Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Financial Independence Retire Early [F.I.R.E]
by
JayJuanGee
on 09/01/2025, 16:55:59 UTC
To give you an idea, it's not that much compared to all of you in here but I can say that hopefully when BTC hits the ceiling, I can say that I can live with my life with less pressure…
That’s a good goal, congrats but I believe the FIRE stuff was originally about collecting dividend stocks which produce a somewhat reliable cash income.

Of course you can invest in coffee beans and still become FIRE if it works for you.

But having to sell your bitcoins might not be the best idea whether you become FIRE or not. Or maybe, you want to invest only in btc and later you want to allocate some of your btc to the dividend stocks when your btc stash hits a certain amount against the USD but then you won’t have any experience in the stock market when that time comes and you will look like a fish out of the ocean which means you’ll make mistakes and lose money.

Or you might try to become a real estate king like Donald after you get rich from btc. It will also generate good cash flow but the bad part is, it is a business which you’ll have to manage. Talk to the tenants, fix the properties etc… Dividend stocks bring much less headache. What could go wrong with KO for example unless they make everyone cancer or diabetic and guess what they actually do and nobody cares Cool (poor J&J and 3M had to go through that lawsuit nightmare and they still operate!)

The point is, I am not sure if depending on only btc is a good idea. You might also want to plant seeds in other farms while it is early. You don’t wanna be late there as much as you don’t wanna be late at bitcoin. Getting rich is easier than most people think. Managing and keeping your riches is a way difficult task.

Also understanding the legacy markets (stock and real estate) gives you a much better understanding of finance than investing only in bitcoin.

Many people who got rich from bitcoin were already nearly rich because they were already invested in stocks. Don’t miss that point. If you become successful at the stock market, you will kill it at bitcoin markets. Ez pz.
Let's say that a guy had accumulated bitcoin until March 2020, and he got up to 10 BTC, yet then he got frustrated with bitcoin, so he decided to start to cash out 4% of his bitcoin per year, and so if he had followed such a cashing out, he would have had cashed out right about 1.76 BTC over the past nearly 5 years, and he would still have 8.24 BTC, and so maybe at this point he could stick with a 4% cash out rate, or maybe he could move up to a 10% cash out rate?  I  think that either one is sustainable, yet the lower cash out rate will certainly allow the BTC stash to grow in dollars value way faster than a higher cash out rate, including a cash out rate as high as 10% per year, but surely a guy with ONLY 8.24 BTC might still choose a more conservative withdrawal rate, even though he surely would have had been able to allow his BTC stash to grow over the past 5-ish years with ONLY a 4% withdrawal rate.
That worked like that till now doesn’t mean it will work just the same in the future. Also you are putting far too much trust in one asset I don’t care if it is gold, bitcoin, adamantine or unobtainium. It is still one asset.

I think what I am describing is a reasonable approach to bitcoin.  Of course, we cannot turn back the clock, and we might not even want to start to withdraw from our bitcoin until it gets to a certain size.  Surely, when you look at the link that I provided regarding the spot price versus the 200-WMA value of the 10 BTC on March 12, 2020, you will see that it may well might not have had been a good time to start to cash out on the BTC, whether cashing out at a conservative 4% per annum rate or otherwise, yet surely I am continuing to make the argument that any withdrawal rate between 4% and 10% has historically been sustainable in bitcoin and is likely to continue to be sustainable, especially if such withdrawal rate is tempered based on accounting for BTC prices in relation to the 200-WMA, and therefore reducing the withdrawal rate when the BTC spot price is less than 25% higher than the 200-WMA.

So, of course, so many of us know that past performance does not guarantee future results, yet I still think that if we are calculating what to do and how to manage our BTC based on the 200-WMA, then we are taking a way more conservative approach to managing our BTC as compared to if we were making our decisions based on the whims of BTC's spot price that have historically been pretty damned big and there is no reason to really speculate that such BTC spot price whims are not going to continue into the future.

