Hello! 
I’m sorry for the semi-dramatic title. 
But I would really appreciate your help on this. So, recently, I’ve been finding myself in need of extra money because of unexpected expenses. 
So, the only money I have left is the money I’ve been HODLing for my cryptos. I can’t seem to withdraw it in fear that I might miss out the chance to make it even bigger. 
But, what am I supposed to do? How do you know it’s time to stop HODLing?
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Hi,
I feel your pain. We grew an account very quickly last year, and now see BTC at almost exactly 50% of its ATH two months ago. One of the reasons I decided to spend a lot more time on BabyPips, on preparing a seriously detailed trading strategy and plan for Forex trading, is because I expected the crypto market to crash or become choppy around September, and it happened earlier. I am very happy this has happened, and at peak I did contemplate removing all our capital in, but we did not need to do that so we just let it roll.
The only advice I can offer you depends on whether you have any other options at all. I don’t know if you have considered the concept of good debt and bad debt (relates to using good debt to invest in long term income generating assets and trying to avoid the use of bad debt which is spending money on things whose value goes to nothing - like meals out, holidays, new clothes).
Having carried large amounts of good debt for over a decade we are now deleveraging our property assets and will continue to do so for the next decade. I have taken that opportunity to minimize our bad debt at the same time and do not carry any credit card balances forward at any time, and there are no car loans.
All I can do is to ask whether those unexpected expenses are one off expenses or are they expected to continue into the future again and again? If they are one off, that is one of the core reasons that anyone invests at all - to have a buffer against unforeseen expenses, and not to be forced into a course of action by circumstances outside your control.
Try to think of the current value of your crypto assets as if you had just bought them. Not at the value of mid April, but at their price now. Would you hesitate to sell them to cover an unexpected expense or would you contemplate short term debt that you could pay off over a reasonable time (1 year to 3 years) and could you afford the repayments? What would you decide if you can look a month into the future only to find that the value of your cryptos has declined another 20% from the already 50% decline since mid April? What would you decide?
As difficult as it is to cut losses, you know it is human nature to hold on to loss makers too long and to sell profit makers too early That is the nature of our game in Forex.
If you still have not been able to decide after this, post again. And if you need all the money, sell all. If you need half the money and cannot decide which cryptos to dispose of, get rid of half of each type. In summary:
Have you exhausted all your options to be able to cover the unexpected expense, or is selling crypto asset the only solution?
Do you need all the funds, or can you partially sell?
Take the action, do not look back, and concentrate on your future plan reset to the new asset value, even if that is zero.
Best of luck Sorry to hear the bad news
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I think it depends on what the reason is for needing the extra cash. If it’s an emergency - hospital bill, food, rent, etc. I’d probably sell what I need tbh. But if it’s not urgent, I’ll probably look to either cut spending or find ways to make extra cash and keep holding.
Imagine yourself a year from now with BTC at 80k, how do you think you’d feel knowing you sold them all the year before? 
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Interesting question which is difficult to answer. not knowing your circumstances and how the future would pan out for crypto currencies.
Personally, I would never buy or hold them, because they have no intrinsic value, and the energy costs of mining bitcoin is obscene.
Try reading this inexpensive book which could focus your mindset on financial management as it did mine - I never thought I’d learn from it.
The Richest Man in Babylon is a 1926 book by George S. Clason that dispenses financial advice through a collection of parables set 4,000 years ago in ancient Babylon . The book remains in print almost a century after the parables were originally published, and is regarded as a classic of personal financial advice.
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I had an experience 30 years ago in Dier Ez Zor - that place that Isis took over for a while. Walking down the street with my driver next to me, I asked him why the women in this backwater town all wore large costume jewellery around their necks. He was shocked, and said that is not costume jewellery - it is 22ct gold. These women were bedouin, in town for the annual camel trading just south of Deir Ez Zor. Those bedouin families trusted gold, and since Syria claims to have the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world (Damascus) I thought "us westerners could learn a thing or two from these bedouin types. So started a passionate hobby of collecting gold, which has not done us any harm over the past 30 years. I read Richest Man in Babylon about 25 years ago, and it has formed the basis of our very long term investment plans. I agree - worth a read especially for anyone at a critical juncture in their lives.
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Oh wow. Good for you that you were able to prepare for it and you weren’t shaken by the recent movements. My foresight wasn’t as good and tbh, I didn’t really expect it would be an issue at all. For a while now, I’ve just HODLed and kept my money in BTC (so much so that I almost forgot about it!) But with the recent movements, I became more active and it just so happened that unforeseen circumstances arose that made me consider selling.
Thank you sooo much for this Mondeoman! 
I asked these questions to myself and I’m not sure if this is too much information but I just opted to borrow money from my partner to be able to pay for the expenses. I’m really thankful that he’s always willing to support me and help me but of course, I wouldn’t wanna depend on him too much. Still, I learned much from the experience. I’ll start preparing for when another sudden movement comes in and I’d be put in a similar situation. If you have any tips on how you prepared for it, that would be much appreciated!
