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Guys honestly you all are always throwing these terms around, emergency funds, savings, reserve funds, discretionary income, and now I saw discretionary funds within saving(discretionary saving).. Yes all of that sounds fine, but sometimes I feel like we make this whole Bitcoin DCA talk sound really really too complicated, especially for beginners... Oya Let’s be real, not everyone can split their income especially small income into 5 or six different categories before they even think of buying Bitcoin.. If you tell someone earning just enough to survive that they need a 3 month emergency fund, reserve fund, savings, discretionary income, and then discretionary savings on top, the person might just lose interest completely…
The truth is, the most important thing here is knowing what fits your own financial stand point... If your income is low, I would advise you just focus on the basics, for me, that is emergency funds and discretionary income…. Emergency funds because life can surprise you at any time, and without that safety net, you might be forced to sell just to survive.. Discretionary income because that is the money you can truly afford to put into Bitcoin without stressing about it. Then every other category like reserve fund or discretionary savings can come later when your income grows or you are more stable financially. We should not even forget that savings itself could mean money you’re keeping aside for something like school fees, house rent, or some life project you are planning for, so it is not always investment related…
To keep it simple, here is how I see it:
Emergency Funds – Money you only touch for unexpected situations like job loss, hospital bills, or urgent repairs…
Savings – Money set aside for maybe planned goals, it could eithe either be short term or long term…
Reserve Funds – extra backup beyond savings if you’re privileged enough to have more….
Discretionary Income – the money left after paying all your bills and expenses….
Discretionary Saving – the part of that discretionary leftover you choose to save instead of spend..
Looking at these, you will see clearly that not all of them are necessary for someone just starting out. You can merge some together at the beginning, like your backup and savings can be one. Then just make sure you have emergency funds on one side, and discretionary income to DCA into Bitcoin on the other side. As your income improves, you can start dividing things neatly, but at the start it is better to keep it simple...
I would say Bitcoin investing is not just about how many financial categories you can name, It is about you understanding and accepting you reality, then discipline, patience, and not touching your stack no matter what happen...
I think that you are making matters too complicated with so many categories. Savings are merely categories of reserve funds and/or emergency funds depending on how they are designated, and of course we can put our various kinds of back up funds in to different categories.. but the essence of the matter is that the emergency funds are a kind of back up funds in which we do not want our funds to fall below.,. so we take more precautions to not tap into emergency funds unless we absolutely have no money left. We also would want to keep some portion of our emergency funds in our local cash - and/or in a way that is liquid, sure keeping some of that in banks is o.k. too yet we are running the risk of getting frozen or locked out of our bank, so it would be dangerous to not have some physical cash for periods that we might not be able to get into our bank account or any other places that we might be keeping our emergency funds in a place that might be less volatile and mostly liquid.
Our various kinds of reserve funds can also cover emergencies, but they can be categorized in all kinds of ways such as various kinds of savings or savings for specific purposes, and if we are running into times tin which we are short on money, we can tap into our reserves even for purposes that they had not been designated in the even that we deem the expenses that we have in front of us to be more important than the reason that we are holding and/or building up the reserve funds.
Similar with any investments that we have, including stocks, bonds, properties, commodities, businesses, and/or bitcoin.
If we have given priority to bitcoin, then we are trying to protect it, yet if our car breaks down and we have run out of most if not all other funds, then we might be faced to sell some of our bitcoin if we consider fixing and/or replacing the car to be more important than hanging onto bitcoin.
If we invest into bitcoin, we may well should have had determined our investment into bitcoin as a priority, yet if we don't keep enough back up funds and/or we don't have good cashflow management practices, then we will likely end up selling some or all of our bitcoin at a time that is not completely of our own choosing.
We might not want to necessarily get caught up in quibbling over various confusing labels, yet if we are able to separate our funds, then we are likely going to figure out our priorities that may include making sure that we don't necessarily need to make difficult decisions if we get to a point where we don't have any money left due to our own poor management of our funds.
