For readers who have been following our journey back in 2021, we have been sharing our monthly updates on what we have been working on monthly towards our financial goals.

Things were looking exponentially well for us, Mr Budget’s net worth exploded from $540,000 in 2020 to $1,780,000 in 2021, and Mrs Budget’s net worth grew from $434,000 to $1,250,000 in 2021. Our total combined net worth, excluding our properties and mortgages, is at S$3,000,000 in 2021, compared to just S$975,000 of combined net worth in 2020. All of that has been attributed to crypto.

As part of our 2022 goal, we wrote that we will need to look at derisking and reallocating our portfolio.

However, with the easy wealth accumulated, we became complacent and overconfident. We, mostly I (Mr Budget) stopped tracking the market and everyday I am just waiting for crypto to hit another all time high and for our net worth to double. I vaguely remember setting a goal of S$5,000,000 and we will cash everything out and retire comfortably.

Typing that out now sounds ridiculous.

Waiting for S$2,000,000 to magically appear on our net worth – LOL. That was a top signal already but I was blinded by greed.

Of course, in 2022, everything started crashing down. The first quarter of 2022 was just stagnant for us in terms of our portfolio, but in April and May 2022, everything started crashing for us when Luna, the crypto token which we are heavily allocated to, crashed and lost its value.

I still remember looking at our portfolio value declining day by day, but I held onto the hope that everything will bounce back, and hence was bag holding.

For those in the crypto market then, you would know that during the Luna crash, the blockchain was so congested that you might be unable to perform any transaction. That happened to me as well – although I had enough time to save some of my positions, the crash happened so fast and before I had time to fund some of my open positions (in anchor protocol), I was liquidated for the first time.

And it went downhill from there.

By then, our portfolio (and net worth) would be down by more than 50%, and even though if we had cut all of our positions then, we would still be overall positive, I held on.

The emotional pain of the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars stopped me from processing everything properly, and I held on to the belief that the crash was a temporary one and that crypto holders would be rewarded. And our net worth would rebound to where it was.

Soon after, the feds came in with rate hikes, and the whole year of slow decline in 2022 and 2023 followed.

Post mortem, I have avoided taking stock of how much we have lost, as we are still holding some leftover tokens and are rebuilding. But I estimate that of the S$2,000,000 in crypto value, we have lost almost 80% of them.

Again, typing this out feels like this was such a costly mistake. Now, we can only dream of a portfolio value like what we had in 2021/2022.

The whole of 2022 and 2023 was just a slow grind for us, and rebuilding our portfolio again to where it was in 2020/2021.

Looking back, I think the obvious lesson for us is that we should always take profit. Although I’m not sure if we will ever master the art of taking profit.

The silver lining of this is that we still have some leftover crypto then, and we are rebuilding our portfolio.

And I hope that we learn our mistake in this cycle, otherwise we will never make it.

The question is, how much is enough?

I hope we can share some more of our thoughts on this, but we will be more cautious in terms of sharing what we are purchasing so that we don’t mislead anyone anymore.

I also hope that coming back to writing doesn’t mark the top of whatever cycle that we may be going back to, and that we all make it this time.

Did you survive the 2022 crypto crash? How was it like for you?