Been seeing some really, really awful financial advice on here and some things need to be put to rest.

Crypto is great, exciting, awesome, and possibly going to change the game forever. (To a degree it already has.). But there are A LOT of people on this sub putting the cart before the horse. And as a 2018 crash survivor, let me just say, everything you think you know about your special defi token or super rare NFT or upcoming exchange is probably bullshit.

There’s probably a greater than 99% that if you actively trade your crypto that you will end up on the losing end. FUD and FOMO are true animal spirits, and you almost have to work to actively kill your emotions not to feed into them. Foregoing that, you don’t know when a major exchange is going to be hacked, or if countries start to ban and sanction other countries for trading in crypto, or if tomorrow it’s your rug that will be pulled.

EVEN IF YOU DCA AND HODL, DEPENDING ON THE COIN, THAT COULD END TERRIBLY.

Look to the top 30 cryptos of January 2018. That’s only a little over 3 years ago. Spare change in the Wall Street World. And yet, so many of those projects have gone to practically nothing. Yeah BTC and ETH are likely to be long term winners, but who knows? There are an infinite number of unknowns in the crypto space, the tech is still for the most part very new, and nobody can foresee what effects government meddlings will have.

I keep seeing dumb shit on here about how opening a 401k is stupid or too risky or how crypto is so much more lucrative.

Here is how dumb it is to turn down a 401k.

There is a ton of misinformation on this subject. For one thing, 401ks run by a company are typically managed to be more speculative when you are young and more safe and conservative as you age, meaning they diversify more into bonds which have a small guaranteed growth rate as opposed to volatile stocks which have risk to a falling market. They typically average between 6-8% growth a year. Now imagine this: your company matches 4% for every 5% of your paycheck you put in. You make $1000 a week for easy math.

In this scenario, you are giving up $50 fiat for $90 investment. BUT, in America, that money is untaxed, but would be taxed if you didn’t put it in a retirement plan and just kept it as take home pay. Let’s say you would lose another 28% to taxes. You are now taking home $36 a week in place of investing $90. At one year you are giving up $1872 in take home pay to invest $5400. Pretty sweet deal right? Except this is where compound interest is important. ESPECIALLY for you young bucks. Let’s conservatively say your 401k grows 6% a year. Pull out your calculators. That $1872 is only going to every be worth 1872. Save it, use it to get Rover’s nails done, whatever. However, that $5400 invested over 30 years @ 6% interest?

$31,014

Yeah. $1900 bucks given up to make over 16 times that in retirement. And that’s NOT including dividends, tax disbursements, stock splits, or any other incentives that come with a 401k. (I recognize a 401k is America specific, but still, compounding interest exists the world over. This is just an example)

Don’t get me wrong, crypto may well be what replaces anything, but it is still 95% speculative or more, and as a 2018 ETH buyer at the top WHO WATCHED IT FALL 93% AND STILL HELD, I can tell you the -only- reasons I didn’t sell is I only invested what I could afford to 100% lose and I believed in the project. Can you say the same about VET? CUMMIES? DOGE? BNB? NANO? If you can, good luck. There are absolutely hundreds of people who made millions off of all those projects… at the expense of hundreds of thousands of others.

TL;DR Invest whatever you like in crypto, but don’t bet a healthy retirement on it because some jackass 19 year old on Reddit thinks 94% APY on CAKE is going to make you a zillionaire.

The old adage still applies:: if it sounds too good to be true, it’s probably a rug.