Below is a list of videos, a PDF and some books I have put together to recommend for anyone who wants to learn about bitcoin. The list is most sorted from top to bottom by shortest or easiest to read to longer and more in depth towards the bottom.
The world feels like it’s heading in the wrong direction—rising costs, declining standards, and growing instability. The root cause? The corruption of our money.
The Bitcoin Paradigm Shift: A Beginner’s Journey to Understanding BTC (2025) – shortest video I can find yet that explains it well!
The bullish case for Bitcoin – Vijay Boyapati ~ 2 hour book read – link below to buy
The Saylor Series- with Robert Breedlove -You only need to listen to about the first 1 hour of each interview where Michael Saylor is talking. The 2nd half is Robert Breedlove summarizing what Michael said. Not necessary to listen to.
The Saylor Series What is Money – Book – summary of the above podcast. This is shorter than the podcast.
EXCLUSIVE: TESLA’S $1 Billion Bitcoin Bet Pays Off | Cern Basher – A great summary of why Tesla (or any company) should buy more Bitcoin.
Broken Money: Why Our Financial System is Failing Us and How We Can Make it Better- Lyn Alden
I am a big believer in the future of Tesla as a business and the positive impacts they will have on the world.I wanted to put together a quick reference for the catalysts I see coming in the next 2 years that I can quickly share with people.
These are ordered from first to happen to furthest away.
Tesla Model Y Juniper Update
New Cheaper Tesla car/vehicles for sale – H1 2025
China megapack factory
Semi production next year
FSD release in China imminent
Robotaxi service – start in Texas and California next year
Optimus bot
Tesla Model Y Juniper Update – This is a styling and hardware update for the best selling car in the world in 2023, the Tesla Model Y SUV. It wasn’t quite the best selling in 2024, likely due to people waiting for the 2025 update. This update should lead to best selling status of this car again and help total production of 2.3 million vehicles in 2024.
New Cheaper Tesla car/vehicles for sale – H1 2025 – Elon has mentioned veiled comments related to cheaper vehicles in H1 2025. These will be able to be built on the same lines as Model 3 and Y. This should help total production of 2.3 million vehicles in 2024.
China megapack factory – The Megapack is a “grid scale” battery storage solution for energy. These are sold often in sits of 200-500 at at time. They cost around $1 million per megapack. The current factory is in the USA, for the USA and rest of world. The China Megapack factory should be in production in H1 2025 and fully ramped by end 2025. These are extremely profitable products.
Semi production next year – Tesla has been testing the Tesla Semi for a while with Pepsi and other companies. The Tesla semi will be much cheaper to operate and more reliable (fewer parts) than a diesel semi. I fully expect electric semi’s to almost completely replace all semi’s in 10 years. The average semi is 7 years old. That means every 7 years most of the semi fleet is fully replaced. Of course there are some older vehicles that remain. Since electric semi’s will be cheaper to operate and trucking is a business large businesses will drive adoption of this more efficient technology, or they will go out of of business and be replaced by companies that do. Tesla semi has driven 250,000 miles
FSD release in China imminent – Up until now, FSD (Full Self Driving) A $8,000 option, or $100/month subscription, has only been available in the USA. Tesla is likely to get approval to start using and selling in EU and China in 2025. This will open up for millions of drivers to pay for that software.
Robotaxi – start in Texas and California 2025 – Tesla has had good progress on its FSD (Full Self Driving) software in the last year. They are planning to start offering a Robotaxi service, using Tesla 3’s and Y’s in California and Texas in 2025.
Optimus bot – Tesla has been working on the Optimus, humanoid Robot, for a few years now. The latest versions are very compelling, being able to walk down a steep slippery slope and catch a thrown ball. These will be offered to do simple work in factories. They don’t need to do 100% of the work people can do. There is a curve of simple tasks they can start on and slowly develop skills and do more and more. Even if they cost $50k a year, they will be cheaper than a fully burdened factory worker who after factoring in health care, sick time, etc costs a company more than $50k a year, even if they are only paid $30k /year. Tesla could likely lease these for “only” $25k/year and even replace half a person.
