48 years old, currently have no investments. My net worth is my car and the clothes on my back, and I don’t ever want to be in this situation again.
(Edit: I don’t need to buy a house or anything whatsoever related to a house, so please don’t mention the “h” word in your response, it’s triggering me for tangential reasons. Let me be clear, I will NEVER care about real estate whatsoever, mmmkay? Just trust me when I say I have a roof over my head and it’s completely paid off, no property taxes, and No, I will never sell it, so the whole h-word" aspect of life is not a concern for me, k?)
Just looking for guidance where to invest this relatively small amount of money every month so in a few years when I’m older & frailer I’ll have enough for retirement. I don’t want it to just sit in my bank account, I want it to grow.
For reference, I’ve been living on approx $1500 per month for as long as I’ve noticed, so I don’t need much per month, and the sooner I die, the less retirement fund I’ll need, but we can never predict when anyone’s death will happen, so let’s assume I’ll live to 100 because I’m ridiculously healthy & an exceptionally good driver, never been in an accident, one speeding ticket in my entire life, no social life so I never get into risky situations, so let’s just plan for the possibility I’m going to live another 50 years.
That is sort of true, but incredibly misleading. I’ve been poking around crypto for quite a while now. The concept of cryptocurrencies are going to stick around, they’re just code and large numbers, after all. But there’s no reason at all to think they will continue to hold their value. Particularly since governments are starting to understand that they will never be able to regulate crypto entirely, but can heavily regulate the on and off ramps.
And while there are a few key cryptos that have proven they have enough ongoing demand to stick around, those have already gone through their initial “to the moon” phases and are not likely to turn people into crypto millionaires anymore.
So crypto these days is like a lotto ticket, except the payout potential for all the “blue chip” cryptos is no longer that great compared to the downside of the entire sector tanking. That leaves the new coins to bet on, but too many of them are ERC-20 tokens (or their counterparts on the Ethereum clones) that are way too easy to make (and rugpull).
So it’s not enough that you think Crypto as a whole is here to stay, you need to look at the thing you are buying. OG BTC and Ethereum are relatively “safe” bets in the space, but it’s still an open question whether they are more likely to see a 10x gain or 10x loss in the next four years. Buying the Hot ERC-20 token of the day is even riskier.
If you do have 20% of your net assets in crypto, I advise you to DCA some out. That’s what I did. Of course, it went up afterwards, and if I had held, I would have more on paper right now. But I have the unique ability to say I’ve already taken 10x out over what I put in, and I have a bunch left. If BTC has another 10x left, I retire early. But if it all evaporates, I can still eat.
Come on, It’s not “incredibly misleading”. There is a risk factor with any investment, with life itself. Cryptocurrencies are just a higher risk, some more than other. How much risky is Ethereum is a good question, but I don’t think we have to search for new adjectives and phrases to talk about cryptocurrencies.
I’m not saying anyone will become a millionaire or to buy some crazy assets, I’m saying that its good to diversify investments also by risk, so to invest a small portion of money into potentially more lucrative areas.
Yes, it is, because the general public views crypto as a single thing, while there is a big difference between BTC and ETH, on their own chains, with their own network effect backing them, and a token which literally anyone can start on their own and manipulate its market to make it look like a good investment before dumping.
So the general public shouldn’t really be getting into this without understanding these risks. It’s not just a matter of “these are more risky”, it’s that there is a huge difference in risk that the casual investor who is uninformed about Crypto can’t spot.