still have to change things up a bit because of certain situations that make me have to. It's funny that the DCA that we do has to be sacrificed by selling it like you said. It's better for me to do other things, including allocating the money that I should have used for DCA for unavoidable or urgent needs as I said earlier.
For the nominal problem, I believe we have different abilities, and in the midst of that difference I still work hard to always make purchases.
Exactly. You can have strictness and flexibility going on at the same time... even if you have set aside $400 per month and/or $100 per week for BTC buys, you might already know that there is going to be some variance in that amount, but then you might even tell yourself that "no matter what
(within reason)" I am going to at least buy $10 per week.
we can set an amount at the beginning, but in practice it can be bigger or smaller than the plan we thought of at the beginning. I'm not emphasizing just when I have an unexpected problem, but I can apply it when I have some money that I can allocate. For example, in a week we plan $100 per week, but at times we can only allocate $10 per week (or a smaller amount). And in other situations I can allocate more than $100 a week (or a larger amount). And that is something that is comfortable (in my opinion), not only can we be consistent, but we also apply flexibility well.
Oh yes, we also have to distinguish between working hard to achieve something and forcing ourselves to achieve something. There are times when we have to think about that, because it is not uncommon for people to think they are working hard, when in fact, they are pushing themselves.
These are not easy to know in the moment and frequently it takes experience to better understand boundaries (or thresholds) that we might have, and if we might have gone too far in something that goes from being aggressive and/or assertive and into the lands of gambling. .., and it can sometimes be o.k. to cross over into some places that we might not want to go, but we have to realize also whether we might still be able to achieve some of the same desires for risks or whatever, but just take a bit of a smaller position size for that particular part of what we might be trying to do.. for example, we might go over budget on something or we might even decide to be overly whimpy on something... but if we think about why we are doing it and what are the consequences, then at least we have potentially been able to get some of the benefits of modifying what we had thought that we were going to do, but to modify it in such a way that accounts how much of a position we using in order to take those actions.
In any case, experience is invaluable, and this is no exception when it comes to realizing the points I mentioned earlier. I didn't realize it right away either, but it has been a long process for me to be able to say things like this.
And if we talk about risk, or the consequences of what we do, then it is very clear that everything has that risk, whether it is a small risk or a big risk. and again it is experience that helps us determine whether the risk is worth taking or we should avoid it.