I read through your bill IA SF2273 related to gold and silver coinage. I appreciate the sentiment and wish you luck with your bill in the future if you continue to pursue it.
I wanted to appeal to your hard money side with some data about the emerging hardest money ever created, Bitcoin.
As you know, Gold backed currency has failed in many different countries in history for the same reason. The government always centralizes the gold and prints more paper than can back the bills. Even in Ancient Rome when the money was silver, there was coin clipping and physical debasement where existing coins were recalled and melted down to a lower percentage of gold.
Another issue with Gold is that we don’t actually know how much there is. More gold is mined everyday and more is mined as the price goes up.
Bitcoin addresses all the shortcomings of Gold that have caused it to fail in the past.
Bitcoin has a perfectly limited amount, 21 million.
Bitcoin is quickly and easily transmitted across the world. You need a lot of military hardware to transport any significant amount of gold. Bitcoin is also easily transacted in very small amounts. The smallest unit of 1 bitcoin is 1 satoshi. There are 100,000,000 satoshis in 1 bitcoin.
0.00000001 Bitcoin = 1 Satoshi.
Bitcoin currently has a market capitalization of about $1 trillion.
Once 1 BTC = $1 million, it will have a market capitalization of $21 trillion and 1 satoshi will =
$0.01
Using the lightning network consumers are easily able to make very small transactions such as at a grocery store or a restaurant.
If you read this post on my website, https://mywheellife.com/2024/06/23/2024-bitcoin-adoption/, you will see that there are a lot of large institutions like the Wisconsin state pension adding bitcoin to their portfolio. It is also legal tender in El Salvador and they are buying 1 bitcoin a day also to ad to their treasury.
As you have probably seen there are now ETF’s available that have bought 1 million bitcoin this year in the USA only.
The available supply of 21 million bitcoin is draining quickly.
I would encourage you to investigate more about bitcoin.
Perhaps you have heard that President Trump has recently endorsed Bitcoin. He is speaking at the Bitcoin Conference in Tennessee this Sunday, 7-28-2024. You should be able to find it on Youtube later.
I would also point you to this video that just came out “Thank God For Bitcoin”
It is one of the best videos I’ve seen to explain the benefits of Bitcoin.
I’d encourage you to introduce a bill, similar to Arizona, to direct the IPERS pension fund to investigate adding bitcoin to the IPERS portfolio. That would be a first step.
A 2nd step would be to have a state reserve of Bitcoin.
The Truth heard one time sounds stranger than a lie heard a thousand times.
The truth is, inflation is caused by the government printing money. There are only so many goods that are possible to be produced by the limited amount of resources in the economy. An infinite amount of dollars cannot create more goods. More money only causes the price of the existing goods to increase as there is more money chasing the same amount of goods.
This is what happens every time the government increases the money supply. This happens everyday.
We have been in this system since everyone alive was born so it seems like it should be the natural system, but it is not.
Ask a fish to describe air and they’d be confused because they are surrounded by water. We are surrounded by fiat currency so we don’t recognize a good sound money when we are exposed to it.
We don’t need money distributed by the government. Money is an IOU. Money is a medium of exchange that people accept to pay for goods and services, and to repay loans. It’s a commodity that’s widely accepted, holds its value over time, and can be easily translated into prices. Money is the main measure of wealth, and it circulates between people and countries to facilitate trade.
Many things have been money over history, shells, gold, silver, copper, stones. Many of these have not been issued by governments. Fiat currency, money by decree, is a recent development. It inherently has no value. It only has value due to a fluke of history. Until 1971 USD was technically backed by gold. You were supposed to be able to trade in dollars for Gold. But that link was broken in 1933 by Executive order 6102 for individuals in the USA and in 1971 for any countries that wanted to exchange their USD for gold. Both were only supposed to be for a short time and both ended up being permanent, so far.
