Are you in any way justifying investing without proper chain accumulation of emergency funds? Do you really mean to do that? Life is very unpredictable and whatever has a higher risk return does not worth attempting, not even investing without proper emergency funds. I don't think there can be any successful long-term bitcoin holding without a good emergency plan. So there's evidently nothing positive about investing without emergency funds.
Long-term investment means you invest what you can afford to hold for long and possibly what you can ignore it's existence. So enough plans must be made in the form of emergency funds and back up funds and all of your basic responsibilities. Talking about changing your quality of life because you are investing in bitcoin is dependent on how you mean. Every investor also deserves a good life. So don't even live a lowly lifestyle because you want to accumulate bitcoin. Any investment that makes you get malnourished or ignore your basic responsibilities would still not last.
I think that everyone's situation is different, some people may not have emergency funds, but they want to start investing gradually so they don't miss the opportunities. It doesn't mean they're careless; it just means that they're taking a risk with what they have at the moment. Yes, life is unpredictable, and sometimes we have to take risks to grow.
A poor person is never going to get out of his poor person status if he fails/refuses to exercise sufficiently adequate cashflow management practices, and one of those adequate cashflow management practices is, as a bare minimum, have back up funds.. we can argue about the amount, and we can argue about what we call it, but zero is not even an option that will allow the person to be doing anything other than gambling and likely to lose within a pretty short period of time.
However, I do not believe it is right to say that someone cannot be successful in long term Bitcoin holdings without emergency funds.
Long term and even short term... Now you might call it something different, but if someone invests 100% of his discretionary funds into bitcoin, and he has absolutely no back up funds, then his bitcoin is serving as his back up funds... so he will end up having to sell some at a time that is not of his choosing, and all fine and dandy if the bitcoin is going up rather than down.
It depends on the person and their plans, some people are very careful, they invest only what they can afford to lose and never touch their emergency funds, no matter how small it is. Everyone's strategy is different, and what works for one person may not work for another.
If a person does not have emergency funds, then he may well have reserves or float... and yeah, he might even call it something else. On the other hand if he is just spending 70% or 80% of his discretionary income each month, then the 20% to 30% that is left over might well be considered his emergency funds, even if he does not call it that.
In my opinion, it’s all about balance.
Exactly.. balance is having some cash rather than having everything in bitcoin.
I am expecting that your expenses are not paid in bitcoin. They are paid in dollars or some other fiat (your local currency), so you have to have some of your local currency on hand, and maybe each month your paycheck comes in - let's just say on the 1st for simplicity sake.. and you pay your bills through the month or no various dates or you keep some balance available until the bill comes at some later date in the month, and you buy your food, and there may be some variance in some of your expenses and so then perhaps you have a certain amount left by the time we start getting close to the end of the month and you are not spending 100% of it right away, you are keeping some float and perhaps you know all of the expenses exactly, yet there still is going to be some variance... Maybe you keep spending through the month and you have some estimation how much you can use for bitcoin, and then maybe when we get to the 27th, there is only a few days left in the month depending on if we are in a day of 28, 29, 30 or 31 days... so maybe at that point you can spend whatever is left, including buying more bitcoin if the quantity is enough and you don't have any other things that you were considering buying.
You can invest and manage your life well if you are wise and do not go all in.
Yes. that sounds like you are holding back some funds... What are you going to call those funds? Even if you don't call them emergency funds, they may well be serving the same purpose, even though you might be not holding back any extra funds.. but you might have some other funds that you are not calling emergency funds and even if you have something like a parent or a friend, they might be serving as your emergency funds, and yeah maybe you are allowing your bitcoin serve as your emergency fund... which is not a great idea, but it still can be workable - even though it is a gamble. but not so bad if they level of cash shortfalls that you have do not tend to be very high.. Maybe you have places that you can get short-term emergency loans that you know that you can rely upon and that could also serve as a kind of emergency fund.. even though it is likely better for you to manage your funds in such a way that you serve as your own short term emergency/loan to yourself center of funds.
Nobody says that you should ignore emergency funds,
You just said it above, in the beginning of your post..
but sometimes individuals want to make a move with what they have.
If you have a payment coming in 5 days, sometimes you can run all of your funds to zero and hope nothing happens in 5 days, and surely once in a while, that might work ok.
The most important thing is not to invest money that can affect your other needs. In as far as you understand the risks and plan carefully, you can save and still invest at the same time.
