Post
Topic
Board Speculation
Re: Discretionary Income vs Emergency Funds: Why It Matters for Bitcoin Investing
by
JayJuanGee
on 21/08/2025, 15:41:00 UTC
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.  
Yes, the expenses related to a child's needs are basically covered under our regular expenses, which may be essential for them to continue their education. It is much better to consider other appropriate options before using a financial safety net, i.e. an emergency fund, for a child's needs or wants, such as personal savings or separate savings, or even other savings even if he reaches the end of his funds, he can then look to his family for help. But it should always be remembered that this fund may be lacking in the future for emergencies, so it should be used with caution but it might be part of a healthy plan not to use it for small school fees, that is for trivial tasks and should not plan to use the cash reserve kept for unexpected expenses in any way.

One thing is to be completely unprepared for child's extra expenses, and another thing is to maybe have some unexpected drainage of funds prior to the child's expenses coming due.  When the topic of child expenses initially came up it was a bad example, since it would not have had been an emergency in itself or a reason to use emergency funds... yet there can be all kinds of ways that folks screw up along the way if they might either be spending beyond their ability to save up the child expenses or maybe they are having troubles increasing their income.. so even if they know that the future child expense is coming, they are not making sufficient progress towards being able to meet that expense, and they might not even be living extravagantly, they might just be having a streak of bad luck. so then when push comes to shove when it comes time for the child's bill to be paid, and if the person really down to ONLY having their emergency fund, their bitcoin investment and/or their child being able to participate in the event or not, then they have to make a choice that they may have had preferred to not have to make..

So surely it is better to try to avoid putting ourselves in such dilemmas, which usually take quite a bit of preparation in advance, and yeah the more relationships, responsibilities or even some of the complications of owning our own business causes more needs to hold more cash in reserves so that we end up having more options the longer that we are in bitcoin and building up various aspects of our bitcoin holdings and strengthening our cashflow management systems/practices.  There may well be cases in which we have to start financially planning and preparing more than 4-6 months in advance to be able to meet our $200 extra child expense without having to feel like we are struggling at the last minute and left with a dilemma of choosing between our emergency funds, our bitcoin if we want our child to participate in the experience that we might have promised the year before. 

Sometimes emergencies do actually happen that force us to change our previous plans, yet it seems that if we are at least trying to prepare ourselves in advance then we might have had done as much as we were able to do under the circumstances that ended up unravelling, and we are ultimately responsible to figure out if there might be some ways that we can better plan and/or prepare ourselves if we frequently are running into scenarios in which we are never having enough money to do the things that we want or we think that we should be able to do.. which seems to ultimately boil down to whether there may be ways that we can increase our income and/or decrease our expenses.

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.
To be honest with you, i didn't have the ideas of creating out emergency fund more of have a discretionary income to use for an investment but ever since i joined this forum i have learnt allot in the forum and this discretionary income i have use it to invest instead of saving it in the bank and it is in this forum that i understand how important emergency fund it is, ever since i have be practicing using my discretionary income for investment and emergency fund that can be of help to me not touch my discretionary income incase of any unforeseen circumstances and i have also spread it outside Bitcoin investments too, so as I'm investing and with emergency fund, I'm also having emergency fund outside my investment.

Sure.  We can accept your representation that you have gotten better at managing your income/expenses and keeping back up funds, yet your ways of describing the various funds is very confusing.

Essentially if you are receiving an income every week or month, and then you have various expenses, then you would either pay your expenses from your income or at least account for the expenses prior to determining what is your discretionary income for that pay period.

With that discretionary income you can determine if you are going to consume beyond your basic expenses, invest or put the extra into your back up funds (which is either emergency funds or reserve funds). 

If you run out of discretionary income then you can tap into your back up funds.  You don't spend from your back up funds prior to running out of discretionary funds, even if your back up funds had previously been built from discretionary funds that came from earlier pay periods.

Many times when we are in the process of building up our back up funds so that we want to get them to at least 3 months of our expenses, we are not necessarily going back and forth tapping into them.  Each pay period we get more money and we might put some of the discretionary income from that into our investment (bitcoin) and/or consume with it and/or put some in our back up funds.

Frequently we suggest that it could take 1 -2 years for a guy to build up both his back up funds and the amount that he put into bitcoin to add up to 3 months of his expenses in each, yet of course, the more discretionary income he has, the greater progress he can make.  A guy putting less than 10% of his income into bitcoin and back up funds is going to take 3x longer than a guy who is able to put 30% of his income into bitcoin and his back up funds...

And, don't get me wrong. I am not suggesting that it is normal for guys to be able to invest/save 30% of their income, even though some are able to do it, and more commonly normal people struggle to get into a habit of regularly saving/investing  10% of their income.. so any newbies to bitcoin and/or investing likely have to struggle to try to get into the habit of being able to reach 10% for their investment/savings and work their way up to higher numbers, so that they make sure that they are not overdoing anything and/or making mistakes that involve their learning some new skills and putting them into regular practice... which can be fun, but at the same time may take some discipline and some going over various numbers and trying to fix mistakes that might be made along the way.