Another truth is the Government takes value that you have accrued by printing new money. This would be much easier to recognize if the world consisted of 3 people and you each had $100 for a total of $300, but then 1 of the 3 people had the ability to create new money. If the 2 people wanted to buy something and they had $100 total each to bid on that thing but the 3rd person was able to create $500 out of thin air and bid against them the 2 people wouldn’t let that happen. They would recognize that the $500 wasn’t really as valuable as the original $100 that each person had because the individual had just written $500 on a piece of paper and said it had value. This is counterfeiting! Creating new money is illegal for individuals, but the government does it everyday. Why is that ok? This is the same for many governments in history. Governments always default to stealing value from the governed by printing new money.
Why do we put up with this? We all have 1,000 different priorities in our lives. We have to take care of our kids, we have to take care of our parents, we have to take care of ourselves! We want to take a trip. We want to build a house. We want to take a vacation. We want to buy a car. We want to go out to eat or we have some other project we want to dedicate time to. In the USA inflation has been relatively low for many years so while we lose about 3% of the value we create each year, we just deal with it.
But many places have experienced high inflation both recently and over time. Argentina has recently had 100% inflation for multiple years in a row. There is nothing inherently different from the operation of the Argentina economy and central bank from the USA central bank. Turkey, Germany, Zimbabwe, Sudan, they have all experienced hyperinflation at various times.
Physical money is just a replacement for an IOU. An IOU works between 2 individuals. But when you start accounting for goods and services delivered across continents between Billions of people an IOU doesn’t work. That is why IOU’s have been abstracted to Dollars or other currencies.
But IOU’s between individuals don’t lose value. If someone does 1 hour of work for you you owe them 1 hour of work back. But if someone does 1 hour of work for you and you pay them $15 and then in a year they want you to do 1 hour of work for them, you will likely charge them $16 due to inflation. Why is this? It is because the accounting system, US Dollars, is broken! They dollars don’t hold value across time.
This is because the government prints more dollars everyday. Every time the government prints a new dollar, every existing dollar loses value.
The only way to fix this is an accounting system that has a fixed amount of units. That is what Bitcoin provides. There are only 21 million Bitcoin available. Each bitcoin can be broken down to 100 million satoshis.
The only reason the price bitcoin is changing today is due to supply and demand for Bitcoin. But you need to look past the present day and envision the future. The future is where bitcoin has been fully adopted by everyone in the world who wants a sound money. In this future the value of all the bitcoin in existence will measure all the goods in the world. As the amount of goods grows with world productivity by about 3% a year the value of bitcoin will continue to grow at the same rate. There won’t be huge swings because there won’t be people speculating on the future price of Bitcoin. It’s price is just a measurement of the good in the world. And since there are 21 million bitcoin, a fixed amount, there is no devaluation of the Bitcoin because more new Bitcoin are not made.
This is the fundamental idea and reason for Bitcoin. It is not a stock or a company. It is a ledger that measures value of things. It can’t be debased like existing USD ledgers.
If you understand this problem, the government stealing value from you via money printing, the solution of Bitcoin appears obvious.
The only question is, does Bitcoin actually solve this problem by being a fixed amount and will the system continue to function as it does today? If it continues to function as it does today, it should continue to gain value. If something comes along and changes how they Bitcoin system works then it’s possible that it could not function as described. Currently, that would be an “unknown unknown”. There is no obvious thing that would cause Bitcoin to fail. But I always leave a possibility for something to happen that I don’t anticipate in any situation.
Because Bitcoin seems to fix the problems with USD and other fiat currencies (Euros, Yen, Yuan, etc) I believe we should support it’s continued development. That is why I try to educate individuals on the problem that Bitcoin fixes, like with this article.
If you have any questions I’d be more than happy to discuss Bitcoin with you. Please comment or get in touch!
