Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Finally I did it (I am happy to join).
by
JayJuanGee
on 29/12/2023, 19:19:04 UTC
This comment does not make a lot of sense, either.  You should not be saving up an emergency fund and then plunking it all down into bitcoin, that defeats the purpose of the emergency fund... and whether OP has a steady income or not (which he described as $300 per month which sounds pretty steady to me as a way of describing it), he still would need to save up 3-6 months worth of expenses for his emergency fund, and if we consider his expenses to be around $150, based on his description, he could save up 3-6 months, of that which would be $450 to $900, and he could invest in bitcoin at the same time, and his having said that he was putting $100 per month into his emergency fund suggests that he would be able to save up his emergency fund in 4-9 months, and simultaneously buy $50 per month worth of bitcoin.

Once an emergency fund is established then it mostly could be maintained and drawn from here and there, but if it is drawn from then it is replenished soon thereafter, and if it maintained, then any extra income that had been used to build it would then be available for investment, so OP could start to use $150 per month for investment into bitcoin rather than just $50 per month once he reaches his emergency fund target.
If one is using emergency funds to invest in Bitcoin, that means the person is not really saving the money for emergency cases but investing it in Bitcoin. Meanwhile, if an investor is not saving for emergencies, that means the person can not hold his coins for a long time (they might even sell them off in just a month or a couple of weeks).

I agree that a person should not be dipping into his emergency funds for BTC buys, but there could be situations in which it makes sense if there is variability in income and expenses, and there is also a decent sized emergency fund.  There also may be decisions to buy a certain quantity of BTC no matter what, so if the cashflow over several months is fluctuating, the income might not meet expenses, and yet there still might be expectations that the following months or the month after, the emergency fund will be able to be diminished with the short-fall, and part of the reason to have an extra large sized emergency fund is to be able to buy BTC every month/week. . or whatever might be the priority that is pre-established.

You are absolutely right, you know what I understand in the second phrase that you are trying to say. An investor must have 3 or 6 months of emergency funds even before he or she starts investing in Bitcoin (I see) because it will absolutely make the investor not think of touching his investment.

I was not trying to say that a person has to have an emergency fund prior to buying BTC.  I am frequently saying to start investing in BTC as soon as possible and also I am saying that sometimes more than one thing can be accomplished at the same time, and yeah, there may be risks involved if the emergency fund is not very strong, but there may also be preferences to make sure to invest into BTC on a weekly basis and to build the bitcoin investment, even if there might be an inadequate emergency fund and other ways that the person's finances are fucked up.. such as not having his debt under control...and so maybe he is paying off debt too... .. and sometimes the earliest days of getting your finances and psychology in order can take a bit of time, maybe even 6 months to 18 months, or even longer, but maybe at the same time there is at least a minimum amount of BTC that is bought.. and maybe there was a past practice of not having any emergency fund, so there was a past practice of always panicking and just the creation of an emergency fund is going to bring progress and the more and more that the emergency fund is built, the more aggressive the person likely is going to be able to become in terms of his BTC investing.

Let's imagine that before one starts investing in Bitcoin, he has been saving $200 per month in 6 months. That's about $1200 and the investor is still working and getting paid steadily (he has a steady cash flow), then on the 7th month he starts investing $100 weekly in Bitcoin (and still saving emergency funds too)... With all those savings he or she has, he or she will not think of tempering his or her investment for a long time.

At the same time, we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and we might end up having way too much cash.

