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.
There is lots of great advice here. I don’t want to cause contraversy, but I would suggest to invest between 10-20% of the investment money into high risk assets such as cryptocurrencies.
I have most of my investments in different funds (tech, medicine), a bit in a savings account (for emergencies) and a bit in crypto. I know there I a lot of hate there, but they have proven that they are here to stay. There is lots of fluctuations that can be hard on the nerves, but in the end, even though this is where I put 20%, it is today worth more than the rest combined.
Just stick to bitcoin and eth.
That is way too much into basically unproved investments and gambling. Maybe put 2-5% into it if you really believe in it, but be aware the long term investment potential isn’t really known (30-50 years).
Crypto’s volatility is akin to gambling, and gambling does sometimes pays off. On average it does not - ask the epidemic of people who lost everything in crypto how they feel about it. Regardless, past performance does not guarantee future returns - the crux of index funds is that finding “the right winners” consistently over time is impossible, and doing it for 20-60 years straight without getting burned once or twice is even harder. You may be up on crypto at the moment but if that money is part of your retirement fund you need to choose when to cash out or how to hold crypto through your entire life without getting burned.
The common advice I see relating to crypto and stock picking is to dedicate ~$1000 into those risky ventures and see how much ROI you can get. Most often, people end up trailing their index fund returns and giving up with a cheap lesson.
Or, even worse, doing much better than their index fund after a Crypto surge, but thinking “I’ll just wait a little bit longer”, and then watching it all crash. So you were better at one point, until you weren’t.
Remember, kids, you haven’t made any money until you sell.
It’s gambling if you play it like gambling. If you invest in the more established tokens and leave it as an investment, then ROI is pretty good.
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.
N00bs who are interested in crypto now should stick with BTC or ETH, on reputable exchanges that openly state they keep customer assets in reserve, with full KYC vetting, and a little at a time. Crypto exchanges’ trading fees are normally super low, and there isn’t really a lot size limit. You can often buy $50 worth of ETH at the same percentage in fees as $5000. They also often expose their whole order book and let you place limit orders, so it can be a good place to learn to trade without much in your account before taking a larger amount to the stock market yourself.
And don’t forget to pay your taxes, kids. Every time you sell, you take a capital gain (or loss), which is taxable. People who got in trouble with crypto are the ones in the US who sold their fat stack of BTC for a 100x profit, but forgot to set aside their taxes, and plowed it all into SafeElonInuCoin which crashed in value, but not until after the tax year was done. Those folks still owed a pile in taxes to rhe IRS, but some rugpuller took all the value out of their investment.
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.