Bitcoin is not an investment. Bitcoin is a store of value. The value you create. Bitcoin is an agreement between people who create value in the world that they will trade their value for other value. The value you create and store in Bitcoin cannot be debased or inflated away by any government by money printing.
What is money?
The Google AI answer is below.
“Money is a widely accepted medium of exchange that can be used to pay for goods and services, repay loans, and store value. It’s also a unit of account that can be easily translated into prices. Money can take many forms, including:
Cowrie shells, Copper ingots, Rum, Gold coins, Paper banknotes, Digital bank records, Barley, Peppercorns, and Silver.”
A different way to think about it is money is a store of value provided to you in exchange for something of actual value (good or service) you have created, that you can cash in at a future date. You work all week, but you don’t need to spend all that value you created at the end of the week. So you try to store the value you have created in US Dollars.
There is an obvious problem with the main money we use in the world today, the US Dollar. It loses value every day.
Not every form of store of value has this problem. If you borrow a cup of sugar from someone and they repay you with a cup of sugar later, they don’t usually give you 95% of the sugar you gave them. They usually pay you back the exact same amount of value you gave them.
If you work for someone for an hour as a favor they don’t come work for your for 55 minutes. They pay you back the full hour.
So why if we are paid $100 for our work and we hold it in the bank are we willing to have that money lose value while it sits in the bank? It is still the same $100 later, but the value the $100 can purchase has decreased over time.
This is reflected in higher prices for good, inflation.
What causes inflation?
According to Milton Friedman, “inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon”. This means that inflation is a rise in the general price level, and can only be produced by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.”
Meaning, the government causes inflation by printing money. Contrary to what politicians want you to believe (that greedy business people cause inflation), politicians themselves are the cause of the inflation! People need to understand how the system works. Businesses raise or lower prices with demand. If demand lowers, they will lower prices or they won’t be able to sell products. They also have to raise prices faster than inflation so they can stay ahead of inflation and stay profitable. Businesses are not the cause of inflation, the government printing more money, that is being spent on the same amount of goods, is what causes inflation. This has happened many times in history, from the Roman Empire to Revolutionary France. Inflation is always produced by governments printing money to try to buy goods.
Bitcoin puts handcuffs on the government. It is impossible to print more bitcoin. There will only ever be 21 million bitcoin. Bitcoin is the only chance we have at reigning in government spending and stopping inflation.
Bitcoin is not an investment. Bitcoin is a store of value. The value you create. Bitcoin is an agreement between people who create value in the world that they will trade their value for other value. The value you create and store in Bitcoin cannot be debased or inflated away by any government by money printing.
Until you understand the exact problem, you won’t see bitcoin in the right way. You will see it’s value, denominated in dollars. As it goes up you will be happy you have more dollars. But more dollars is not the goal. More bitcoin is the goal.
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Connect with them yourself.
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I keep thinking of new ways to think about what value Bitcoin provides. Below is the way I thought about it today. It started while talking with a friend at a coffee shop about money. We discussed the gold standard and he asked how it would be possible to go to a gold standard today. The market capitalization of all the gold in the world today is only about $13.7 trillion and the value of all the money in the world is around $450 trillion. Gold currently costs about $2,000/oz. To fully back the $450 trillion of money with gold the gold would have to significantly appreciate. It would increase it’s monetary premium. In fact some central banks have explicitly said they are buying more gold in case this happens!
This website, gold survival guide, did a calculation of what you’d have to reprice gold to, in US dollars, to get only a 26% backing. They determined that you’d need gold to be worth $33,690/oz. This would be a significant monetary premium on gold over what it is worth today.
Gold is the most commonly thought of thing that has a monetary premium. Houses are a good example of something that people don’t often think of that has a monetary premium. Many houses are bought by speculators to store value. For example:
Rich Chinese buyers are willing to use houses, which are not very liquid, to store value outside of China. It is a lot simpler way to get value out of the country. It would look a lot more suspicious if they just shipped hundreds of thousands of dollars out of China and parked it in a bank. But to buy a property is an “acceptable” reason to take money out of the country. People are resourceful and will find ways to store value.
