Personally, I suggest that beginners to bitcoin can come in with 5% to 25% of their income into bitcoin, yet they surely have to figure out if even my own recommended range works (and is appropriate) for their personal circumstances, and in the end each person is responsible for his own choices of both whether to invest in bitcoin and how much, and surely many of us suggest to get off zero and to get into some kind of a beginning range (such as 5% to 25%), yet there still is an overwhelming majority of normies who are still stuck at either zero or very low levels of allocations to bitcoin.
You've made a valid point, and this leads to my question. Do you think some of these normies don't have that financial capability to allocate from the little they have, or they just don't know how to make plans and allocations?
By definition, a person who does not have much or any discretionary income should not be investing, so I am not referring to people who actually do not have discretionary income.
Now, my reason for asking this is that, in most cases, we come across people who finds it difficult to invest from what they have,
Of course, investing is difficult, and a person needs discretionary income before he can invest.. otherwise he is trading or gambling. I don't recommend trading and/or gambling, even though people do it and people can do what they like, whether I recommend it or not.
because it is considered very little.
Well. Either you have discretionary income or you don't. If you are not sure, then you might need to hold the cash aside until you are sure that you have enough to cover your various expenses before buying bitcoin.
Another thing with bitcoin is that your investment timeline should be 4-10 years or longer. Sure a poor person could go into bitcoin with a plan to invest 4-10 years or longer, yet emergencies could end up happening, and hopefully they have an emergency fund to take care of such emergencies if they were to happen, but yeah, I understand that many people barely are able to gather up enough income just to eat, remain sheltered and to take care of their other life-necessary costs, such as transportation other kind of basic needs, so those people would not necessarily have enough income or reserves in order to be able to invest in bitcoin.
And even though these set of people are opportune to get more income (maybe through salary increase, as a result of promotion), or other means, they still find it difficult to pull out a certain amount for investment, probably because they feel that an increase in income, also means an increase in expenses, which IMO, is a bad behavior to managing finance.
An increase in income does not automatically mean an increase in expenses. Of course, if a person gets a job down the road, then maybe they have to pay for transportation and some other expenses, yet hopefully they are making more from having the job (the extra income) than the extra expenses that they may well have to incur to perform the job.
Frequently if a person is having troubles figuring out if they have enough income to buy bitcoin or not, then they might have to spend more time figuring out their financial situation, and probably it would be better to error on the side of not investing into bitcoin, since if they invest into bitcoin, they have to consider that money to be removed from their ability to use it for 4-10 years or longer, so if they cannot figure that part out, then they might not be in a position to invest into bitcoin...
And yeah, there could be ways that a person is able to increase their income and/or cut their expenses in order to be able to invest into bitcoin yet it may surely not be obvious how to accomplish such, and each person is ultimately responsible to figure it out and if they screw up their finances and/or psychology based on their having had invested into bitcoin (or having not invested when they should have), then they have no one to blame but themselves, and surely there are also people who are not able to do basic math, so they might not be a good candidate to own bitcoin, yet I am not going to presume people to not know basic math even though there are such people who probably should learn basic math prior to investing into bitcoin or anything else.
~snip
Before doing steps like that and DCA or buy in lumps, a person should consider all the risks, analyze a big chunk of info needed, and keep acting toward the goals in his mind.
Of course, DCA demands consistency and focus, but I don't think the whole analysis thing is very important, besides there is no risk in investing for long, as long as your accumulation is intact and safe, because security matters alot for a long term journey.
And, yeah, I agree with sotelorene in regards to your last point..... Investing long term into bitcoin does not remove the risk, since there is always a risk that your investment could go to zero, and that risk does not go away merely because you are investing longer rather than shorter. Self-custody is probably helpful to protect a long term investment, yet even self-custody does not remove the risk of some folks messing up their own self-custody, and it is likely that many folks lose their bitcoin based on faults in their own self-custody situations.