Waiting is the hardest part

Friday night we had the neighbors over. I broke out the slip and slide, cooked a couple of pizzas and drank beer with Missus and neighbor dad. Talked about Bitcoin. Wound up letting Elder stay up till 11:30, playing video games and watching half of The Gate. She got scared right when we got to the good part and we turned it off. Seemed everyone in the house was sleep deprived and more hostile to each other than normal. Kids finally went down the street to play. Younger thinks she can just take out the front door and walk over there whenever she wants, and threw a huge fit yesterday afternoon when I told her her she needed to stay in the house during the hot part of the day.

I did fix a broken thermometer, though. Broke out the soldering iron and the hot glue gun. Saved a whopping fourteen bucks. Every dollar counts, y’know?

Spent a couple hours balancing the house books, throwing all our bank statements into GNUCash. The arrangement I have with Missus is a bit hard to keep up with via bookeeping, cause I’ve been trying to account for things that we pay for separately in our own personal accounts: cell phone in mind, and various insurance products through her payroll deduction and checking accounts. I’ve decided that we need to move them over to the house account as much as possible. Since we don’t have daycare expenses right now, it’s hard to figure out how to balance that. We’ll be consolidating as much as we can into the joint account, both to make accounting easier, and to make a proper budget.

Right now we’ve got more than six months cash on hand, for mortgage and utilities. Not including cell phone, groceries, our various insurances, or other incidentals. My credit card spending has gone down quite a bit since the start of the lockdown, but it’s too early to tell exactly how that’s going to work out long term. Zombie, LLC is still above water, so we’re looking good. I don’t keep any long-term savings in my personal account, as fifteen percent of my weekly salary goes straight into Bitcoin.

And for now, it looks like that is going to have to change. There’s a couple factors, but the main one is that I need to get the tax savings from a fully funded IRA. I can still gain bitcoin exposure through GBTC. And being able to take gains off the table in an IRA, tax free, is the best part. Unfortunately I won’t have access to it without taking taxes and penalty, but the goal here has been to build wealth, not to generate income. I’m still going to stack twenty five bucks for Elder and Younger like I’ve been doing, but my own wallet will have to stay where it’s at for the time being.

There’s some additional decisions I need to make about what we’re doing with our idle cash. Holding six month’s expenses in the bank where it earns a whopping 0.01 percent interest is stupid. A CD might be better, but not much. Even Compound’s DeFi rates seem to have dropped of a cliff lately, so I’m not sure what the right answer is. Do nothing for now, I suppose.

I’m also considering scaling into some alcoin positions. ChainLink is looking good, and IDEX tokens will increase my earnings on my DEX node. The only other thing I’ve been considering is Ternio, but I’m not sure I want to KYC at another exchange. I’m still bag holding mining proceeds from Ravencoin, Haven, Arrow and a few others, and I still haven’t touched any of my 2017-19 ERC bags like BAT, 0x, and others. Again, I’ll do nothing for now. I just can’t bring myself to do anything when BTC looks like it’s on the cusp of exploding. I might actually add some Grayscale Ethereum Trust, but I need to take a hard look at that first.

For now, we wait, and work.