People want assets that will rise with inflation. They can be willing to pay more than the utility value of the asset to acquire it. Unfortunately, it’s never explicitly stated or even talked about that some things have a monetary premium on top of their utility value. Commodities like corn or oil have very little or usually no monetary premium.Their only value is from the things they can be used to do. They don’t store well. To have a monetary premium a good has to have a long life, like gold or houses. Stocks are another thing that has a monetary premium.
One thing that also has a monetary premium that is not often talked about is money! People like to talk about the fact that Bitcoin has no “intrinsic value”. Do you know what is another thing that has no intrinsic value? US dollars. Think about it. What gives a dollar its value? It is it’s network effects. It is accepted as valuable by others. Gold has a utility value as well as a monetary premium. Some people get confused by gold having a utility value and they think that any money has to have a utility value. But that is not true, as evidenced by the US dollar, the primary money in the world, having no intrinsic value! In fact there is really only 1 major difference between US dollars and bitcoin. US dollars can be created at will by the US government, and are everyday. This reduces the purchasing power of every existing dollar, including the ones you own and worked to earn.
Bitcoin has a fixed supply. Once you own a fraction of a bitcoin, you own that much of the total bitcoin network. There is no way for anyone to steal your percentage of the network by creating more bitcoin
I often say, if the government quit printing dollars, we wouldn’t need bitcoin. Every government that has had their own currency in history has always printed and debased that currency until it has lost all value. See the Romans. They literally has physical silver coins. They would periodically recall them, melt them down, dilute the silver percentage and reissue them. Initially they would act like they were the same value of coin, but as people came to realize that new coins had less silver they would require more coins for the same goods. So back to the monetary premium. US dollars have no inherent value. Neither does bitcoin. But US dollars have a created monetary premium from their acceptance as a means of payment. There is no reason that bitcoin, or anything else that a group of individuals choose to use as a store of value and means of payment could become that and gain some of the monetary premium that dollars have. In essence we can transfer the monetary premium from dollars to bitcoin, if we choose to. In El Salvador bitcoin is already accepted as a means of payment. Many individuals and businesses around the world have already individually chosen to accept bitcoin as a means of payment. SInce dollars don’t reliably store value, due to the ability of the government to print more, why wouldn’t people choose to store value in a tool that it is impossible to make more of? That is why I choose to store some of my value in bitcoin. If you are interested in talking about the idea of monetary premium more, or the idea of transferring monetary premium from one good to another, get in touch!
I’ve had an interest in developing countries for years. Often this has been in the form of donations to charity. I have also personally been giving money to a couple men in Haiti for school for years.
I recently visited India to visit some friends and also to attend a Business Summit for JoyCorps.
“The JoyCorps Fellowship is a group of carefully selected, visionary leaders who operate agrarian and small manufacturing businesses in Asia’s under-resourced communities.
We offer Accelerator and Incubator services that provide business expertise, structures, encouragement and community — all vital for growing a thriving business in a challenging environment.”
I was able to meet many entrepreneurs in India and learned about their challenges in starting their businesses.
by Magatte Wade due to following Magatte Wade on LinkedIn. It was very timely and I listened to this while I was in India. A lot of the challenges faced in different developing countries are all the same.
One other organization I became aware of while I was in India is AgGrandize.They have a fund available that you can invest in. Actually making an investment in a foreign small business directly is still not nearly as easy as a donation to charity. I am going to continue learning and looking for options to make this easier.
If anyone knows of a fund that you can invest in in monthly increments, that invests in small foreign businesses, please let me know!
If you are interested in this topic below are a few books I would recommend to learn more about investing in developing countries to help them help themselves.
I have been reading and thinking about money, economics, wages,fair wages, trade imbalances and business stuff for years. This is a list of links and some books that I have found interesting related to the topic. I don’t have a take away conclusion from this reading yet.
