I personally attempt to avoid creating the impression that I am giving advice, even though yeah sometimes when we are making suggestions to people about their ways of investing, people might consider that they are following our suggestions when they also need to make sure that they are doing what they believe is good for their own circumstances and they are able to deal with whatever investment plan that they have.. In the end, it seems that one of the main points should be that each person is figuring out their own strategies and/or approaches to bitcoin investing and/or cashflow management.


Some folks might not call things the same thing, such as if they have a cash cushion or back up funds or some place that they might go (mommy/daddy) if they run out of money.. so they might not even think about some of the basic matters that a person with fewer resources has to consciously play out, especially if he wants to attempt to invest into bitcoin aggressively.

There are also some folks who invest some small portion of their income, and they generally have a good income, so their income ends up serving as an emergency fund, and anyone not really pushing any limits might not really get anywhere with his investments either.. to the extent that there might be some future need to have had saved / invested - since some folks might be able to earn well in a certain portion of their lives, but if they not plan well, then they may end up in either a poverty situation or unable to even closely match some of their earlier income lifestyle choices.  

Some of the higher paid professional athletes will sometimes earn a very high income, such as even in the millions per year, or even several hundred thousand per year, but then end up NOT planning and/or investing their earnings very well, so then if they become unemployable then they might need to live off of their investments from their earlier hight paying earnings, if they had made any investments during the time that they were earning high amounts.  Surely, many of us would speculate that an athlete who might have had several years making more than $1 million per year, then maybe even just a few years of investing well, then he should be set for life.  Even for western style living, many times, just a couple of million invested will result in at least an entry level income of being able to live perpetually off of the income from such investment, as long as the investment is managed well, and I surely suggest that a mere $800k valued at the 200-WMA prices in bitcoin would result in ability to withdraw $80k per year perpetually, yet right now that is a minimum of 16.203 BTC, and surely a few years back it would have had been fairly easy to accumulate 16.203 BTC over around 4 years of investing at $2,800 per week (about $12k per month) and for a total of right around $600k invested a person could have had accumulated at least 16.203 BTC... and so not necessarily easy for a regular person, yet for someone who is making more than $1 million per year, it would not be very difficult to invest $600k into bitcoin over 4 years. .. but still sometimes there is a need for some foresight and planning, even for guys who have decent amounts of money.. and surely many of us might conclude that even the lower paid of the professional athletes who make $300k per year could invest $600k over 4 years... even though it can be a bit presumptuous to expect someone making $300k per year to live off of the other $150k, since taxes might be nearly $50k, and leave them "only" $100k per year to live off of since the other $150k per year would be invested into bitcoin.

And yeah, of course, it does take some effort to also identify bitcoin as the place to invest, rather than getting distracted into some non-bitcoin asset, which likely a lot of professional athletes get sucked into real estate, which many of us bitcoiners realize real estate is an inferior place to put value, as compared with bitcoin.


It does not necessarily help you to have larger than 3 months of expenses in your emergency fund, especially someone trying to build his investments.. and really you could end up screwing yourself over by having a lot of value tied up in cash - since emergency funds are generally considered as being in cash, liquid and easier to access...

Of course, you can have reserve funds that supplement your emergency funds, and depending on the size of your bitcoin investment, you might find it useful to start to diversify into other investments which are ways of keeping more value in cash, cash equivalents or even fairly liquid investments.. and yeah those kinds of funds/assets could go quite a beyond your cash/emergency fund holdings.... which then might get us into justifications for diversification and when it might make sense to start to diversify, when maybe there might also be desires to mostly grow bitcoin holdings... but sometimes it might start to make sense to keep some value in other assets, whether property, stocks, bonds, commodities, cash/cash equivalent... even some business activities might make sense.


Your outline and explanation is confusing Derekfunds.

Discretionary income is all of the money that you have left once you have accounted for basic /essential expenses...

So everything except essential expenses comes from discretionary.

You cannot invest or do anything beyond your essential expenses if you do not make more than your basic expenses.