If a guy might be investing into bitcoin for 3 years at around $100 per week, so then he had invested around $15k into bitcoin, and maybe if his income is around $30k per year, which is about $577 per week (or $2,500 per month), and maybe if his expenses are around $300 per week (or around $1,300 per month).. so if he had built up his emergency funds to about 3 months of his expenses, then that would be around $3,900, and maybe he also has $2k to $3k in reserve funds. He may well be in a pretty good position to cover all kinds of situations, yet if he uses up all of his reserve funds and starts to tap into his emergency funds, he might be getting into a bad situation that he wants to prevent, and he knows that once he starts to tap into his emergency funds, then the only thing that is next is to tap into his bitcoin, so he already might be taking actions before he gets down to ONLY having his emergency funds.. and yeah, if his emergency involves a cut in his income and also a raising of his expenses, then all of his back up funds might get depleted quickly, unless he is able to rectify the situation.. and maybe he had gotten into a car accident and he cannot work for something close to 6 months, so he may well be struggling, and he may end up having to sell some of his bitcoin, even if he had various reasonable and seemingly adequate cash back up systems in place.
Hopefully guys can figure out their own vulnerabilities, and sure in the beginning of their investment the bitcoin might be serving as an emergency fund as the various back up funds are being built up... but by the time a guy has spent a few years building his bitcoin and building his back up funds, he should be able to tolerate ups and downs in the market and also various cashflow situations that he might face, including if he might have had taken measures to try to increase his discretionary income by increasing his income and/or cutting his expenses.
Mr Loyang did see any where in my comment that says wait to invest? Or any phrase suggesting you should wait to know everything before investing?… Please read that again and understand the concept of my writing.
The Journey of bitcoin investment is not a one way ticket, it involves a continuous process and this involves STUDYING to know more about bitcoin and it’s technicalities, LEARNING new ways of investing (improving on the initial knowledge you started on), You PRACTICE (that’s investing) what you’ve learnt, practice is the only way you know for sure if you have the right knowledge and strategies or not, You PLAN your Finances and make out enough discretionary for your investment purposes (creation of emergency and reserve funds, percentage of discretionary money that goes into bitcoin), from time to time you check out how well you’ve accumulated and what you can improve about your strategy you RE-STRATEGISE if need be and that’s how you grow in this space, and at the end you must have known by experience what works best for you.
Damn it!!!! Maybe, I didn't understand you or I am looking at it from a wrong view. Are you trying to say that before you invest into bitcoin, you need to learn continously about bitcoin and her technicality and after that you can start investing based on what you have learned. You don't need to know all that or try knowing more than the basic knowledge of bitcoin before you can invest. Bitcoin technicality is fucking broad and if you're not a tech savvy, you might find it difficult to understand once.
You don't need bitcoin technicality as someone who wants to start investing into bitcoin. All you need is your discretionary income and basic knowledge of bitcoin. The rest can be learned simultaneously as you are investing because you are only buying and not selling. If you want to learn all that you mentioned before investing, you will be a no coiner for long and you will miss out the opportunity of buying and building your bitcoin investment earlier. Don't forget that time waits for no one and bitcoin price increases overtime.
There are surely questions about whether to invest and there are questions of how much (or how aggressively) to invest.
A person might start out investing into bitcoin somewhat whimpily (or less aggressively) and then increase his level of aggressiveness in accordance with his knowledge.
An overwhelming majority of folks remain no coiners and/or low coiners because they either don't know much or anything about bitcoin or they don't feel confident in what they know.. and yeah, bitcoin is likely going to continue to be adopted and some folks are going to choose to continue to stay as no coiners and/or low coiners while they wait to figure out if they might need bitcoin later.. and sure, there are always going to be people entering into bitcoin, and the later entrants are going to merely have to start their bitcoin adventure later down the road when bitcoin is likely going to be multiples and more likely magnitudes more expensive than it is today. Of course, there are no guarantees that bitcoin is going to go up from here, yet anyone who stays a no coiner or a low coiner is purposefully failing/refusing to prepare for UP.... and sure at the same time, it is better to be a somewhat low coiner and take a somewhat whimpy approach to bitcoin rather than to have no bitcoin at all... but yeah, people will continue to learn about bitcoin, and those of us who know about bitcoin are surely advantaged by our asymmetric information since so many folks still seem to not know about what is bitoin in order to realize that they should be getting started as one of their first steps, especially if they are interested in studying it further.