Quote from: JayJuanGee on February 22, 2025, 05:26:30 PM

Of course debt can eat away at your finances and your psychology, so I would not want to denigrate the situation that you find yourself in, and sure there can be a lot of extra challenges to reducing debts, and to invest into something like bitcoin at the same time.

If you figure out and find bitcoin to be amongst the best places, if not the best place to put value, then you likely should want to continue to build your bitcoin position, even if you are simultaneously trying to service your debt. Of course, I cannot tell you how to do this, and you have to figure out your own balances, even though I also have mentioned that I consider it a bad idea to sell any of your bitcoin while you are still building it in order to attempt to get it to a size that might put you at your own personal fuck you level down the road within some timeline that you might be able to use it to also finalize the paying off of your debt.. so yeah, there can be some tough decisions and/or trade-offs when we are burdened by what we consider to be oppressive and ongoing debt.

It has been a very long 15 years ++ for me, but I cannot deny it was made surprisingly better just because I DCA in BTC (as I said above, it already deleted a chunk of interest, and deleted about 5 years from my end date). It was another headache to be honest and when I first started honestly I was scared it wouldn't pay off, but it has already so I make my peace that I will always DCA up to a point, and then calculate how much it helps me in my position to pay off my debt.

I'm glad you understand, and we cannot advice anyone on debt, I'm always trying to balance... like you said, if I stick to BTC DCA and hodl forever, I can predict a very good future to pay off a lump sum, but I'm just feeling more freedom to be getting the debt payment down to a level that is not so scary as it was 10 years ago.

Quote from: JayJuanGee on February 22, 2025, 05:26:30 PM

For sure, it is not easy to time bitcoin tops.. and many times guys end up selling too much too soon.. and if you come to the conclusion that you are better off to shave off some of your BTC, then surely you are in a better position to figure out those balances, and you might never really be able to come up with a perfect strategy since you might already be engaging in various efforts to increase your income and to reduce your expenses, so that you can make sure that you are making big dents into your debt payments and perhaps building your bitcoin investment too..... .. but yeah, as I already mentioned, it seems that it can be quite challenging to both sell bitcoin and to buy bitcoin at the same time, yet if you figure out some way of balancing that, then you might still be able to make progress in meeting your various goals and perhaps to get your debt down to levels that are more bearable.

By the way, there are some kinds of debt that are more oppressive than others, and if your interest rate on your debt it less than 8% per year, then it may well be better to prioritize investing into bitcoin rather than reducing the debt - yet sure the debt could have some other costs (perhaps?).. and so if the debt is higher levels then there may well be some value in prioritizing the reduction of the debt over buying bitcoin, yet it still seems problematic to me to be trying to play BTC price waves, even though you seem to have some ideas about how you are trying to play bitcoin's price waves that you perceive to be helping you, but you probably will have had noticed that your sales of your BTC might not have had been as good as just letting your BTC ride (rather than sell it) even if you had encountered some success in playing the 2017 price wave and even the 2021 price wave.. and your mentioning of being able to catch the ATH from last year seems a bit strange since the ATH from last year was not very much different from 2021, and surely anyone who sold some BTC last year should be regretting such sales since the price is more than 50% higher this year.

That's why I just stick to new ATH, sort of. It makes my job easy because DCA means every single time you kept BTC is lower than the new ATH, and on average you make a lot more, than if you saved 4 years on bank interest (I use a fund, it's slightly higher than bank interest but it also comes with risk of small loss as most of it is protected by deposit guarantee).

The thing about debt, especially business and personal loans. You can get a semi low interest annually, but if you missed a payment or became unable to pay like I did then they strip away everything, at a bad price. I won't go into details but I lost everything I had, and then they finalized the debt into 1 single amount with a long repayment scheme. But you first pay the interest, then the principal. And the longer you take to pay, the more the principal accrues interest. So shaving off the years helps a lot with compounding. In my case, because I made many mistakes in the past, and the system punishes you even more, what started out as manageable interest became heavy! I can say it is more than 10% per year if you take into account all the extra costs (like paying late, or paying the insurance for the debt).

Last year's near 100k wave was definitely not so good, but take into account the pre 40k buys from early 2024, I practically 2.5x that. Again, very difficult to predict and catch waves, and I could make it more efficient but this problem of repayment and debt servicing, forces me to try be conservative. And it worked out so far. The plan is to continue another 2 ATHs... by then I am very very hopeful to reach a repayment milestone that grants me back some freedoms. Such as getting a passport to travel, opening another bank account, getting a credit card.

Financial prison is so bad you just want to get out of it asap...

Thank you for all that. It made me think