Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Discretionary Income vs Emergency Funds: Why It Matters for Bitcoin Investing
by
JayJuanGee
on 09/08/2025, 22:08:45 UTC
I think that many times if guys are in their earliest of stages of building up their various back up funds, they are going to likely be engaging in various risky behaviors from time to time, since they don't have enough back up funds to cover a wide variety of scenarios.. yet the more and more that they build their wealth, and even their bitcoin holdings, they have more and more cushion to cover a larger variety of scenarios including that they could end up in situations where they might have to sell 5% to 10% of their bitcoin holdings, yet if they have built up their various investments so well, then they would not even be majorly damaged even if they end up having to sell some portion of their bitcoin holdings.

Yet, if a guy is in his early stages of building up, he might not be able to afford such losses and if he ends up getting set back a lot, he might never be able to make up for his losses... and he also might never be able to get to fuck you status or maybe instead of getting to fuck you status in 15 years, he ends up not being able to get there until 25 years, and so he would have had a much better life to have had gotten to fuck you status earlier, but once he made certain mistakes, he ended up overly depleting his various investment stashes (including his bitcoin) and never completely being able to recover, but once he experiences certain levels of damage, he still has to pick up the pieces of whatever he has and he has to work from what he has rather than working from where he could have had been.. even though some folks will become psychologically damaged from some of their large losses in life..and some people will be better at picking up and salvaging the pieces from where-ever they are at as compared with others who might end up giving up..
I trust the right orientation is that we invest according to the values of our discretionary incomes and expands our values of even diversify when there has come increase of our incomes. The reality is that the more wealth we grow is the more expensive our budgets grows therefore we're expected to have more savings to solve those needs because we wouldn't have to put them all up to those behind our confidence.
Perhaps selling even a pinch of your asset isn't a good idea because you're otherwise deviating from your goal. If you must sell, let it be at the appropriate time you've set upon from the onset if not, there'll always be convinceable reasons to why you even have to sell all to solve your needs. I think we need apply some more disciplines and don't crave for expenses that's above our savings and not our future assets.
However, somedays are like that when we've to stumble with our finances especially when  we don't earn much and have a dream that's beyond what our presents can afford in the long term. So therefore, I also agree that there could be need to sell at times at the needy but that mindset of repeatedly tempering your investment values just for emergency purposes is a void that can't help reach the goal. Instead, if if expenses has become too much to handle and also buying more to your portfolio, then stop buying and just hodl. You can use further provisions of your discretionary incomes to curb those expenses regarded that you're not buying more in the meantime until you sort your expenses and budgets.

A lot more concreteness will come regarding how to manage our bitcoin investment as we accumulate more bitcoin and we plug in our calculations regarding what to do based on how much we have and what are our various goals.

There are trade offs to any action, and even a poor person after a couple of cycles of stacking is going to be tempted to tap into his bitcoin and he is even going to be able to see the waves, so he may well anticipate that that the BTC price price will be going up and then it will be correcting, and even if he had ONLY been investing $10 per week, after a couple of cycles, he might be starting to get to several thousands of dollars invested into bitcoin and maybe he accumulated somewhere in the ballpark of 0.3 BTC and 0.4BTC, and also the value of his actual bitcoin holdings may well be around 10x the quantity of money that he put into bitcoin..

So his past ongoing and persistent investment into bitcoin had really been paying off and given him options that he did not previously have.  When he looks at his holdings (let's call it 0.35 BTC), he sees that based on spot price, his stash is valued around $41k, and valued at 200-WMA at close to $18,000.   From the 200-WMA, he can see that he could withdraw up to $1,800 per year, which would be 15x the amount of his historical weekly contributions of $10 per week, so he is feeling that his having had invested into bitcoin is putting him into a good place.  

Even though he feels that does not really have enough bitcoin to stop working, he might start to feel that his ongoing investment of $10 per week into bitcoin is not really adding much if any value to his BTC holdings as much as the value of his holdings are fluctuating just from ongoing BTC price moves.  So he is left with a bit of a dilemma in regards to his continuing to contribute, even though he might be convinced that he does not want to withdraw yet.  He might even consider that just continuing to hold that same quantity of bitcoin, after 4-ish years he might be able to more than triple his sustainable withdrawal rate, so he is still left with a bit of a dilemma in regards if he should continue to contribute $10 per week into bitcoin or to put that $10 per week into other matters and just wait another 4-ish years and consider that his withdrawal rate might be around $5,400 which would give him a weekly withdrawal rate of right around $100.

None of can really say when we are transitioning from accumulation stage to maintenance stage and then later to some form of sustainable withdrawal stage if he should keep investing in bitcoin, even though many of us might be inclined to tell our hypothetical guy to just keep buying $10 per week for another few more years, especially if he is considering that his timeline might be somewhere in the 4-ish years of investment timeline... yet for sure how to allocate our money are personal choices, and sometimes we can feel inconveniently locked into the scenario of the hypothetical since sometimes we might want to change some of the hypothetical circumstances.

I also plan to use my emergency fund for my child's needs, as he will start school in about a year, and I can use my emergency fund for future needs and beyond as much as possible without having to use Bitcoin prematurely.
Indeed it is correct that everyone should clearly remember about a separate savings section as the emergency fund is like a financial safety net. Using an emergency fund for a child's needs doesn't seem like a complete healthy plan to me and this plan should be shut down immediately. In terminology it can be said that these things are basically part of your financial plan so it may be appropriate to use personal savings or other reserve savings to enter at that moment. In fact an emergency fund may not be created to cover such expenses, basically everyone tries to save that money to deal with unexpected and confusing financial pressures. It's true that if you don't want to use Bitcoin prematurely, so definitely need to find other options or alternatives but you probably shouldn't touch your emergency fund at all because these funds should be used properly based on risk tolerance and for unexpected moments.

Everyone is correct when they are saying that an expense related to a child's needs that maybe it is an extra $200 twice a year, and those kinds of expenses need to be prepared for and planned for in advance, and if you get to a place where the child's needs are needing to be paid, and all that you have is the emergency funds or the bitcoin, then you might have to make an uncomfortable choice, since you do not have any other funds from which to choose.. so you may well have had put yourself into such a situation in which you don't have enough money to pay for the child's expenses.  

Another thing is that sometimes other people might know that you have bitcoin, so then they create expenses and they know that you have the bitcoin to pay for such expenses. You might even do that to yourself.  You consider your bitcoin as a kind of back up fund,vso you do not sufficiently/adequately prepare other kinds of funds, which may end up contributing to your selling too much bitcoin too soon and/or selling bitcoin at a time that was not completely of your own choosing, and if you initially told yourself that your bitcoin investment timeline was 4-10 years or longer, and you were really emphasizing longer than 10 years, then you should not be running into situations that contribute towards your potentially being motivated to sell some of your bitcoin at a time that is prior to such 10 years plus timeline.