Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 06:10:27 PM

Hey Bitcoin, here's the deal: I need a new car. I just got home from a very long and sweaty trip: my A/C works, but at least one blend door actuator ~~is possessed~~ has a life of its own. I reset the system, and it worked for a few minutes again before it went wrong again. The end result: the A/C is working hard, the fan is loud, but the cold air doesn't reach the inside of the car. Barely any air comes out, because some of the blend doors are blocking it. Automatic climate control is very nice, until something fails, then old fashioned manual controls would have been much better. Add the fact that it consumes engine coolant, has a "check engine light" that comes on most of the time (but I can turn it off for a few hours by driving only long trips with expensive premium fuel), door rubbers that come loose, and tire pressure sensors that make a light on my dashboard blink (because of the sensor, not because of the tire pressure), and it's time to replace it. It's not even that old, but has had far too many problems already. Long story short, I want a new car. Why post it here? I want to make a deal with Bitcoin, because I don't want to sell too much. So Bitcoin must go up, that's the only solution

Maybe I'm just very tired, but this felt like the right thing to post after the broken A/C really got to me. I just drove for 12 hours, passed an upside down car, a camper van on it's side, and lots of road work. Time to hit the couch with alcohol

A few years ago.. 2021 bitcoin price run. I spontaneously decided to get a new car, and I was thinking that I don't really need a new car because the one that I had was working pretty good...

Yet at the same time, once i started looking, there ended up being a few bells and whistles that I wanted updated. .. so viola!!! new car ended up happening.

I thought that I was going to just get a dollar loan and then pay it off within a year or two.. but then once I had the loan, there was no incentive to pay it off early... so I just let the payments run... and it ends up being a five year term, so it is completely paid off towards the middle of 2026.. .. oh, and by the way, I had another car that I bought in 2011, but then I paid off all of the loan early in 2013 because I did not want it hanging over my head. yet I probably would have had been better to use that money to buy bitcoin and to spread out my cashflow since the interest was only around 2% or 3%.. .. and yeah, those are some of the benefits of buying a new car and then suffering so much depreciation, especially in the first 3-ish years.. and yeah, these technically ladened cars do not seem to be made to last.

I will admit that I might have had tried to negotiate better terms if the interests rates were not so low, and I will also admit that I probably would have had paid it off early if the interest rates were low.. but once a person is in a loan like that, there is no incentive to pay it off early at those kinds of rates... except maybe that we do not really own the car or have the title until it is paid off, but once it is paid off, then we receive the title.. and we no longer have to have full coverage insurance which is another savings. Cars are expensive toys.. and prior to 2010, I was accustomed to buying all of my cars at least already 3 years old, but then maybe around 2010 I started feeling more rich (even though that was still more than 3 years before I heard about (learned about) bitcoin).

Regarding the BTC price, contrary to belief, what we want and/or pray for does not have any meaningful affect on it, so in that regard, we have to attempt to be prepared for BTC price moves in either direction, including sideways. I understand that not knowing BTC price direction causes dilemmas, yet life is full of dilemmas... and so .. sometimes we have figure out some kind of a balance. For one thing if we have not yet gotten to adequate bitcoin accumulation levels, then we are still accumulating bitcoin, and so we need to maintain various kinds of backup funds that include reserve funds and emergency funds, and so yeah, it can be logical that a new car may well go beyond such back up funds, especially if there is not an ability use debt or a loan is not part of a plan, so then yeah, cars tend to be BIG ticket items, and surely part of the reason that some folks buy more car than they need is because they can get them financed., In my case in 2021, I probably would have bought it whether there was a loan available or not, but the loan made it way easier to accomplish with less stress on my cashflows for the immediate, and it was even reasonable to spread out for 5 years and/or 60 months of payments.

Even if a person were to have an income of $6,666 per month and maybe expenses that are merely half of that. He might have had a total of back up funds that are in the ballpark of around $12k to $15k depending on perhaps already anticipating that he was going to be buying another car, so maybe he might have had been saving more on the side for the new car, too. A guy might be willing to ONLY deplete the back up funds by half since he has to have some funds for any actual emergency that might come, so then the question still would be how expensive of a car he wants to get and how much BTC will he need. The previous brand of car seems to suck if it is not very old and is having so many technical glitches. I still like the idea of buying 3 year old cars, unless you have reached overaccumualtion stage with your bitcoin, and if you have reached overaccumulation stage then there is at least no need to worry about shaving off some bitcoin - except no one really wants to sell too much too soon if the BTC price might go ripping uppity... a similar dilemma to the one that psycodad presented to us only about a week ago or so.

Maybe the punchline still is that none of us likely have any clue which way the bitcoin is going to go in the short term, even though since we are in a bullmarket, it is likely inclined more towards up rather than down, and surely so many of us are expecting some kind of excitement that brings us at least $200k in the coming months, but still.. some kind of a short term within the coming 1 to 4 months (or even drug out into 2026) UPpity, if it ends up happening, is ONLY going to seem obvious after it had already happened.

Quote from: Biodom on Today at 06:46:41 PM

Quote from: LoyceV on Today at 06:10:27 PM

[edited out]

Oh, no..don't count on bitcoin to "buy things".
In "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator"-book by Edwin Lefèvre-based on life of Jesse Livermore, he says that every time someone says "this trade will buy me ...", it almost never works.

Casually selling btc on a whim works, though, Grin

I have found selling on the way up to be very helpful to always have cash, yet we still have to get to a status of having enough or more than enough for that selling on the way up strategy to make sense... of course, shaving off a bit extra might be a thing too.. and surely if someone considers that a car is a BIG ticket items, and so if all the funds are gathered up, then there might still be a $30k shortage in funds in order to get that car that seems suitable for the situation, and surely $30k right now of right around 0.26 BTC is a lot better than it would have had been through much of 2023 or 2024.. .. in 2023 we would have had to have had shaved off more than a whole BTC, and then in 2024, we would have been able to get away with right around 0.5 BTC. . but yeah, it seems to me that it never would really feel good to shave off BTC if we were not in overaccumulation stage yet. and being in overaccumulation stage helps, even though it might not completely solve the dilemma with a potentially BIG ticket item in regards to anticipating that the BTC price is about to go uppity.