fbpx

Tag: Retirement

Why Is Grayscale Buying 100% Of The Mined Bitcoins Since Halving

Grayscale is buying 100% of the bitcoins (and more) that have been mined since halving.

Grayscale’s fund is for the investors who want to buy and hold Bitcoins without going through the trouble and technicalities of acquiring and storing Bitcoins safely. Instead the investors simply buy shares in the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.

But it’s not so difficult to buy and store Bitcoins especially with companies like Coinbase in business that make buying BTCs as simple as using PayPal. Then what is this new kind of increased interest from this certain class of investors who are only willing to buy Bitcoins through Grayscale’s trust? Let me explain.

This new attention seems to be coming from IRA / Roth IRA retirement and pension accounts that are eligible for tax benefits when buying BTC through Grayscale’s trust. In other words, with macro instability and to hedge the COVID-19 related crisis, the retirement and pension money is going into crypto-assets.

There are many out there who view Bitcoin as fake-money or a ponzi-scheme. At the same time the world is exchanging “real cash” for the “fake one” at 30 million dollars per week from their retirement and pension accounts to weather a storm.

The Fundamental Error We Make When Planning For Retirement

The key to retirement is understanding a fundamental concept called savings rate. A lot of people only focus on the savings, and not the savings rate. Let me explain to you why the savings rate is more important than the savings.

A friend of mine was saving $200 every month while he was making north of $1000. A few years later, his business really took off and now he was saving $300 every month while making nearly $3000. While he was making progress in saving more money, he thought that he was going to retire much earlier now. But that isn’t true. He actually delayed his retirement. Sounds strange, right? Let me explain.

His savings rate before was 20% of his income and a few years later despite increasing the savings amount, he reduced his savings rate to 10%. The reason why this matters is because his expenses have gone up considerably. While his savings have gone up by $100 each month, his expenses have gone up by $1900 per month.

Now that his new lifestyle requires much more money to maintain, and assuming that he doesn’t want to downgrade his lifestyle once he retires, his savings will now support him for considerably lesser time period. And hence he will have to work for a longer time period now before he can retire.

Here’s a retirement calculator for people in Pakistan.