Deffo in for the long haul. I'm slowly buying coins up with spare money and trying to get my friends into it too. I only found out about Bitcoin approx 6 months ago!
It's never too late (yet) to discover Bitcoin. Those of us who paid dollars instead of pennies may feel we missed the boat but those who paid triple digits think of us as early adopters. The day will come when anyone who paid less than $1000 will be considered an early adopter.
Buying bitcoins with spare money is the only way to go. Never spend money on a speculative asset unless you can afford to lose it.
As for trying to get your friends into it, that's a losing proposition. Better to make them aware of it and if they don't participate, rub their noses in it later. If you promote them and they buy high and lose money short-term, they'll use you as a scapegoat for their own failure.
Congratulations for deciding on the long haul.
Hi man! It would be awesome to see a $1k coin one day. It needs someone like Amazon/Ebay to adapt the payment system and then we will all be laughing with any luck!
Thanks for the tip on 'buy what you can afford to lose'. I read that somewhere on this thread a long time ago and it put things into perspective. Especially with the guy who sold his house and put it all into Bitcoin. That's confidence right there!
Good idea about the friends thing. I've not been pushy but just showed them how much I'm 'up' after a couple of months of reading and watching the price.
Regarding your friends, and telling them about bitcoin, I agree with Jimbo's suggestion - merely to inform them about bitcoin in whatever way that they are interested, and if they are not interested don't push it.
Actually, I would not get into too many details regarding your own holdings and the extent to which you are profitable - unless those kinds of details become more relevant to their attempting to decide what to do.
They have to decide what to do based on current price and not past price performance, and even you have the potential to lose everything that you invested and all of your current level of gains.
I employed a similar strategy for more than 2.5 years, at least to the extent that I bought with extra money that I had, and I never used money that I needed for my living expenses and I had other investments too (for retirement planning, etc).
So, if you continue to buy with extra available money, over time you will acquire a large holdings in bitcoin and at some point, you will feel that your holdings in bitcoin is sufficiently balanced with your other financial holdings - even though periodically, since bitcoin's price has had a tendency to be very volatile (which is likely to continue for some time into the future) you may need to reassess the values of your various financial holdings and consider whether you want to reallocate in such a way that remains comfortable to your total situation (accounting for at least your view of bitcoin, risk tolerance, financial diversification, cash flow and timeline).