“It is utterly clear to me that the highest priority need of world society at the present moment is a realistic economic accounting system which will rectify, for instance, such nonsense as the fact that a top toolmaker in India, the highest paid of all craftsman, gets only as much per month for his work in India as he could earn per day for the same work if he were employed in Detroit, Michigan. – Page 112 Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth, Buckminster Fuller
I am sharing a few articles I’ve read the last years about various impacts of higher wages in different parts of the world. I still don’t have a big conclusion from this.
As jobs are exported slowly the world wide wage should rise, but likely America’s will fall, which is fine.
I do share the concern that some businesses “can’t afford to pay people $15/hr” but if that is the case should they be businesses?
I mentioned that there are a lot of things that challenge starting businesses (wages/paying SS, and medicare/insurance).
I have been a big proponent that nationwide healthcare will allow smaller businesses to be more competitive with larger businesses because they should only have to compete on wages, not healthcare. This same idea came from Andrew Yang. His book “The War on Normal People” is very good, for many ideas, not just UBI.
I like the below articles for worldwide perspectives on income and economics.
The country allows lower pay for teenagers, and the labor deal McDonald’s struck with its employees currently pays 16-year-olds roughly US$8 an hour, not altogether different from what they’d make in the states. In an email, Greg Bamber, a professor at Australia’s Monash University who has studied labor relations in the country’s fast food industry, told me that as a result, McDonald’s relies heavily on young workers in Australia.
Jobs moved to Mexico. Seems to have worked out well for the new employees in Mexico. Seems to have “busted” the people who lost jobs in USA,
Now, of course, to an American audience this seems so minor, so unbelievably reasonable, it’s hard to see how there can be any opposition: Five bucks a day? As a minimum? It’s easy to be outraged that the U.S. government wouldn’t push for a minimum of more. Who can live on five bucks a day?
Haiti’s industry is focused on commodity white T-shirts for brands like Hanes. The commodity white T-shirt is one of the cheapest, easiest things in the world to make. With $500,000 you could buy a bunch of used sewing machines in Alabama or Guangzhou, rent a cement shell in some poor country, and be in business in a few weeks.
In short, Dominican textile workers have real bargaining power because they have real, globally competitive skills. I’m sure manufacturers would love to pay them $3 a day, but they can’t because the Dominicans know how to do stuff that commands a higher wage.
I have no idea what would happen if Haiti did have a $5-a-day minimum wage. But I do think it’s reasonable to assume that some factories would close and far fewer new ones would be built. Far fewer Haitians would be allowed to take that first tentative step on to the ladder of industrial development.
It looks like LOWRY sewing robot has been made into a company.
ABOUT SOFTWEAR AUTOMATION
We are an Atlanta-based advanced machine-vision and robotics startup disrupting the $1.5 trillion apparel industry. Our fully automated Sewbots enable on-demand manufacturing by moving supply chains local and closer to the customer, while creating higher quality products at comparable cost to imports from low-wage countries.
This is the future of everything. Automate as much as possible, for mass production. It is how the past has always gone and it’s the way of the future. More things will be automated. Automated things will be cheaper, or they wouldn’t be automated! Cheaper things means people can actually buy more things! Think of TV’s. In 1990 a 20” tv was relatively expensive and maybe a family had 1. Now it’s cheaper to have 3 55” tv’s.
LA garment worker pay- Many garment workers in the USA are here illegally. The employers should be held responsible for hiring illegal immigrants. They are also taking advantage of these people.
A 2016 U.S. Department of Labor investigation found pay violations in 85% of the L.A. garment shops it looked into. – How do these places stay in business? If they are investigated and found to be violating the US DOL how do they stay in business????
Vernette speaks in Haitian Creole, as he has trouble communicating in Spanish.
He arrived in the Dominican Republic “under the fence,” or irregularly, about a year ago.- It appears that illegal immigration is a problem worldwide, and they are treated poorly everywhere.
