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- Today I wanna tell all of you how to become a millionaire in just a couple of weeks. You heard that right, just a couple of weeks.
Sound too good to be true? Not if you're one of those inspirational crypto bros who's telling people it is true. And one of those guys is former billionaire in Chia Pet who became a real boy, Sam Bankman Freit. The other thing he became is a real broke, at least in comparison to his net worth pre-crash. This guy went from billionaire to millionaire within a couple of weeks by losing $23 billion in the great crypto collapse of 2022. But your boy SBF isn't the only person to lose big in crypto right now.
More than 80,000 Bitcoin investors had their millionaire status revoked due to this crypto market crash. And other high-profile celebs weren't immune either. I'm talking about guys like Tom Brady and Odell Beckham Jr. and Mr. Wonderful himself, Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary. Mr. Wonderful? More like Mr. Wonder Where All That Money Went.
Okay, that roast felt way cooler in my head. Way cooler in my head. So in the wake of all this madness, people have taken to the modern man's Acropolis Twitter to spill their guts on what crypto cost them. And there's an entire account now dedicated to this called Coinfessions. Let me read some for you. I've lost $350,000 of Solana since I bought it at the all-time high in 2021. I don't know what to do anymore. I've fallen into a deep depression. When will it end?
Dark stuff. I'm down $5.5 million from a few years in crypto. About $1.5 million in debt. And I just found out that I owe $250,000 in taxes. Follow me for financial destitution.
Hey, at least we're laughing on the way down. I started trading crypto in September of 2017 with about $25,000. By early 2018, I quadrupled my money, which would have paid off all of my debt. Instead, I kept trading and losing, and now I have nothing left. I still have the debt, and I'm trying to get back to six figures to pay it off.
I lost everything. Right now I got 5.43 USDT and I'm spending way too many hours flipping coins. My math makes a quick 10x to 50 USDT, then again and again would be 5k. But honestly, I'm lying to myself and have no hope. I should spend more time doing useful things. I hit a peak of $600,000 in net worth in January of 2018. I held meme coins down to 150k and then lost 140,000 of it day trading the bear market.
I enrolled in a BS master's program to get $10,000 of student loans per semester for more trading capital and have been trying to make it all back the past four years. My family still thinks I'm rich. I have no friends, no girlfriend, and I spend 12 to 14 hours a day staring at charts. I have $4,900 left at the moment, six figures in student loan debt, $20,000 of credit card debt, and every day is hell on earth. That's a giant bummer.
I mean, seriously, those are some really sad, depressing stories of people who thought they were going to get rich quick. Some of them did get rich quick, and they lost it all because of greed, because of pressure, because of all of their crypto bros saying this is the path, this is the way to get rich. And here's where it's gotten us. A whole bunch of young people who had bright futures who are now depressed and broke with no friends. That sucks. So...
How the heck did we get here? Can we all just harken back to better times, simpler times, to when crypto was going to make us all rich and you were actually kind of weird if you weren't in on it and you didn't own any? And in the aftermath of COVID, NFTs and crypto coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum shot up in value. Bitcoin even hit an all-time high in November of 2021 at almost $68,000. But then, crypto market crashed. And it crashed hard. ♪
which made commercials like this age like milk. - Fortune favors the brave. - Fortune favors those who didn't listen to Matt Damon, as it turns out. You should really stick to acting instead of investing advice. He had a heck of a run there. "Good Will Hunting," "The Bourne Series," "The Ocean's Movies," "Four Verse Ferrari," "The Martian," "Interstellar," "The Departed." Did you really need the check from crypto.com? - I just couldn't help myself.
I'm a trickster. Many experts sounded the alarm early on about how volatile and unpredictable cryptocurrencies can be. And others also said the crypto market was in a bubble. And here's the thing about bubbles. They eventually pop. And
And when the crypto bubble popped, the bubble blowers disappeared real quick. So here's how it all went down. In May of 2022, two cryptocurrencies, Luna and Terra USD, suddenly collapsed, which caused billions of dollars in losses and strike fear in the hearts of investors. And by June of 2022, this was a full-blown panic.
