It is expected that our emergency funds should be higher than thye one that we are investing so that they will be no ugly suituation that will make you go and sell from your bitcoin that you are buying, this shows that you are ready to continue using your DCA pattern to keep on accumulating till you get to your bitcoin target.
You should not be presuming that the same kinds of balances are going to need to be in place for all investors, and sure when you start out investing you are going to be in a certain place in which you hardly have anything to add up that is in your investment portfolio, yet sometime between 3-10 years investing (whether in bitcoin or any other thing), you may well start to get to or to exceed 1 year's income (living costs) inside of your investment portfolio. A lot of investment and cash management advisors, will suggest somewhere in the ballpark of 6 months income (living expenses) as an emergency fund, and personally, I am not so strict on such a rule or such an emergency fund being maintained at all times, even though I do believe that 6 months is a pretty decent guideline regarding how to think about how any of us might deal with a variety of scenarios that might come our way in which we are going to need liquidity (or cash/value to be available in our local currency).
If we set some standards for ourselves, we should be trying to consider why we are setting such standards and also to consciously realize the extent to which we are deviating from such standard or if it might not be a good idea to deviate from the standard if we are not sure why it exists, so sometimes we do end up having to experience a variety of scenarios in order for the importance of certain practices start to make more sense - and it could be that if we take a real whimpy and/or conservative approach towards investing into bitcoin, such as $10 per week when our budget would allow $100-200 per week, then we might not have to worry about any of the bitcoin related matters because they are relatively a smaller amount of our budget, but then if the price of BTC ends up going up faster and/or higher than our other investments, we might start to realize that there were real world consequences that ended up playing out and perhaps causing us some regrets regarding choices that we made earlier in our lives and we are unable to turn back the clock for some of our decisions, even if we may well have been truly and sincerely convinced that we were doing the thing that was best for our current self and our future self, but we ended up being wrong.
We need cash to survive and we need our investment to grow for a better life in the nearest future or at old age, this is why there must always be a reserve of emergency funds to take care of whatever should be taken care on, your investment can keep on growing as you keeping on DCAing.
Lump sum buy bitcoin one time and then completely forget it for 20 years.. that's pretty inactive and it might even give that person a lot of peace of mind to just not think about bitcoin for 20 years or whatever might be his/her timeline.
Don't get me wrong. I do think that DCA is the best for an overwhelming majority of normies.. but people are surely free to choose their own variation of systems and even truly/sincerely believe that it is better for them.. and perhaps they are correct in terms of their personality and/or their financial circumstances.
I understand what you mean, because
as long as you are happy with how you invested your money in bitcoin, and holding your long, you will be peaceful because you know that you will make good profit at the given period of time.
Yes, but none of us are going to know for sure if we are going to be happy with the results. We might believe that we are happy with what we are doing, but we are also not going to really know the results, so we just have to do our best, and some of us will end up being more correct than others in terms of reaching a balance that works for us in the short term, in the process of the investment, and later when it comes time to start to reap the fruit of our earlier investments and our investment strategies, if any.
What I see in the DCA pattern, is like you said the active buying of bitcoin, no matter how long it takes you to continue buying, maybe ten years or more.
Well, you may well have to make a lot of adjustments along the way, but sure there is no problem making a plan and then trying to stick with it, but you might have to tweak such plan at various points. .and you will likely become more informed about your plan as you see results and if the results end up deviating somewhat from your base-case projections.
Let's say that you started investing in BTC around 10 years ago, so at the time that you got started in bitcoin you already had around a $100k investment portfolio, and you wanted to bring bitcoin up to about 10% of that portfolio. so you more or less want to get up to 10% and then thereafter to reassess.. And so if you start to invest $100 per week into bitcoin, then it is going to take you around 2 years or perhaps a bit more to get to 10%, but then if the bitcoin and the other assets perform differently, then it could end up contributing towards your reconsideration of the matter. .. your overall assessment is that you realize that bitcoin could perform better than the rest of your portfolio, but it might not, so you are merely just expecting around the same results as your overall investment portfolio, which had been around 6% per year on average.
