Reserved 2

Opening Post 2: Getting started – assessing personal financial situation (in relation to ability to invest in bitcoin)

First things first, no?

Before any of us invest into anything, we should strive to figure out our own situation and individual circumstances to the best of our abilities.  Of course, we do not necessarily want the perfect to become the enemy of the good, but at the same time, if we cannot figure out various aspects of our own personal circumstances, then any investment that we make, whether it is into bitcoin or into some other investment, we may well devolve into gambling rather than investing.

These 9 principle individual factors that influence your decision whether to invest into bitcoin and how to invest into bitcoin have financial, skills and psychological components that include:

1)   your cashflow,

2)   how much bitcoin you have already accumulated,

3)   your other investments (including considering your emergency fund, your float and your reserves - which are usually kinds of liquid ways to hold value in cash, dollars and/or your native currency in away that many of your expenses tend to be denominated),

4)   your view of bitcoin as compared with other investment possibilities,

5)   your timeline,

6)   your risk tolerance,

7)   your time, skills, goals (investment/lifestyle targets, which includes figuring out the extent that you are in BTC accumulation, maintenance or liquidation stage),
 
8 )   your abilities to strategize, plan, research and learn along the way including tweaking strategies from time to time,
 
9)   your considering your time, your abilities and whether to trade, reallocate from time to time, to use of leverage and/or to use financial instruments... (and for sure the use of financial instruments, leverage and margin trading involve higher level skills and are not even necessary to still become richie in bitcoin's already existing asymmetric bet.)

These are ongoing areas in which anyone should be working upon without necessarily concluding that they need to perfect all of them or even to perfect any one category prior to being ready to start investing into bitcoin.. whether that is investing with their time, their energies and/or their finances.

I will say straight up that it can take a pretty long time to figure out all of these factors, and even if you do not know the exact answers for each or any of the categories, that lack of perfect knowledge should not stop you from getting started into investing in bitcoin including that you can continue to learn and to improve upon each of the areas (and all of the areas) to better get to know yourself and your particulars with practice and continued attempts at application and tweaking along the way.

In the near future, I will be fleshing out the above 9 categories a bit more and adding them here.. but just my providing the above 9 categories should already be helpful for anyone investing into bitcoin and the main aspect still remains that bitcoin investors should be spending some time figuring out some of the application of each of these ideas for themselves.


ONLY after we go through some preliminary steps of understanding our own situation in respect to the above categories, then we should be able to set our BTC investment target allocation, and of course, our target could change over time, so if we are an already established investor with several investments and a decently long history of investing that has allowed us to accumulate investment assets.. perhaps over 10 years or more, then we might well decide to get off of zero and have a BTC investment target anywhere between 1% and 10% of our total investment portfolio.  The 1% to 10% range is a starting out area, and of course the more that we learn about bitcoin might cause us to gravitate to some level outside of the range.  I would suspect that the more that anyone studies bitcoin should cause him/her to go higher in terms of allocation and perhaps above the 10% level.  Furthermore, the more bullish we are about bitcoin would cause us to gravitate towards the higher end of the range and the more bearish (or timid) that we might be about bitcoin would cause us to gravitate more towards the lower end of the range.

If we happen to be a less established investor and we have no other assets, we may well allocate all of our investment into BTC until we reach a certain level that would thereby allow us to diversify after we had already reached a certain level of investment whether that is $10k or $100k or some other amount would be our determination regarding if we might need to start to diversify into other investments besides having everything into bitcoin.

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The power of compounding.

There surely is a certain power to compounding.  Let's imagine a hypothetical purchase of 20 BTC starting out with $5k invested in 2015... **(so that is about an average of $250 per BTC). It would just take a few of the compounding events to really start to feel the power of the compounding..   Even if you were to start to cash out 20% of your BTC stash after 10 or 11 compounding events, you would not deplete your BTC by cashing out in such a manner.