I've got to get out of here. Get a hold of yourself. The crypto industry saw intense cutbacks and Bitcoin suffered its worst month in more than a decade. When it was all said and done, the crash hurt millions of investors. It forced several high profile crypto lenders into bankruptcy and it wiped out more than two trillion dollars of value from the crypto market. Two trill. Straight to no. And it's gone. What?
It's gone. It's all gone. And China also got busy cracking down on crypto, banning all crypto mining and making transactions using crypto totally illegal, which additionally wiped out close to $400 million from the crypto market. Now, all of this cracking down left very little room for cracking up. This was no laughing matter.
By July of 2022, Bitcoin had lost roughly 70% of its value since reaching that all-time high. It was hovering around $21,000 per coin. And the other big digital cryptocurrencies like Ethereum and Dogecoin, well, they took some significant hits too. And that's not even mentioning that basically all FTX investments are now worth $0. And it's gone! So, why is crypto crashing? Why?
Well, for one, confidence in crypto as a legitimate investment is now starting to fade. Since the beginning of the year, trust in crypto has plummeted by 18%, and more than a third of crypto owners reported selling some of their Bitcoin in July. And one study shows that only about 8% of Americans feel positively about crypto, which coincidentally is the same percentage of Americans who feel positively about the Bachelor franchise. You literally just came in here to act like that? Are you kidding me?
And when the value of a cryptocurrency is pretty much completely based on whether or not people believe it's worth anything, losing trust is the worst thing that could happen to crypto. But you don't have to take my word for it. I would, however, take Warren Buffett's word for it. Now, if you told me you own all of the Bitcoin in the world and you offered it to me for $25, I wouldn't take it. Because what would I do with it? I'd have to sell it back to you one way or another. It isn't going to do anything. That's a direct quote. Pretty baller.
But really, we can't blame crypto's Michael Bay-level crash and burn on any one singular reason. In addition to fading confidence, the biggest pieces of the crypto crash puzzle are inflation, recession fears, and more regulation on crypto mining. You stir all of those pieces together, and you have one really gross pot of chili.
I'm serious about this stuff. If betting on a specific type of crypto is too unpredictable for building long-term wealth, what should you invest in? Well, my wealth strategy is as timeless as the Bible itself. Here it is in a nutshell from the book of Proverbs. Wealth gained hastily will dwindle, but whoever gathers little by little will increase it. So based on that wisdom, I personally put my hard-earned dollars into good, grow stock mutual funds that have a long-term track record.
record. So here's what that is. You're basically buying bits and pieces of ownership in tons of companies. We're talking hundreds at one time in one fund. And if you do this, you're giving your investing portfolio two things. First, it gives you the benefit of investing in the growth potential of the stock market, which, by the way, historically has a long-term average annual rate of return of 10 to 12%.
And second, it helps keep your portfolio diversified so that your nest egg isn't riding on one or two stocks or an unproven investment. Looking at you, Dogecoin. And to take diversification a step further, I then invest evenly across four different types of mutual funds. Growth and income, growth, aggressive growth, and international. I'm not putting my eggs in one basket. I'm not even putting it in multiple baskets. I've got baskets all over, man. You can't even count how many baskets I've got.
That is one big pile of baskets. So people, it's time to stop playing the game. Will my crypto crash?
Millionaires don't gamble their futures on Dogecoin and single stocks. And regardless of what you saw in that one TikTok, actual wealthy people invest consistently in mutual funds and index funds in their 401ks and their IRAs month after month, year after year. And I know there's a ton of other YouTubers out there over on your sidebar, and they're claiming their investment strategy will make you rich tomorrow. But I'm telling you, the proof is in the curdled crypto pudding. Pudding skin singles.
Now, if all this talk about crypto and investing is overwhelming, don't let it be. Just be whelmed. That's my goal for you. You don't have to figure out all this stuff on your own. You can work with a financial advisor and investing pro to walk with you through this wild, wild west of investing. And I call them smart investor pros. And it's a whole team of folks out there across the country that our team here at Ramsey vets to serve you well when it comes to investing.
I'm going to drop a link below if you want to learn more about that. And if you've got a really juicy crypto story for us, DM me on Instagram at George Camel, and maybe it'll be featured on a future episode. And don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to get more content like this and make the algorithm happy. Thank you guys for watching. See you next time.