Sure, regarding ONLY having one asset, that could be problematic, even if we are still imply that the one asset would still be balanced with managing fiat reserves (whether the dollar or other fiats that might be considered local currency kinds of balancing of cashflows and cash reserve attempts).  I am not even going to entertain any nonsense that there are practicalities in regards to fucking around with shitcoins, except maybe for folks who cannot resist gambling, then maybe they could play around with up to 10% the size of their bitcoin holdings into various shitcoins and/or trading an/or gambling.  Another problem with considering shitcoins as diversification is that they have been and will likely quite greatly continue to be correlated with bitcoin's price performance, so adding shitcoins to your investment portfolio is largely just adding an additional layer of risk, when we already likely should realize that bitcoin is already a risky asset, so why add more risk that is just correlated in the same direction, except for limiting it to no greater than 10% of the bitcoin value, for those guys who cannot resist gambling (and/or experimenting and imagining that they are learning from it).

So usually if we are referring to practical diversification, then we would be considering across other asset classes that are not supposed to be correlated, even though many of us realize that so many asset classes are perverted through their overly correlation with various debt systems, yet still we could continue to consider other potentially non-correlated or less correlated asset categories as property, stocks, bonds, commodities, cash/cash equivalents (hopefully not shitcoins) and perhaps some business kinds of ventures.

I am not against allocating beyond bitcoin and cash.. especially as a person's investment portfolio grows, and perhaps once the bitcoin and cash components might start to get to more than a year or so of annual income/expenses, then there could be some desires to have some other exposures that may well still be just various ways to buttress the cash component so that it is earning yield rather than ongoingly debasing.. so the general idea is that bare minimum of 3 months back up cash/liquid funds in a kind of emergency fund, and then other kinds of back up funds can be in cash or something that might be relatively liquid which sometimes might be referred to reserves and float and as those funds get bigger, presumptively along with the growth of a person's bitcoin stash, then there may well be desires to have  some of those back up funds earning, so putting into the categories of other assets as I described, yet it may not be urgent to diversify, yet over the years maybe one or two more back up assets could be added whether properties (not tending to be very liquid) or stocks or something, and surely some of these choices might be individualistic.

So then in regards to withdrawing from the bitcoin, sure you could start early.. such as the starting from march 2020 when the 10 BTC are ONLY worth around $55k-ish... but it may well be better to let them grow for a while and continue to add to them, and if your cashflow is totally fucked up or if you feel that you had overly allocated to the BTC, then either you just stop buying it or maybe you start withdrawing at a bit of a faster rate (such as going as high as 10% annually) until you start to feel better about your balance.. .. and yeah of course, these can be tough decisions, and as you suggest, we cannot go back in time, we can ONLY attempt to figure out a prudent and practical strategy from now hence forth and perhaps try to learn from historical performance and/or identifying and accepting the ongoing strength of BTC fundamentals..even if the upside potential might not be as great, bitcoin's investment thesis remains strong today and perhaps even stronger than it was 5-10 years ago... and perhaps even stronger in the past year or two based on more and  more entrants and interest from governments, institutions and traditional (status quo) rich people.

Can bitcoin grow the same rate in the future as it did in the past? Sure it can but is it wise to make a bet on only one asset? If you trust only bitcoin then good or bad whatever happens to Bitcoin directly affects you and your future plans. 100%.

Sure bitcoin has appreciated in value (price) quite a bit in the past 5-10 years, so we can see that it would have had been good to invest in bitcoin historically, yet I still doubt that we would be disadvantaged by investing into bitcoin today, especially since we cannot turn back the clock.  We have to figure out what to do from today, and sure we can account for our various personal circumstances (including the 9 I mention) that will also account for how many BTC we have so far accumulated, and then also to figure out if we have enough or more than enough, and if we don't have enough, it seems that we should keep building the bitcoin, and bitcoin likely remains amongst the best (if not the best) of investment assets that is currently widely available across the whole world, yet it still likely ONLY has about 1% of the world's population invested into it... and yeah, maybe we remain pessimistic about bitcoin's upward potential as compared with other places that we might put our value, so then those are questions about position size rather than questions about whether to get in or not.