Yes... if you save, then those savings are likely emergency funds, even if they have been allocated to something else.. if shit hits the fan, you have to figure out which funds you are going to use, and at some point you have to figure out if it is better to take away from your promise to give your daughter a bike fund or the bitcoin, and you end up selling your bitcoin because you did not have any other funds to draw from, which is a problem of your own making, and surely guys can be at points of their bitcoin investment where it is more important than other times to make sure that they do not sell any of their bitcoin, yet they may well end up either selling their bitcoin or maybe even they end up not being able to buy any more bitcoin because they put themselves in a bad place due to their own lack of strong cashflow management systems, and one of those systems is to maintain various levels of back up funds that are suitable to your whole financial and psychological situation.
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I really appreciate your detailed breakdown, it is clear that you have been living this strategy for over a decade, and your long term commitment to Bitcoin speaks volumes about your understanding of both the asset and the discipline required to build wealth patiently..... Your point about DCA and steady accumulation is solid, especially for those who are just starting out or have limited discretionary income.
Where I also think front loading adds a complementary layer is in recognizing timing asymmetry. Bitcoin is still early in its adoption curve, and for those who have done their homework and built conviction, there’s a case to be made for prioritizing it more aggressively now rather than later. Not recklessly, of course but strategically, based on one’s financial situation and risk tolerance.
For example, someone with an existing portfolio might decide that waiting three years to reach a target allocation in Bitcoin feels too slow given their outlook on the asset. In that case, reallocating a portion of their traditional investments to front load into Bitcoin could be a way to align their portfolio with their evolving thesis. It’s not about abandoning diversification, it’s about recalibrating based on conviction and timing. And you are right, emotional discipline is key. Front loading is not for everyone, especially if it leads to stress or overexposure. But for those who understand the game they are playing and have the bandwidth to handle volatility, it can be a powerful move.
Ultimately, it’s about tailoring the strategy to the individual, some will thrive with slow and steady DCA, others may benefit from a more front loaded approach. The beauty of Bitcoin is that it invites both paths, depending on where you are in your journey and how deeply you understand the asset.
Let's say that a guy with a $50k salary had been saving in various traditional ways for right around 10 years, and so he had been putting away around $150 per week, and so his investment portfolio had gotten up to $120k, and he was really wanting to put something like 80% of his investment portfolio into buying a house, and so in order to qualify for the loan and the house that he wanted to get (which was initially going to cost around 25% of the total cost of the house, and 10 years ago he was thinking that he was going to get a house that was $250k, yet he anticipated that during the process of saving for the house that it would go up to $350k or something like that, yet over the last 10 years, the house that he was wanting to buy now costs right around $550k, so he has never even quite getting to the point of being able to put 25% down because the goalpost had kept moving, even if he is saving and investing and even earning a fairly reasonable return on his investment... but really currently he only has $96k to put down on the houser, which is really only right around 17.5% for the downpayment.
He just heard about bitcoin and he is considering what he could do from here on out, which he could take from his saved money and put that into bitcoin, but maybe that would be at least a 4-year commitment if he were to invest into bitcoin in order to be an investment into bitcoin rather than trading it, so he is actually willing to consider the matter since his saving for a downpayment on a house has really not been going as he had expected.
Surely we likely could even look at the guy's situation, and we can see that if he had used his $150 per week to buy bitcoin in the last 10 years instead of his way of investing, he actually would have had done much better in saving for his downpayment on a house. He would have had invested
$75k and he would have had accumulated 31.61 BTC. We know that he would have all kinds of options based on that quantity of a bitcoin stash... but let's paint a bit worse of a situation.
What if the guy if the guy did not figure out bitcoin 10 years ago, but instead only figured it out 5 years ago, then if he had then invested
$150 per week, he would have had invested nearly $50k and he would have had accumulated 2.4 BTC... surely putting him in a better place than he is now, but not close to as good of a place as he would have had been to have started 5 years earlier. Even such a guy with 2.4 BTC might not want to give up his BTC for a house, since the 2.4 BTC currently have a 200-WMA value of $121k and a spot price value of $284k, and he might rather just keep saving in bitcoin before he might be willing to put a downpayment on a $550k house.
Now if the guy either has no bitcoin or he only has less than a year of stacking bitcoin, then he might not know what to do, and even if he moves high amounts of his current investments into bitcoin (perhaps half of it), then he still might want to dollar cost average the amount into bitcoin over 4-6 months or maybe even more and he might also want to continue investing into bitcoin at around $150 per week for 4-6 years rather than putting that money into a house. The number of bitcoin needed to buy the average middle to upper class house has been coming down greatly in the past 5-10 years, and surely the longer the period of time, the greater that we an see the number of bitcoin needed to buy the average house has been coming down, even if the houses have been going up in price during that time, too.
and he actually could have just bought the house outright since
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