See disclaimer at end. There are assumptions in these calculation that inflation is 3% constantly every year.
Your investments will return 7%/year.
These tables change if either of those numbers change. But these are useful historic numbers to help people start thinking if they are in the ballpark of saving enough or not.
In the previous post I considered how much someone my current age at the time (28), might need to retire when they are 65. I have thought about this and it’s actually quite easy to make a table so that anyone whatever age and income level they think they might need could identify how much they need to save without doing any math!
How you read the below table is:
Identify from the top row “how much yearly income you need to retire (in 2023 dollars). So if you are spending say $50,000 this year and you think you’ll continue to spend that much in retirement go to that column.
Then identify your age and the age you want to retire.
For this example say you are 40 and you want to retire at 60.
60-40 = 20 years to retirement. So you look in the left column and go to the row “20 years to retirement”
Where the column and row intersect is how much you might need to have at that age to retire.
So in the example, if you are 40 years old, and you want to retire in 20 years and withdraw $60,000 a year (in 2023 dollars) from your portfolio you would probably need to have saved $2.7 million dollars in 2043 dollars)
The dollars in the resulting boxes are all in the calendar year of the year you’d retire.
So in 2043 you’d need to have $2.7 million to retire.
The table assumes you can safely withdraw 4% of your portfolio a year.
4% of $2.7 million is $108,000, but that $108,000 is in 2043 dollars.
Adjusted for inflation $108,000 is worth $60,000 in 2023 dollars, which is what the top column tells you.
I tried to make this easy since everyone knows what their current spending is. That is why the top column is in present day dollars.
The next step would be to identify how much money you have now and determine if you’ll have enough at the time you retire to reach the goal in the table above!
The table below helps with that.
How to read this table is to sum up your investments in all your accounts today.
Ex: 401k, IRA, Brokerage account etc.
That is the top row.
Again, look at the column to identify “how many years until you want to retire”
The resulting orange box will tell you “how much you will have in that year if you don’t invest another dollar today.”
So in the below table our 40 year old person who wants to retire in 20 years and has $600k in their 401k & IRA & any other investments will have $2.3 million in 2043, assuming they don’t invest another dollar between today and 20 years from now.
Now this might at first seem unhelpful because you might be thinking “but they will likely be investing more between now and then”.
And that is true!
But what this table tells you is that you NEED to invest more to reach you $2.7 million goal from table 1 if you want to retire with your expected withdrawal of $60k a year.
Here’s a clean table for you to identify yourself on.
Let’s look at a different scenario:
Say you are 40 years old and think you can live on $50,000/year in 20 years when you retire.
You’d look up that you’d need $2,257,639 in the year 2043 when you retire.
If you look at table 2 you can see that if you have $600,000 invested today, and plan to retire in 20 years you’d have $2,321,811 when you retire.
Since you need $2.2 million but your investments will grow to $2.3 million this might mean that you don’t need to invest anything else for the next 20 years!
This idea, that you might not need to invest any more money to retire in the future is known as “CoastFI”.
Now as I mentioned right at the start there are 2 assumptions in all these tables.
Inflation is 3% every year. It might be more or less in the real world.
Your investments will grow at a steady 7%/year. This will certainly be more or less every year. It’s easy to do math with averages though and over time the ups and downs of the market average out.
You have to make assumptions like this when doing these types of calculations. These are based on historic averages. Every person needs to do their own calculations or work with a financial advisor to get these numbers exactly right for themselves.
But these are good starting points to just give you a high level view if you are even close to having enough money or if you’ll need to continue investing!
For most people you are likely going to not have enough invested now that you can stop investing. But how close are you?
Are you millions of dollars away? Or hundreds of thousands? Or only thousands?
I will create another post in the future to try to help understand how much you will need to invest to reach your goal, but I thought this was a sufficiently long post for now.
MyWheelLife.com 