Prior to March 2020, I used to recommend for beginners into bitcoin to make an initial allocation into bitcoin between 1% and 10%, and after March 2020, I started to recommend an initial allocation into bitcoin between 5% and 25%, and yeah of course, the more than guys study into bitcoin they can figure out whether they want to be more whimpy in regards to their bitcoin allocation level or if they might want to error on the side of being more aggressive, and surely my own recommendations are merely attempts to share some of my own ideas, and guys ultimately have to figure out these matters for themselves, including tailoring their level of aggressiveness to their own circumstances - including that some guys may well want to go outside of my own recommended parameters based on their own assessments of the matter or even their own assessments of their own particular circumstances that they believe justifies some other kind of a target.  

I am surely not claiming  to know the answer in regards to what some other guy should do, even though sometimes I still might feel that I have enough information to make some general suggestions, and some of the general suggestions that I ongoingly tend to make is to proclaim that an overwhelming majority of normies are tending to be underallocated to bitcoin, since we have a whole world of low coiners and no coiners, so I think that it is ongoingly appropriate for me to continue to be presuming that an overwhelming number of normies continue to be underallocated to bitcoin.. absent some evidence to the contrary.  Of course, I would not proclaim that psycho Michael Saylor to even be close to the category of underallocated to bitcoin, even though he ongoingly proclaims that he does not have enough.. hahahahaha.. what I psycho, but still ongoingly he makes a lot of really good points in regards to recognizing and appreciating bitcoin as the most pristine of assets currently available, and they are available to him and/or anyone else who is willing to spend time, energy and/or financial resources to gobble them up (and to put them into self-custody - even though Saylor's own (including MSTR's) BTC custody arrangements might not be as good as they could be or should be).

But when you have a diversified portfolio of all good assets (btc, gold, dividend producing stocks making profits, growth stocks, high yield bonds) which you pick personally, then you will distribute the total risk to your assets but the upside potential will be more or less the same.

I don't have a problem with the idea of diversification, including the categories you describe, yet you still personally have to figure out how much of a priority are you going to give to bitcoin, and also potentially question the extent to which you are diluting your bitcoin investment based on your voluntary decision to invest into various inferior assets.  Yeah, of course, we don't have to agree regarding our allocation choices, and personally, since about 2017-ish, I had come around to my own adjustment in thinking to largely just continue to let my bitcoin investment ride rather than engaging in practices of reallocating into inferior assets, even though for sure we had seen a lot of volatility from bitcoin since we can look at the charts and we can see that bitcoin had a stupendous uptrend from late 2015 to late 2017 in which it largely went up 78x from $250 ish to $19,666, but then it ended up correcting back down in the ballpark of 84%-ish to $3,124-ish.  Even in that 2017 process of going up and coming back down, I had already decided (I think it was sometime in late-ish 2017) that I was just going to ride out whatever ended up happening, including whatever correction might end up coming after the blow off top, so I already decided that I was not going to try to trade the waves.. that were even somewhat anticipated prior to their happening, even though none of us can really know specifics in regards to when the top is in, until perhaps after several months when it starts to become more clear that the top had already happened.

My point is that any of us can attempt to structure our own finances and our psychology that we are willing to ride the waves including figuring if we might have high allocations in something like bitcoin, we still could decide to just let it ride, even if we expect it to continue to be greatly volatile and sometimes even having extremely great downward corrections that might well even be manipulations in which we cannot tell how far the downity is going to end up.  I am not going to claim it is easy to go through the down periods, and I am not even going to claim that there aren't frustrations when the price seems to fail/refuse to go back up for way longer than seems reasonable... but at the same time, it still continues to seem that bitcoin remains amongst the best (if not the best) of assets, and the mere fact that there is an ongoing underlying war in the background should not necessarily dissuade us, even if the underlying war might contribute to our position size choices, and surely we are not all going to decide the same, since we surely have to also account for our own particulars in regards to both how much to allocate and then how to manage our BTC once in and if we are continue to consider ourselves in a BTC accumulation stage or if we might consider that we had advanced to a maintenance stage or a liquidation stage or some combination of those, since sometimes we might float a little between those stages especially if we are building our BTC holdings and also other aspects of our overall investment portfolio yet at the same time, it might not be exactly clear if we have enough yet or not or if we just have to continue to allow the time to play out and maybe not take any drastic moves, unless the drastic moves might be justified based on new developments and/or reasonable changes in our perspective.