Thank you again. 
That’s exactly why I’ve been doing everything to keep all my BTC and HODL! 
It’s this fear of missing out. (I call it that but sometimes, I think it could also be just my greed!) But for you, if ever BTC does reach 80k, will you be selling all you have? Cause my issue is, at the back of my mind, there’s always this chance of price going higher, which makes it so hard to let go!
It’s definitely hard to gauge where cryptos are headed and when these movements are all gonna take place. But tbh, at this point, I’m already to far in to stop. But of course, I do understand where you’re coming from though. Thank you for the book recommendation! Your description sounds interesting and given that it’s a longstanding piece, I’m sure there’s something to learn from it. I’ll try to get a hold of a copy.
Hi,
I am glad you were able to borrow from your partner to get you over the difficult period. For myself and my partner (wife of 32 years), we seem to be attuned well for each other. I have no idea whether our planning would work for anybody else, but the important thing is that we agreed to make five year plans. These were not investment plans - they were life plans and now we approach our sixth (and maybe final) sixth plan. We have had our ups and downs, but it is fair to say that over all the periods, there has only been one in which our financial goals had not been met, and that was the last one. For the first four, we had exceeded those plans by such a broad margin that the fifth was our first serious plan for “stretch target”.
Anyway, I could write for Britain on this subject, but here are some relative figures that we agreed upon in the first plan, and have never waivered from these figures.
1 Your Principal Private Residence (your home or PPR) is a long term liability, not an asset. Maintain borrowing on the PPR at around 75% and use the continuously increasing fiat currency to invest in longer term assets that should not depreciate in value
2 Hold 10% of assets in gold and sliver (not ETFs, physical bullion). Actual figure started at 5% when we were young, and now ranges from 10% to 20% as we get much older.
3 Never spend more than 5% of asset on cars. They are fully depreciating assets. Prefer to pay cash, but if necessary, take a bank loan and ensure the car is always worth more than the residual loan.
4 Budget for spending in categories of mandatory, discretionary, charitable causes, taxes and savings / investment, in that order. This is counter-intuitive. For five years, our discretionary spending consisted of holidays and gold accumulation, which we were both happy to sign off on. 
5 Do not invest in bonds or public stock (shares), prefer investing in own business or other small businesses.
There have been large variations in allocations over the years but this has served us very well. It helped a lot that our gross income (salaried OR self employed) has always been far greater than our mandatory living costs, but if other people find this impossible, there are always choices to make. For example, even though 3 family cars amount to less than 2.5% of wealth, I refuse to double the spend in cars. The only two times we bought new cars was for my wife, and being self employed in the UK, the commuting mileage to and from client premises has over the years paid for both my wife’s and my car costs as expense deductibles before income or corporation tax. Had we not had the benefit of this “cost offset” I would never have taken a lease on her car.
I hope this is of help. It took us 20 years to confirm that it was a good plan. Be patient.
By the way, crypto started off as 1% of wealth, we agreed after six months to move it to 3% of wealth, and at peak it was 12% of our wealth, the extra 9% being capital gain. So after the 50% market drop it is now 6% of wealth. That explains why we have managed this recent downturn. The trading element will not be started until I take it through a full backtest, but will then support both crypto and gold/silver in terms of risk mitigation for our existing holdings. I guess you could say it took me over 20 years (and about 28,000 hours of IT and management consulting) to realize that long term investment and trading (short term risk management) are two elements of the same goal. To maximize wealth opportunities with an acceptable risk profile.
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Will probably sell half or something.
I like how we’re thinking about BTC at 80k. Watch it drop to 10k next week lol
Hi,
That was my approach with Cardano (ADA) last year. I bought at $0.055 and sold half at $0.11. It was small money but at the time, it was proportionately a large holding compared with our total crypto account. I also had a change of strategy to measure all gains and losses in BTC, not in USD. So at about $0.125, we sold the remainder and bought BTC instead. I am philosophical about that decision, and in fact bought ADA again at $1.255 after it had reached an ATH of $1.90 or thereabouts. Had I just held on to the $0.055 holding, it would have delivered a 28X as of today’s value. And that is not the only crypto holding we had that mooned. We sold SC, BTT, DGB end of last year to accumulate BTC. In all cases, a different strategy would have improved our current holding, but is that any guarantee of the future?
It did cause me to look at our risk profile within crypto. It is still a small percentage of our capital, but we both feel that it is one worthy of a higher percentage investment, and have long term gold holding to sell if and when we decide to increase the relative value of the crypto currency holdings.
