Hey Everyone,
Just looking for advice on Investing as a student. The Dnotes CRISP for students finally got me to jump in on crypto. I'm an Electrical engineering student that's interested in setting aside some money for Crypto each week (specifically Dnotes). Was wondering what the recommended amount should be for someone in my situation. I typically end the week with $50-$100 I've mostly been putting this to the side and paying off my loan or into Savings. was looking at 20% of earnings is that a good amount to put into digital currencies while keeping the rest for traditional type savings (bank).I will also have money from work over the holidays that will be used mostly for investing.
Just looking for advice on Investing as a student. The Dnotes CRISP for students finally got me to jump in on crypto. I'm an Electrical engineering student that's interested in setting aside some money for Crypto each week (specifically Dnotes). Was wondering what the recommended amount should be for someone in my situation. I typically end the week with $50-$100 I've mostly been putting this to the side and paying off my loan or into Savings. was looking at 20% of earnings is that a good amount to put into digital currencies while keeping the rest for traditional type savings (bank).I will also have money from work over the holidays that will be used mostly for investing.
I remember reading Warren's Buffett's autobiography, "Snowball", and was struck at how lucky he considered himself. In fact he considers it one of his chief pieces of luck, that he started early. In fact that's the entire reason why his book is called Snowball. The earlier you start, the longer the hill becomes for your snowball to roll down the hill, accumulating with each turn.
The point is, just start. And given that you are so young, you have the benefit of being able to broaden out your risk parameters. You can invest in volatile risky things when nearing retirement. Even though I'm a firm believer in crypto, imagine if you are retiring next week. And then tomorrow bitcoin decreases by 30%. Sure, it will double and triple again in time. But that means nothing when you are retiring next week. So the fact that your time horizon is so long is your chief advantage. Just start. And then understand it's for the long haul. Sock the money away and don't give it a second thought. Practically pretend that you don't have it. And then one day you'll wake up and then you'll have a nontrivial sum.
One app that I absolutely love is called Acorns. It takes all your purchases, rounds them up to the nearest dollar and invests the "round ups." A quarter here, a quarter there, and next thing you know I have enough in this account to buy 1 bitcoin, which is what I did. And now my account is low. And I look forward to building it again through more round ups.
It's basically an app which automates your idea of taking small chunks, very regularly, and putting them into something meaningful over the long term. Essentially you're just cutting out the Acorns middle man and investing chunks yourself this week. Good on you. I tend to need something to force me to do this, so Acorns is a good fit for me.
I am an elder millennial with three kids, so I don't have a lot of spare cash flow. I say that to tell you that whilst you have relatively modest cash needs, be as aggressive as you can with investing. Not necessarily with what you are investing (dont just go buy a bunch of deep out of the money options on a pink sheet stock, for example), but in terms of how much you invest. Seek to put as much away as possible. Put some in a retirement account like the US, and put some in DNotes.
I was also interested to hear from anyone that has setup data centers specifically with the goal of Mining coins. I'd like to use my Engineering experience in the field of digital currencies after graduating (seems to be where the world is going). What sort of cost did you have setting it up? What return did you get on your investment? Is it worthwhile to setup in NZ with the electricity costs we pay? Cost of cooling? Cost of storage? and Any mistakes you made you'd warn others against doing.
Given my online handle, you might guess that this is how I got into crypto: on the mining side. Folks might make it seem super hard. But honestly, if I can do it, anyone can. In terms of deep technical expertise, I'm mostly just a novice. I learned by doing.
I spent $2400 on my first mining rig three years ago. Good motherboard, open air mining case, Intel Celeron CPU (aka a cheap one), 4GB of RAM, a used monitor and cheap keyboard/mouse, a free Linux distro for the OS, a cheap hard drive, an add2psu component to string together 2 PSUs (it's way cheaper to string together 2 750w PSUs, than buy a single 1500w PSU), some powered USB risers to keep the GPUs off the mobo for heat management purposes.....just to be clear, super inexpensive components....and then top top of the line GPUs.
I mined for a long time, and then shut down my miner, and sold it for parts. All told, the net cost was $1300. And I mined coins which are many, many times that. To the point where they could pay off my house today (of course, I don't live in a fancy mansion, but hey). We are talking thousands of percent ROI on that net rig cost.
The major mistake I made was to stop mining when it became basically breakeven, in terms of the value of the litecoin I was mining versus the cost of electricity. And it sounds stupid, but I didn't into account the idea that the litecoins (to give an example, but I mostly mined DNotes, actually) might rise in value over a long time.
So I basically gave up on mining, way way way too soon. If you put in the effort and capital to make a rig, keep it going as long as possible. Because likely future appreciation will make it profitable to mine even if it doesn't quite seem so in the present. Lemme know if this spurred any questions. Happy to help further here.
In fact, I literally am putting together a new rig right now. Assembled the thing today with my daughter. Now just waiting on the GPUs (6 EVGA GTX 1070 Superclocked cards) to get here midweek, then I'm off to the races!!