**this example was inspired by my earlier post on the topic.

1) $250 to $500     = $10k

2) $500 to $1,000     = $20k

3) $1,000 to $2,000     = $40k

4) $2,000 to $4,000     = $80k

5) $4,000 to $8,000     = $160k

6) $8,000 to $16,000     = $320k

7) $16,000 to $32,000     = $640k

8 ) $32,000 to $64,000     = $1.28 million

9) $64,000 to $128,000     = $2.56 million

10) $128,000 to $256,000     = $5.12 million

11) $256,000 to $512,000     = $10.24 million   (20 BTC) (otherwise if spending 20% reduced to about $8.192 million with a remaining stash of 16 BTC)

12) $512,000 to $1.24 million     = $20.48 million (20 BTC) (otherwise if spending 20% reduced to about $15.872 million with a remaining stash of 12.8 BTC)

13) $1.24 million to $2.48 million     = $40.96 million  (20 BTC) (otherwise if spending 20% reduced to about $25.3952 million with a remaining stash of 10.24 BTC)

So think about it, if the BTC price gets to $500k, then this hypothetical holder starts cashing out 20% of his stash each time the BTC price doubles, he still is allowing the stash to grown more than the amount that he is cashing out.    You can work out the raking numbers with a spreadsheet that I developed and discussed in another thread which fillippone has also linked a google spreadsheet to it so that you can plug in your own numbers to see how the compounding and raking works out with various numbers plugged therein.

Here is an excerpt / example of a similar but later posted description of compounding

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Here are 6 hypothetical examples to show how length of time investing in BTC, how much of an investment portfolio the person has and investing strategies can make significant differences in regards to choices that the investor will have available and whether he is going to want to consider either continue to accumulate BTC or maybe to convert into some other strategy (such as maintenance or liquidation).   **Modified somewhat from original post.


For these next Hypos 7-9, we can imagine similar kinds of hypothetical folks with ONLY 2.5 years investing into BTC.

Hypo 7 (2.5-years BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a decently large investment portfolio)
This person might have invested about a total of $3 million into bitcoin for the last 2.5 years using DCA method, and maybe even lump sum investing at various high price points, so maybe has a $34.9k average cost per BTC, and maybe built up 86 BTC, and so maybe he just plays the waves and feels like he is getting close to having enough BTC, and accomplished most of his DCA , and maybe will still buy some more BTC from time to time when he perceives the BTC price to be low.. such as near or below the 200-week moving average, other than that he might just be maintaining somewhat building his stash.   86 BTC - Around $3 million invested, average cost per BTC $34.9k, valued at around $2.666 million based on 200-WMA and $4.472 million spot price.

Hypo 8.  (2.5-years BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a medium-sized portfolio)
 Maybe this person was investing $2,000 per week into bitcoin, and invested around 264k into bitcoin and accumulated about 9.1 BTC, and likely this person is not quite feeling as if he has enough BTC.....9.1 BTC - Around $264k invested, average cost per BTC $29k valued at around $282k based on 200-WMA and $473k spot price.

Hypo 9 (2.5-years BTC investor who came into bitcoin without any kind of investment portfolio), and has been investing $100 per week into bitcoin, and maybe invested around $13k into BTC and accumulated nearly 0.5 BTC.  This person still is considering that he is quite far from having enough BTC, even though he feels pretty comfortable about his investment to date including that he has built up his emergency fund, his reserves and his float, yet he is thinking that he might need to DCA into bitcoin for another 5-10 more years before he starts to feel comfortable, and maybe he is going to need to increase the quantity of his weekly DCA by either increasing income and/or cutting expenses... and he is thinking that he might be able to bring his DCA amount up to $200 or $400 per week and maybe get another 2 or 3 BTC in the next 10 to 15 years or so.  0.5 BTC - Around $13k invested, average cost per BTC $26k valued at around $15,500 based on 200-WMA and $26k spot price.

For these next Hypos 10-12, we can imagine similar kinds of hypothetical folks with ONLY 1.25 years investing into BTC.

Hypo 10 (1.25-years BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a decently large investment portfolio)
This person might have invested about a total of $2 million into bitcoin for the last 1.25 years using DCA method, and maybe even lump sum investing at various high price points, so maybe has a $25.6k average cost per BTC, and maybe built up 78 BTC, and so maybe he just continues to DCA for a while and perhaps considers starting to play the waves and feels like he continues to need to build his BTC stash size through DCA and maybe even some lump summing and buying on dips.. such as near or below the 200-week moving average, other than that he may well just be maintaining and building his stash.   78 BTC - Around $2 million invested, average cost per BTC $25.6k, valued at around $2.418 million based on 200-WMA and $4.056 million spot price.