We decided on the following short term strategy in the meantime:
1 Do not change what we do right now with 80% of the crypto portfolio
2 Take a nominal 20% of the current value of the crypto portfolio and substitute higher market cap (MCAP) currencies for lower MCAP currencies. I have yet to name this strategy but for want of a better word, I call it my sh__coin strategy. Invest 1/10 of this sum in each of ten low MCAP coins (they must be less than $1B MCAP).
3 When the sh__coin currency doubles, sell half of it. Keep the other half as a long term holding. Reinvest the sold half back into the 80% holding of larger MCAP currencies.
4 The next step of this strategy is yet to be defined, but the opportunities are in three distinct areas, being those currencies with a potential over three years to do a 10X, a 100X and a 1,000X.
That’s all for now. I have chosen the first sh__coin. It already went 2.5X and I sold half. Having not identified a more suitable reinvestment coin I rebought when it (quickly) sank back to the level for which I had purchased only three weeks prior. Volatility is up to 100% per day, and I am waiting for it to either sink to zero, or do a 100X. Time and number of opportunities will tell.
When the money isn’t dispensable. Investing money should be spare money. Get yourself back on track and then go back to investing.
OUCH.
Hmm this is interesting. I also love the name.
Are you able to tell me which one?
OMG! Super helpful as always. Huhu. I really appreciate the response and I’m also very grateful that I was somehow able to overcome the difficult times with the help of my partner. But of course, I still don’t want to rely on him too much.
Anyway, just curious, why do you think the sixth plan may be your final one? Is it too hard to complete? Tbh, I haven’t really thought about my goals as “plans” and maybe that’s why I’ve been all over the place, trying to accomplish everything at once. I’ll definitely keep these figures in mind, but it might be a little too late for me when it comes to the 3rd bullet. Still, I’ll try to use this in making future decisions. Thank you soooo much.
And I’ll definitely be watching and waiting for that to happen! Haha.
Thank youuuu! Tbh, it’s really my fault that I did not have emergency funds to stay prepared for unforeseen circumstances. It’s a lesson I learned the hard way. But I’ll try to keep this in mind from now on!
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Long as there is no harm and a lesson learned then there is growth opportunity!
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Unfortunately, no. Maybe in due course, but it has such a high chance of reaching zero that I don’t want anyone to be sorry they every read my posts 
I have since identified 3 more sh__coins for the portfolio, but my criteria have not been met. This is so much “just a feeling” that it will be a waste of effort to act on “just a feeling”, but it is useful to start to populate a table of “suspects”. That takes me back some years to my sales management training. Suspects, prospects and customers. Seems like only yesterday, but it was before the Filofax craze so that tells you how old I am. 
Hi,
This relates to a concept I thought deeply about after our exuberance in the property market about 13 years ago now. Greed overtook our previously “relatively boring goals”, and we over-leveraged in property. We leveraged our gross assets by X5, and thereafter, realized this was never in our long term plans. We broke our own rules. The concept is “how much is enough” and has resulted in a pretty compelling case for rational goals.
One goal that few people think of is “how many years am I going to be able to support myself until I die?”. A fairly morbid subject, but one which the insurance actuaries have been doing for a couple of hundred years. We arrived at a Pareto principle age of 91 for both of us. It is written into our five year plans. We are not going to live beyond the age of 91, and that is what the actuaries statistics tells us.
The other parameter that goes hand in hand with this is "at what age do I wish to stop “working”. I say “working” because my idea of work does not seem to align with the vast majority of other people’s definition. There are two principles at play here. The first is that I really still don’t know what I want to do when I grow up, and my only fear in this respect is not having the physical or mental capacity to be able to do what I do on a daily basis. For the past 3 or 4 years, that has sometimes been a challenge, and I have recently opted to take 2 months off consulting to recover from two operations. But that has given me more time to concentrate on some other pursuits or “get rich slow” schemes for which I am thankful. Let’s say that I may only have another 2 to 5 years left in which I would enjoy consulting, and at the same time to not present a risk of incomplete work for my clients due to ill health.
So realistically, we only have another 20 years to 25 years after that to be able to pay our way in life until we die and already we spend less than one twentieth of our wealth per year excluding savings. So with our three wealth targets of minimum, average and stretch, I doubt there is any future issue preventing us from being able to live our “minimum target”. The sixth five year plan will be about realistically assessing the risk to minimum target (if any) that future average and stretch target goals would create. Currently this is zero risk, and we need to ensure it stays that way. Crypto and Forex are all about the difference between our aspirations for stretch target vs average. Stretch defines inter-generational wealth transfer, still a goal, but which achievement becomes more and more unlikely each year that passes.
I think that once you stop thinking there is a reasonable chance by positive goal planning that stretch targets are unachievable, that is pipe and slippers time. Or maybe in my case, the time to go and do some research and development engineering. Depends on how the gray matter behaves.
Read this book last two years on a course recommendation and it’s the best financial book I’ve come across…Epic.