Part 1 covered going into age old question most entrepreneurs and investors have and that is trying to determine how much you should keep reinvesting vs paying yourself out.
This part goes over the fun scenario of lump sum cashing out your future expected multimillions in the year 2025—aka retirement.
Scenario A:
The early 2020’s where rough but you stayed strong in not touching any of your gains. You have been financially struggling for a while now with jobs being harder to hold and keep.
Moreover, you also pissed off your main supports over time on Steemit as you became rather bitter about things. You have enough people who quite Steemit with auto voting on your blogs that you still bring in a nice amount. You just have no desire to pump out the content like you use to.
Your days are filled with daydreaming all of the stuff you are going to enjoy in life when you finally get retire.
It’s now 2025 and amazing you went 100% all in and now steem is at $1,000 each and you are sitting on a cool $7million worth. So you cash out baby oh yea! Finally, you get to enjoy all that work. Despite all market crashes, late nights not being able to sleep and watching your nest egg crash a few times it’s paid off.
You have never had so much money ever in your life. In fact, you get to retire in your mid 30’s OMG it’s a dream come true. You can’t believe it only costs $375k in cash all that Steem out to fiat so you are done with cryptocurrency world!
It’s been so many years since you had a decent car that junk in the driveway is gone. While you are not going go out and blow $500k on your dream car (you are smarter than that right?) you settle for that $125k beauty! She is sexy smoking red and oh heck a blue one looks great next to her as well! Hey, you get to learn about expensive: maintenance, repair, and luxury taxes! That junk car is starting to look like a bigger bargain then you thought. Let’s not even think about super yachts!
Now about that crappy apartment, you were living in. Well, you always wanted a beach front house and for a cool $1.5 million you found the perfect one and only $500k over budget. Along with a nice lake house for only $350k during the off seasons. These are your forever homes and you are now retired so they have everything you ever wanted in a house and more.
Last time you even had a vacation was before you even joined Steemit. The plan is to treat yourself to a yearlong world trip you been thinking about this for years now! Pairs, London, New York, Vegas, Shanghai, Tokyo, Moscow, and Seoul. Almost a new city every day of the week! You have all this money just sitting around and room service at 5-star hotels is wonderful! No economy flying for you-- first class all the way. Private tours of tourist traps so you are not waiting in line. Amazing car rentals to get around. You would have never dreamed about blowing 400k on a yearlong vacation but it was a once in a lifetime experience and you went for it. Gosh, those dining experiences really added up!
You had been sharing a lot of amazing photos of your new cars, houses, and world trip with friends and family. You had no idea their lives sucked so much with a lot of hardship. You paid off your parent’s house for only $100k. A couple of times you flew your best friends out for an all paid for vacation to the tune of $30k. That dream college your sibling wanted to go to but could not afford consider it done for $50k. $90k in a few cars to help out some other family members and friends in need and heck 100k in cash as well. When did family and friends start costing so much money to have?
While you had no idea you are actually a Sneakerhead just never had the disposable income for it. What’s 100k to buy out a rather small collection someone was selling at a discount. Along with beast t-shirts at $10k. While you are at it you got a Rolex for $30k and another $200k in clothing and electronics.
You finally get back to your house that you not seen in a year. You pick up your mail from the post office and what're this nasty letters from IRS! What that guy on the internet said he didn’t pay taxes why do you have to? I’m sure it’s a mix up you just seen a commercial last week for a free tax preparer. Time to go pay them a visit and short this misunderstanding out!
About that “free” tax prepare done by a seasonal worker who up till last month had no clue what an AMT, AGI and he’s pretty if anyone asks him for anything other than an ez1040 he might have a panic attack. Needless to say when you told him about how you made money from blogging and then went into an entire spiel of steem, sbd, and cryptocurrency this guy said: “I don’t think you can file an ez1040 I’ll have to ask a manager.” Yep, nope, you are not going get off easy. You are a “special” case that requires research because they have no idea. Even worse you didn’t keep any record keeping what so ever.
After a few hundred billable hours and a couple of consultants, CPA, and tax lawyer later you are now all set to take full advantage of legal tax avoidance for next year. Between a few years of back taxes due to law changes how cryptocurrency is taxed and you forgetting, fines and other fees. You luck out and hired the A team and they got you off the hook for only $2.5 million.
Don’t worry that should leave you with $915,000 for rest of your life and you are only in your 30’s! Been a while since you check for friends request on Facebook maybe that chick you spent two weeks in Paris hit you up! $)#)# she had twins and didn’t know how to tell you till she needed money…
Scenario B
They don’t call them the boring millionaire for nothing. In fact, you could have a couple of these in your life and you would have no idea! That’s the point.
Early on in their life they had a taste of some extra money and guess what they blew it all on stupid stuff (like everyone before them.) They learned early on that having money and the world being able to fix most things with money is a serious issue.
They learned from their past mistakes and know where to watch out for in their own financial weakness. Everyone has some they could be: clothing, cars, house, vacations, charity, eating out, cutting edge electronics, family, and friends to name just a few.
They also learned that when you are doing extremely well other people in your life tend to remind you how much theirs sucks! Talking about how great your life is suddenly has turned into bragging and you know better than to do those nowadays.
What do most of these boring millionaires do when they struck it out rich and turn into one? Well, they consider themselves retired but still working! They focus on making sure the tax man and any debts they owe are taken care right away.
If their car is working just fine they don’t go out and buy a new used/new one right away they hold off.
They might take an extra vacation or two a year. Most of the time they are just a little nicer than ones they use to have but they get to enjoy a lot more of them.
If they wore jeans most of their lives they are not going start wearing custom tailored suits. If they ate out once a week they might up that to two and that is as exciting as it gets!
The biggest threat to their money tends to be inflation and people finding out about it.
Let’s assume they worked a little harder than Scenario A and after taxes and cashing out there take home was actually $7 million. If you are going live another 65 years that’s $107.7k a year just about if spent evenly over that lifetime. Expect inflation, and illness is going be main factors to eat into it. If you think “oh I’ll just reinvest that back into cryptocurrency yet again,” well you could risk it all yet again and hope for more. Boring millionaires don’t tend to do that. They put their money in safer places while trying to beat out inflation. Nothing fancy.
Conclusion
I have observed both Scenario A and Scenario B types of people in my lifetime. It’s shocking how normal smart minded people go crazy when they finally have the cash to burn.
Most think they know better than those before them and don’t see any harm in spending some of it in a stupid manner. That is an easy hole to jump down into. You see it all the time with professional athletes, top earners in their field, lottery winners, and inheritance.
Will I be different? I’d be a fool to think I would be perfect. Only time will tell that and steem needing to hit $1k each or the dozens of other things I fail at doing yearly to get ahead. I hope to still see you around in 2025 perhaps then we will have an answer if you are Scenario A or Scenario B! If nothing else a good laugh about how easy it was to earn entire steem back in 2018!
