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Fair enough, I can agree with what you said..but I think still believe many folks throw around 100% of their discretionary income without a proper understanding of how disciplined they need to be over time. And yeah, if they got their basic need covered, and most importantly their emergency funds, savings etc. then putting all discretionary income wont be wrong. I can tell you that most folks dont even know what is discretionary income, they are only pretending to investing aggressively not minding the dangers of not settling every other thing when they get their income.
Well many times we go back and forth in threads and we might not be clear about definitions, and surely there can be ways that guys can figure out how to be as aggressive as they can without overdoing it, yet if they develop systems in which they are categorizing their funds, then they might get some better handle on managing their own finances.
Managing finances becomes even more important for any of us who might have had decided to invest into something like bitcoin for 4-10 years or longer and we might have goals to try to accumulate as much bitcoin as we are able to accumulate, but we do not necessarily want to make mistakes of overdoing it.
So, yeah, sometimes we might not agree upon the terms - even if we might not disagree with some of the objectives.. even though surely every guy has to figure out his own objectives, since he is going to be responsible for figuring out how much to invest into bitcoin and how to manage his cashflows, and if he ends up screwing up and he says that he was following some suggestions from the internet, then no one is going to help him out if he ends up not figuring out his own balances, and hopefully when we are batting around ideas on threads like this, guys get better ideas in regards to how to manage their own situations better and even in their sharing of their ideas and experiences, they can frequently help other guys to figure out their own establishment of boundaries... whether bitcoin investment amounts or boundaries in terms of how much to put into their various back up funds.
Sometimes we will also give examples, and I frequently like to talk about $100 per week invested into bitcoin, yet surely in nigeria guys might have to adjust that down to $10 per week or maybe $30 to $50 per week, yet that might not even be very good for them, if they are not considering the rest of their finances and psychology, so guys have to adjust the numbers to their own circumstances, and surely if they are brand new, they may well have to start out a bit more conservatively while they are getting used to buying $20 worth of bitcoin every week.. which can feel like a lot of learning at first, but then after a while they may well start to get used to it and better understand the various terms and the reason that we might want to break down our back up funds into emergency funds and reserve funds and the idea of float can also be something that is helpful to discuss.
And, yeah, when we talk about cashflow management, and there can be guys who already are doing it, but they might not use the same terms. When we talk about the needs to have better cashflow management because of bitcoin, there may not be experiences investing into something so volatile, so they have to get used to it, and even going through the experience to figure out how they are going to manage their temptations to sell too much too soon or their temptations to stop accumulating BTC when the BTC price goes up, even though they are still in their earliest of stages of BTC accumulation.
Again, investing 5% to 25% of discretionary income might seem like they are playing it safe but if they are measuring that percentage to the actual income and not the discretionary income (money left after the basics), the its a different context altogether.
Of course, there are differences in how it plays out depending on which category is being discussed or considered. Guys might end up making mistakes thinking that we are talking about one category or framework and they misinterpret the framework, and so there still are needs for ownership and thinking through their plans to make sure that they understand the reasons for certain kinds of limitations, yet in the end they are the ones who need to understand and apply the limitations for themselves so that they don't end up overdoing it.. and surely there could be some guys who are very confused, yet if they start out more conservatively, then they may well be able to increase their level of aggressiveness as they become more confident, yet at the same time, they still could end up making mistakes, so it is god for the them to really practice and to even play around with some of the ideas until they really start to understand how to apply various kinds of practices that we discuss in these various bitcoin investment related threads...and yeah, of course, some guys come to bitcoin and they already have other investment experience, which should be helpful to them, but sometimes they can still make mistakes by trying to apply similar practices to bitcoin, which might not work out very well for them to misapply some of the concepts or even to think that they know more than the do merely because they have investment experience in other areas.
By the way, I recall when I started investing in bitcoin in late 2013, I had some interactions on a forum about bitcoin, and I had already had 20 years of investment experience at that time (yet all of that investment experience was outside of bitcoin), yet I still had to learn how to apply those things that I knew (or though that I knew) to bitcoin, and I ended up learning a lot from my experience after I came to bitcoin and adding bitcoin to my experiences, and even some of the kinds of ways that I applied things were different since bitcoin was a different kind of asset with various kind of ramifications throughout all parts of society and crossing over into many disciplines.. I feel that I am still learning various aspect of bitcoin and even bitcoin is not exactly staying the same, either. It is an evolving kind of a dynamic, and lots of the world is still just in their earliest of stages of learning about bitcoin..
It's very possible for Guys to make mistakes by misinterpreting or even misapply concepts from a particular framework to another, particularly when it involves dealing with an asset as unique as Bitcoin. If an investor would really wanna avoid overdoing the whole thing, then the key lies in understanding the actual reason behind certain limitations and also knowing how to personally apply those limitations.
I also believe that it makes sense to start out conservatively and then increasing aggressiveness with confidence. Bitcoin is totally different different from other forms of investments, so it really doesn't matter the amount of knowledge one has in those other investments, it can get really tricky to attempt applying those knowledge on Bitcoin, because the dynamics and concepts of investing in Bitcoin is total distinct. I see you also mentioned about having 20 years of investment experience outside of Bitcoin when you started investing in Bitcoin in late 2013, I think your experience best explains and proves the fact that even with broader experience, there's still a learning curve specific to Bitcoin.
The evolving nature of Bitcoin means that people are continually learning about the impact of Bitcoin crosses so many disciplines. We're still learning various aspects of Bitcoin and I totally agree that lots of the world is in the early stages of understanding it, because Bitcoin is still relatively a new technology and so is the adoption. The dynamics and nature of Bitcoin are evolving overtime, and this means that strategies and approaches to investing in Bitcoin needs to also adapt overtime.