So if you had invested around $10k into bitcoin
(at $100 per week) starting from early 2014, then you may well have ended up accumulating right around 30 BTC.So you might reassess and then decide to go 1 more year with the $100 per week into bitcoin, even though it is going to take you higher than 10%... so then
after 3 years investing into BTC at $100 per week, you may well have gotten to right around 40 BTC, so you may well be faced with questions regarding how to proceed.. and I am not going to say that I really know the answer because each person is likely going to need to reassess based on his her own situation about how to proceed when such surprise (or somewhat surprise) results end up playing out.
I am not sure of the resolution that each person is going to make regarding how to treat their bitcoin investment because if they had invested in bitcoin for a bit more than 2 years at $100 per week, they might have been right around 10% invested by the time early 2016 comes, but then then by the time we get to late 2016, they might be getting to 13% or so invested into BTC, which is more than their 10% expectations or maybe they maintain their allocation to keep it at 10% as compared to their other investments, but still they end up being faced with the BTC prices shooting up around 40x between late 2016 and late 2017, if we use $500 as the base price.
There may well be some needs to reassess whether continuing to DCA is a good strategy or if some other kind of an approach towards BTC accumulation might become more practical.
I personally don't really like the idea of reallocation, but if you are not very diversified, then you may well need to think about reallocation, even though letting your winners ride might also be a good approach as long as you are comfortable with your various other investments as compared with bitcoin, because sometimes when the price of one asset disproportionately goes up as compared with other investment, there are needs to assess what are your other investments and are you comfortable to keep so much of your netwealth in an asset that just went shooting up so much rather than shaving some off.. even though we are not really talking about those kinds of matters in this thread.
Another reason why I like the DCA method is that it create room for you to see reason why you need to increase your bitcoin portfolio from your initial bitcoin target because, you will become use to assigning a certain amount for regular DCAing, which will become part of your weekly, or monthly practice. DCA will also give you a proper insight of bitcoin market for you to come up with a strategy on how to be flexible with the market, irrespective of the price of bitcoin, as long as you keep on accumulating.
For instance, an investor can come up with a DCA strategy, that if the price of bitcoin is at 20k-25k, he will use 20% for DCA, at 26k-30k, he will use 15% and at 30k up, he will use 10% and so on, because he has a fixed amount of money assigned for DCA. While people who buy at dip, don't have much practice in their buying, just only to follow news and keep on expecting for the dip, that they don't know when it will come, or the people that buy at lump will only buy once in a while based on when they have accumaulated enough cash that they feel it is time for them to buy again.
I don't really disagree with any of these last assessments of yours even though you are kind of crossing over the definitions of DCA, buying on dips and lump sum, and in practice they do frequently end up crossing over depending on how they are deployed.
The rate of Volatility in Bitcoin is high and you are placing yourself at a 50:50 risk. I believe it is not advisable.
The risk in bitcoin is not 50/50, even though short-term price moves could be 50/50, but if you are investing into bitcoin over 4-10 years or even longer than that 20-30 years, the risk is not 50/50.
Sure you could lose all your money, but when you are investing money in the long term, you are not investing with money that you need in the short term to cover your expenses, and even if you might end up with a shorter investment time horizon of 4 years, then you still should not be thinking about the short-term price moves.
Of course, you can choose to treat bitcoin however you like and get in however you like, but the thrust of the ideas of this thread is long term investing, which I personally would consider to be a minimum of 4 years from the time of any amount that you put in or any time that you add more value, it is still 4 years from the time of the new value, not from the time that you started.
Truly money can resolve our urgent needs but in some cases when money is not available, the available should go in for it or possibly take the place of the money to solve the problem. Most times things happen that no one bargained for but you will have no option but to respond accordingly. These experiences are sometimes among the reasons one needs to invest. Irrespective of the nature of the investment, for instance, bitcoin that you have direct access to when you are in urgent need that requires a financial commitment and you have no cash at hand and in your account but you have crypto assets. It is expected of you to sort yourself out. That is good because when you have enough to sustain yourself and more, you invest the excess so as to serve you when you are in urgent need and the investment as the case may generate income as time goes by.