So we have to find a workable balance, and if a person has expenses of $200 a month but a salary that varies too, then there might be months that he is not able to pay all of his expenses from his salary.. and he should be in the best position to figure out if he needs to have more saved up so that he can deal with the variability, but also there are other ideas of cashflow replacement, but also if an unexpected outside emergency comes besides the needs for cashflow, then he might need to have more than just 6 months worth of regular expenses saved up... so I am not going to be able to suggest in advance for someone, and each of us has to figure out how much cash to keep and how aggressive to be in our BTC investment, and if maybe we have been investing in BTC for more than 4 years, we might even be in a better position in terms of solidifying our emergency funds.. and maybe even having other categories of emergency funds besides cash..and maybe we would also have an order in which we would draw such funds and hoping to never have to dip into the BTC.... .

and yeah there are some people who don't want to buy BTC right from the start, so they save up in order to buy on the dip.. which may or may not work out for them, and is not a very good way of preparing for UP, if they have not already bought BTC in advance of their waiting for the dip, which means they might have ONLY prepared for one BTC price direction if they do not already own BTC.
What's the essence of waiting for the dip when the dip will not come so easy? However, such person might not even be aware of the dip rather.

You can prepare for dips or not. That's your choice.

Since I got into bitcoin I have striven to be prepared for either BTC price direction, and I have striven to maintain such preparedness at all times.  That has been my own approach.

When you are brand new to investing into bitcoin, you might have some savings and maybe you have some kind of an investment portfolio of stocks or something, so when you first decide to start buying, maybe you have an aim to get at 10% of your investment portfolio will get allocated to BTC, and so if you own $10k worth of stock, and you don't want to sell any, then maybe the next 10 months you invest $100 per month into bitcoin and you thereby get close to being around 10% into bitcoin, and then after that you can reassess what is your next goal.

If you already have $600 in cash in the bank that you could allocate to buying bitcoin, but you don't want to spend it right away on bitcoin, you might choose to allocate a portion to buying bitcoin, but maybe at the same time you have to account for your income and maybe you have $100 per month coming into your income that could be spent on bitcoin, so if you add up what you have in the bank and what you have coming in, then that is $1,200, and so you could divide it up $400 to each category but then you don't have $400 to buy right away and $400 for buying on dips, so maybe you divided it $300 for buying on dips and $300 right way, and then you still would have $100 per month for DCA, and yeah, there can be a lot of scenarios to consider, but having money to buy on dips is part of something that I have always try to prepare myself, but sometimes when the BTC price keeps dipping, any of us can get to points in which we need to reassess or we might even run out of cash.

On the other side, yeah it can be uncomfortable if the BTC price does not dip and you have money waiting to buy on dips that does not get used, and you have to figure out yourself how you want to treat that money or to readjust your considerations of the setting of your buying price points from time to time in order to attempt to best prepare for what you believe that the BTC price might do in that portion of the money that you have available for that purpose, and at the same time it would not necessarily mean that you stop DCA buying within the terms that you have set for that category of funds..

As the OP didn't wait for the dip, I like it that way because maybe before the dip might come back he must have spent the money already if only he's one of those that can't deal with cash Grin.

I already stated how I would have dealt with it, and that does not mean that my way is either the best for OP or for anyone else, and OP has to decide, and once he decided and he already employed that strategy, then he likely is somewhat locked into that strategy, unless the BTC price goes sufficiently above his buying in [price and he decides to reassess based on that kind of a price movement...and sometimes people will take a loss in order to correct a mistake that they made, and there are surely trade offs in correcting mistakes by taking losses, but sometimes it might be the more practical solution, and I am not even suggesting that OP should do that. 

I have made some similar mistakes in the past, and frequently i have to make some tweaks in order to account for the mistake, and hope that the mistake is not too large... and so sometimes I have mistakenly bought when I meant to sell, and other times I have mistakenly sold when I meant to buy...and sometimes I don't realize that I made the mistake until several hours or even several days later.  I will usually have to figure out some kind of a solution that I consider to be acceptable to wait out a price move that might correct the mistake in one direction or another or I might force some kind of a resolution... and if there are likely fees to take into account, then that would also be something that is calculated into what can be done or should be done.

Sometimes it could take several weeks or even longer for the situation to resolve in one direction or another in order to get me back to where I should have been or could have had been absent the mistake.