I Gambled on Bitcoin and Dogecoin

Note: Today’s article is going to be a quick one. I had hoped to publish earlier this week, but the week hasn’t been going great. I was doing well for the first 24 days of the 35 days of my wife’s deployment. This last third seems to be the toughest.

Getting back to the topic…

Yes, I finally took the plunge. I own Bitcoin and Dogecoin. I know, I should have probably bought Ethereum before Dogecoin. I’m new at this, so I’m going to make mistakes.

One of my biggest regrets in life was not buying Bitcoin in 2011 when I wrote about it. Or maybe I should have bought them in 2013 when I wrote that they weren’t going away. Or maybe I should have bought some in 2015 when I wrote about it then.

I haven’t written about Bitcoin much since then, because it hurts to have missed the train before the bull run. Well now that I’m on the train, expect it to come to a complete stop. In fact, that’s almost what immediately when I bought it. It dropped 10% right away. Same with Dogecoin. This kind of stuff happens with crypto-currency.

The toughest thing about Bitcoin is getting started. I didn’t know where to buy it. My Robinhood account is the kids’ money, so I couldn’t do it there. I kept looking into Paypal, but their fee structure incentivizes you buy over $1000 at one time. I just wanted to dabble with some small amounts and dollar cost average if it drops.

Enter Coinbase.

With Coinbase going public recently, it got my attention. I decided to sign up and see how it worked. Big tip: Coinbase Pro has much lower fees and I found it very easy to use. I guess if you are a beginner, regular Coinbase is the way to go. I suspect most of the readers here though can figure out Coinbase Pro and save on some fees.

Here’s a video about how it works:

And you can sign up by clicking here:

That’s my affiliate link, which means that I get a little money if you sign up. I was shocked at how quick and easy it was to sign. They connected to my bank account to verify it with Plaid right away. I was buying Bitcoin in about 5 minutes.

The fees for Coinbase Pro are a flat 0.5%. That’s actually pretty good with Bitcoin it seems. I’ve bought in 4 times at $50 each. As I said, it’s not a lot of money, but maybe it adds up over years. Or if drops in half (as it has been known to do sometimes), I can deploy a few hundred dollars to buy it much lower.

So far, I’ve bought at $61K, $55K, $52.5K, and $49.8K. So my average is around $53.2K. As I write this, I’ve made about $4. I won’t be buying a summer retirement house with that kind of money.

Remember that Robinhood account? The kids had around $22 in dividends that paid out last quarter. Coinbase Pro doesn’t support dogecoin, but Robinhood does. My kids have 64 dogecoins. I bought pretty close to the high at 35 cents a coin. I think I’ve lost about $3 or $4 dollars. I hope they’ll forgive me when they are older – I have made them a few thousand dollars by investing.

That’s all I have for today. Do you have Bitcoin? Are you buying any?