Of course, there are some kinds of expenses that are higher priorities than other expenses, and sometimes people will prioritize certain kinds of expenses and/or lifestyle choices and they might even start to consider some of their lifestyle choices as if they were basic and/or essential, and sure some of them might be basic/essential and others are merely choices to live more luxuriously.

Emergency funds and reserve funds and savings and investments surely come from discretionary funds.

Sure the discretionary funds could have been used from earlier times to build the various funds, but they would have had come from discretionary funds, unless mistakes were made and funds for expenses are sometimes mistakenly categorized as discretionary funds.

I think that part of the reason that so many guys consider that there is a need for a stream of income to invest into bitcoin is because living expenses continue, and if a person does not continue to earn income, at some point, the discretionary funds, or the emergency funds or the reserve funds will be needed for expenses... and if a guy does not have any of those kinds of funds, then he will be forced to tap into his investments, such as his bitcoin... and there may even be folks who use their bitcoin as an emergency fund, which truly could be the case if such guys do not have various forms of back up funds, besides his bitocin investment.


I agree with everything that you said ZeroVinsonN, except you are giving a bit of an impression that each of us classify our basic expenses in ways that are clear and not entangles or if they are clearly able to be locked in, which even that might not be true.

There can be some subjectivity in regards to what are basic expenses, and there can even be flexibility in terms of how they are resolved.

Surely, I am in agreement with your assessment  that we do not have discretionary income until we resolve our basic expenses first, so surely you are correct in proclaiming that discretionary income is calculated from whatever is left after the basic expenses have been accounted for.  There could be times in which we have certain bills that are due on certain days of the month, and we might not know their exact amounts, so sometimes we might keep extra money in our accounts or in hand so that we will have enough to cover the various bills once they are known, whether we are talking about receiving a utility bill or maybe figuring out the costs of certain food items.. so we might not want to spend from that float money until we are sure that our basic expenses are resolved (or at least completely accounted for).

Let's say for example, I received $1,436 on the first, and so I am expecting to get paid on the 1st of the following month.  I carried over $227 from the previous month.  I like to try to carry over at least $200 from month to month.. So will try to error between $200 and $300 in my carry over.

So my total is $1,663.

I have various costs through the month, and I know which day of the month they are due.. so I tend to pay them within 5 days of their due date.

Some of the fixed cost items are already known with exactness, and other items are known within a range... The date that they are due (or the absolute latest that they can be paid without a penalty are generally known)

Rent $610 to $660

Utilities:   $50 to $120

Food: $150 to $360

Junk food other bad habits:  $10 to $40

Transportation:  $40 to $70

Phone and other subscriptions:    $20 to $40

Entertainment:  $30 to $90

savings for other BIGGER ticket items  from time to time, furniture, electronics, accessories - $30 - $60  

So the lower end of the expected expenses is $980 and the higher end is $1,480, and some of the expenses may already be known or resolved in advance, and others might not be resolved until further down the road into the month.  As they are resolved the money comes available.  If the income is higher than the $1,436 amount I listed for sure the amount above $1,480 would unambiguously be contained within discretionary income, yet sometimes it might become difficult for guys to dedicate money towards buying bitcoin or even increasing their emergency funds (or other back up funds) unless it is clear that they have discretionary income.  

I think that my initial reaction might have had been a bit of a quibble related to your seeming overly assertion that the income and expenses needed to be settled before the money could become discretionary income when the funds might not need to be settled as long as the funds are accounted for and available.

I'm confused with what you just said, you need to understand what discretionary funds means money kept aside for your own discretion and this can only be done after all of your bills have been accounted for so the money set aside for emergencies come from your discretionary funds, you can only save from what's left after all necessary bills and payments have been settled and this money that's left is your discretionary funds and it is from this money that you save from for emergencies.
Your emergency fund isn't different from your discretionary fund, it is a part of it, so a part of your discretionary funds can go into bitcoin investment and another part can be saved for emergencies that may come up.