In the end you will end up having a financial fortress which will survive any doomsday scenario.

There are a variety of ways to hedge your various investments, yet at the same time, guys will likely engage in different tactics while they are building their investment portfolio as compared to if they transition to either a maintenance stage or a liquidation stage.  Surely any of us should want to establish an investment portfolio that holds its value, but also that it appreciates enough so that we can start to withdraw from it or live off of it, and probably we also would want to make sure that our investment portfolio would also keep up with the debasement of fiat currencies (whether our own fiat currency or various fiat currencies overall).

I made that mistake going all in on asset. Never again. I could have won big but it is not worth having that anxiety. Anxiety makes you panic and panic makes you stupid. Going all in is a no no.

Of course,  it is hard to argue in regards to experiences that are based on actual happenings, even though surely arguments could be made in regards to lessons that might be learned or even paths forward, yet at the same time, each person is responsible for figuring out their own allocations, whether they consider themselves in the building stage including hopefully building their various assets within their investment portfolio or if they might consider themselves to be transitioning in to some kind of a maintenance stage or liquidation stage.  Surely when a person is more earlier on in his investment building, he may well just start out with one asset, such as bitcoin and cash, and then little by little he might end up adding other categories of assets and figuring out how much to allocate to them.. and surely there are guys that get their balances wrong, even though again it is both their decision to make and also they are going to be responsible for any consequences of their decision, including that no one is likely to bail them out (from the internet) if they end up screwing up in terms of their own allocation choices (and/or their from time  to time reallocation, if they end up engaging in reallocation practices from time to time).


I have a diversified portfolio now which makes bucks even while I am sleeping. I have different assets all around the world. Every tiny share and sat I got is busting his ass to make money for me and I sleep much, much better. Not a care in the world.

That's good.  I still think that there can be some differing considerations regarding if the assets are still being built up and when a guy might start to choose to live off of his investments, if he might consider that he is approaching such stage of his investment.  Sure, if he is still working, he might not need to go from his building stage and straight into a stage of withdrawing from his investment, and he also could transition from full time work to part time work and sure, some guys say that they don't mind working all of their lives, yet I would think that part of the theme of this thread is to talk about the extent to which we might consider that we are engaged in work based on merely activity preferences rather than feeling that we have to work to support our lifestyle, so in some sense, you already mentioned that there could be stages in which we may well consider that we are pretty much able to completely live off of the financial portfolio that we had built without having to engage in other kinds of work - beyond perhaps just some managerial kinds of activities that we might have to continue to do in regards to spending from our investment portfolio and/or maybe accounting  for our moving around funds from time to time.

we talked about it a lot on the Italian board of the FIRE movement, which is very interesting
FIRE is not a fixed pattern but more a way of thinking and making choices

There is no FIRE scheme or project that is the same for everyone, everyone has their own and is personalized for their needs
What's good for you, may not be good for me

Sure, there is a bit of a psychological component, yet there are also some hard facts that relate to both how much value a guy has accumulated, the various ways that the value is allocated and various kinds of cashflow and portfolio management practices that might be different in regards to the building stage as compared to getting to a status that the guy is actually going to start to live off of the funds, either in full or partially.

I doubt that mentality is going to help very much for guys who either had not established enough funds into their investment portfolio or if their cashflow and/or their portfolio management practices are not in a decently solid status allocations and/or plans to withdraw if that is their current or future status.