Hypo 11.  (1.25-years BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a medium-sized portfolio)
 Maybe this person was investing $2,500 per week into bitcoin, and invested around 165k into bitcoin and accumulated about 6.2 BTC, and likely this person is not quite feeling as if he has enough BTC.....6.2 BTC - Around $165k invested, average cost per BTC $26.6k valued at around $192.2k based on 200-WMA and $322.4k spot price.

Hypo 12 (1.25-years BTC investor who came into bitcoin without any kind of investment portfolio), and has been investing $100 per week into bitcoin, and maybe invested around $6.6k into BTC and accumulated nearly 0.25 BTC.  This person still is considering that he is quite far from having enough BTC, even though he feels pretty comfortable about his investment to date including that he is making progress towards building up a solid emergency fund, reserves and float, yet he is thinking that he might need to DCA into bitcoin for another 5-10 more years before he starts to feel comfortable, and maybe he is going to need to increase the quantity of his weekly DCA by either increasing income and/or cutting expenses... and he is thinking that he might be able to bring his DCA amount up to $200 or $400 per week and maybe get another 2 or 3 BTC in the next 10 to 15 years or so.  0.25 BTC - Around $6.6k invested, average cost per BTC $26.4k valued at around $7,750 based on 200-WMA and $13k spot price.

For these next Hypos 13-15, we can imagine similar kinds of hypothetical folks who are pretty much newbies in their investing into BTC.. so they are trying to figure out their attack plan in order to accumulate BTC in the coming 4 years or so.

Hypo 13 (newbie BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a decently large investment portfolio)
We would assume this person already has various investments and a somewhat diversified portfolio and of course an emergency fund, reserves and float.  He could be aiming anywhere between 5% and 25% allocation into bitcoin, but he might want to take anywhere between 6 months and 24 months to reach his allocation and to think about these kinds of matters as he is going.  He might have a lump sum that he has already authorized of around $1.6 million and an anticipated income of around $800k for the next 6 months, so therefore his total budget is $2.4 million for the next 6 months.  He may well decide to dedicate 1/3 to lump sum, 1/3 to buying on dips and 1/3 to DCA.

Hypo 14.  (newbie BTC investor who came into bitcoin already with a medium-sized portfolio)
 Maybe this person does not have any lump sum that he is able to invest, but his finances are in pretty good order in terms of his emergency fund, reserves and his float, and he considers that he can invest right around $4k per month or $1k per week into BTC, and if he has time he can try to time his DCA investing so that he can take advantage of the dips... which is around 15% of his discretionary income yet he is thinking that it could take him 10-15 years or more to reach his investment targets.. yet he will keep investing into bitcoin at about $1k per week and maybe from time to time if he gets extra cashflow or he is able to decrease his expenses, he might invest more into BTC, but he is going to play it by ear with a decently aggressive DCA approach and reassess from time to time with the passage of time.

Hypo 15 (newbie BTC investor who came into bitcoin without any kind of investment portfolio), Maybe this person has to assess his budget and to build his cash reserves, his emergency fund and his float.  He may also need to pay off some of his debts so that his cashflow is stronger.  He is considering to start out by investing around $10 per week and working his way up to $100 per week in the next 3-6 months while he gets his finances in order, including assessing various aspects of his finances and psychology... He figures that after about 1 year he should have his more egregious debts paid off, and he might be able to build his emergency fund at the same time as he is investing into BTC.. with an expectation of potentially increasing his weekly investment into BTC beyond $100 per week, but that might take a year or two. and he will reassess at various points along the way.  

Last Edited: September 19, 2023 (updated 6 individual investment factors to become 9 factors)

January 10, 2024:  Added Compounding section

January 19, 2024 & February 17, 2024: specified some language in category 3 to differentiate between emergency fund and reserve fund.

February 18, 2024:  Added more compounding examples and added Hypos 1 - 12.