If you read my article on dog sitting on Tuesday (or many of my other articles recently), you know I’ve been busy with dog sitting. I had been meaning to get an update out on my cryptocurrency investing for a few weeks now, but it’s been hard to put the time together. As luck would have it, I was able to put the time together just as the cryptocurrency market rebounded earlier this week.
I swear it was a coincidence. So in the interest of full disclosure, I was down around 20% in all my cryptocurrency purchases. It would have been much, much worse, but dollar-cost averaging has helped keep the percentage low (low in a relative sense). When I started investing Bitcoin was above $60,000, so about twice the price of what it was just last week. It’s hard to make money buying at the top.
I wrote about when I started buying bitcoin. I also bought some dogecoin, but it amounted to $22 worth in my kids’ Robinhood account. They’ve lost about $6, so it’s not a big deal.
Soon after buying Bitcoin, I bought Ether. I originally thought that all crypto was more or less the same, but it seems that different ones have different infrastructure to do different things. It also looked like Ether was the top coin going to switch to a system that is energy-friendly, which would give it an advantage over Bitcoin.
Below is a table that shows when and where I invested in Bitcoin and Ether. Since I’ve bought crypto many times, it’s a long table. The big thing to note is that I buy in lots of small transactions (usually $50, but sometimes $100) and that I almost always buy when there’s a drop and I can get more crypto for my dollar.
| Coin | Date | Amount | Value | Transaction | CoinPrice |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | 4/17/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00081635 | Buy | $60,943.43 |
| BTC | 4/18/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00090356 | Buy | $55,061.05 |
| BTC | 4/18/2021 | $0.00 | 8.967E-05 | Free | $0.00 |
| BTC | 4/22/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00094692 | Buy | $52,540.02 |
| BTC | 4/22/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00099871 | Buy | $49,815.13 |
| BTC | 5/13/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00102105 | Buy | $48,725.17 |
| BTC | 5/16/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00111111 | Buy | $44,775.83 |
| BTC | 5/18/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00122328 | Buy | $40,670.15 |
| BTC | 5/19/2021 | $100.00 | 0.00278012 | Buy | $35,790.62 |
| BTC | 5/23/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00146844 | Buy | $33,880.12 |
| BTC | 5/23/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00155946 | Buy | $31,902.82 |
| BTC | 5/29/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00144891 | Buy | $34,336.83 |
| BTC | 6/7/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00150995 | Buy | $32,948.84 |
| BTC | 6/21/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00152426 | Buy | $32,639.40 |
| BTC | 6/22/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00158529 | Buy | $31,383.03 |
| BTC | 6/22/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00168063 | Buy | $29,602.67 |
| BTC | 7/20/2021 | $50.00 | 0.00167383 | Buy | $29,722.82 |
| Total | $884.50 | $850.00 | 0.02234154 | 4.06% | $38,045.72 |
| Coin | Date | Amount | Value | Transaction | CoinPrice |
| ETH | 5/3/2021 | $50.00 | 0.0146626 | Buy | $3,393.07 |
| ETH | 5/18/2021 | $50.00 | 0.01598978 | Buy | $3,111.44 |
| ETH | 5/19/2021 | $50.00 | 0.0170301 | Buy | $2,921.37 |
| ETH | 5/19/2021 | $50.00 | 0.01893828 | Buy | $2,627.02 |
| ETH | 5/19/2021 | $50.00 | 0.02078337 | Buy | $2,393.80 |
| ETH | 5/19/2021 | $50.00 | 0.02294418 | Buy | $2,168.36 |
| ETH | 5/23/2021 | $50.00 | 0.02426996 | Buy | $2,049.91 |
| ETH | 5/23/2021 | $50.00 | 0.02539767 | Buy | $1,958.89 |
| ETH | 5/23/2021 | $50.00 | 0.02762223 | Buy | $1,801.13 |
| ETH | 6/21/2021 | $50.00 | 0.02580257 | Buy | $1,928.15 |
| ETH | 6/22/2021 | $50.00 | 0.02665997 | Buy | $1,866.14 |
| ETH | 6/22/2021 | $50.00 | 0.02859266 | Buy | $1,740.00 |
| ETH | 7/20/2021 | $50.00 | 0.02833601 | Buy | $1,755.76 |
| Total | $702.12 | $650.00 | 0.29702938 | 8.02% | $2,188.34 |
| All Crypto | $1,586.62 | $1,500.00 | 5.77% |
At the end of each crypto in the table above, I have a percentage of gain/loss. So as I write this article (7/26), I’m up 4.06% in Bitcoin and 8.02% in Ether. That’s 5.77% overall. Crypto moves quickly. As I mentioned above, I was down probably 20% last week and even though I’m up now, I expect to be back down soon.
I don’t have any plans to add any new crypto types. That could change if I catch some news that gives me reason to invest differently. I also don’t expect to buy any new crypto soon. With the jump in crypto value over the last couple of days I don’t think it would be a good value to pay these prices. Of course, no one knows when the next drop/buying opportunity will happen, so maybe in a couple of weeks, I’ll be buying more.
The other thing that you can see is that I’ve invested $1500 so far. I didn’t expect to invest this much over a span of a couple of months, but the steady drop of price has created consistent buying opportunities. Bitcoin would have to drop to around $20,000 for me to invest as much over the next couple of months. Also, in the grand scheme of our net worth, $1500 isn’t a lot…
… and that’s the goal. This cryptocurrency experiment is intended to be a small part of our personal finance journey. By keeping it a limited percentage of our net worth and using time-tested methods like dollar-cost averaging, it won’t make or break any of our life’s plans.