I am trying to gather fact on what you said here.
Do you mean funds can be used to invest in Bitcoin, just to keep as emergency fund? Or you mean at a point of emergency the best option to resolve problems is by tampering ones investment.
I do not think it necessary to invest your emergency fund in Bitcoin, because you are not yet into sorting out any issue at that moment and you feel using the money to invest is the best. The rate of Volatility in Bitcoin is high and you are placing yourself at a 50:50 risk. I believe it is not advisable.
I also think there are better option when your emergency fund can't meet up with challenges at the time instead of tampering with your investment. A loan can be collected from Family, Freinds or any Financial services but not your investment
In
Crypto Bitcoin, you are advised to invest what you can afford to loss. That is the point and as a smart investor you should be able to have a budget and plan of investment so as not to be in a situation whereby you will have to start looking for where to go borrow from to sustain yourself. Always set out small portion of your income that you know would not bother you if you invest in them.
Emergency can happen at any time and when it happens, it always requires urgent attention to resolving it. In that case one would need to fall back to their investment to sort themselves out. When this occurs, you will have to acknowledge the fact that investments are much worth it. Investment to me sometimes is a back up plan otherwise what is the investment there for if I can not be able to use it for myself when the need arises.
FTFY It seems that I agree with everything you said as long as you are talking about bitcoin, which is the subject of this thread.
We are not talking about "crypto" here... in fact fuck crypto.. including that it is not likely that a lot of the principles of long term investing, buying on the dip and DCA do not really apply to crypto or shitcoins..,.
you gotta be careful if you try to apply these same presumptions of fundamental value to projects that may or may not have fundamental value, so you better spend some time figuring it out, otherwise you are going to be applying different kinds of considerations including in and out considerations...
Anyhow, if you meant to talk about bitcoin, it seems pretty strange that you use such a vague, meaningless and dumbass word, and you've done it more than once.. .. hopefully, you learn how to use the term bitcoin, if you are talking about bitcoin, and if you happen to be talking about something else, you likely need to explain what it is that you are talking about rather than speaking in gobble-dee-gook and meaningless language...
and there would be no excuse to say, everyone else does.. .. if that is what some members here might be thinking.. so what if other people speak in retarded language? We are talking about bitcoin here. so hopefully we are not using retarded terms without at least having a context for why we are using such terms.An emergency can occur any moment, so it is good to get prepared for it so that when it comes you will not think about selling your coins.
Hopefully, emergencies are not happening very frequently.
Don't get your emergency funds mixed up with the likelihood that some of your incoming cashflow and your expenses vary. The variance of your cashflow versus your expenses should not be an emergency because you can project out those kinds of matters and put them within a range. Emergencies might not happen for many years, but if you engage in sloppy practices of projecting out your cashflow and your expenses, then perhaps emergencies are happening way more frequently than they should be.
Some people can even invest 30% of their salary in bitcoin, 50% in their needs and bills for that month, and 20% in emergency funds, but that still depends on how much the person is earning.
I like these kinds of categories, yet there is still a difference in regards to how much to allocate towards something for each paycheck, but if the emergency fund is not being used, then it does not need to be allocated into, except if such emergency fund is getting rebuilt from having had been depleted... so when you are describing the 20% for emergency fund, you are likely just referring to something like an expectation that you might have about variance in your expenses versus your income..,. so there is difference between a variance in your income versus expenses and the replenishing of an emergency fund... even though there could be cases that might be drawn out for a decent amount of time that might amount to replenishment of a depleted emergency fund...and some members have already suggested that an emergency funds should not be touched at all, except for the purpose that they are proscribed. I am not 100% in agreement with that view, but I surely have a lot of sympathy for that kind of a conservative and self-imposed disciplined approach.