Man, asking about the “best strategy” makes me remember a time when I was hunting for that magic formula myself. That whole ‘Virgo Career November’ thing? Listen, forget the stars for a minute. My personal finance life was a total wreck long before I ever looked at my chart, and it had nothing to do with what some astrologer was saying.
The Setup: Chasing Shadows and Getting Burned
I was in this total mess back in ’21. Everyone was talking about easy money, and I thought I was smart enough to game the system. I was convinced there was some secret investment strategy, some quick trick you could find on a Twitter thread or some Discord group that would just turn a few grand into retirement cash overnight. Spoiler: I was an idiot.
I started with a bit of everything. There was the meme stock that everyone was saying was going “to the moon”—I threw a decent chunk of my savings at that, watched it jump, and then got greedy and held on too long. Then there was the crypto venture. Not Bitcoin, not Ethereum, but some random junk token some dude on a YouTube live stream kept yelling about. He sounded so confident, talking about the tokenomics and the community. I bought in heavily. Real heavily.
For a few weeks, I felt like a genius. I was checking my phone every five minutes, seeing those fake-money numbers go up. I even started planning what I’d spend it on. That was the delusion right there.
The Gut Punch and The Forced Pivot
The whole thing blew up right before the holidays that year. That meme stock I held? It tanked, wiped out the profit and then a huge chunk of the principal. The crypto coin? The guy who ran the project just vanished. Rug pull. Gone. I looked at my account balance one morning, the coffee still hot, and it was a zero. Not just a little bit of money, but months of saving, just gone. It was a total gut punch.
I spent maybe two weeks just stewing in it. I couldn’t sleep. My wife was looking at me like I was insane, and honestly, she wasn’t wrong. I felt like I was drowning, trying to keep up with the mortgage and the bills when I knew I’d just thrown away our safety net chasing some fantasy.
I realized I needed to stop listening to random people and find something real. Not a strategy, but a system.
Building The New System: Boring is Better
So, I started from the absolute bottom. This wasn’t some mystical investment strategy; this was just boring, painful arithmetic.
- I grabbed a spreadsheet. I tracked every dollar. Every single one. Coffee, gas, groceries. I hadn’t done that since college, and it was embarrassing how much money was just disappearing.
- I eliminated the noise. I deleted the trading apps. I blocked the Telegram groups. I stopped watching the finance gurus on YouTube. All of it. Total radio silence. I had to quit the junk food of the financial world.
- I Automated Everything. Once I saw what I was spending, I set up automatic transfers. Every payday, without fail, a fixed amount went straight into a boring, diversified fund—a simple index tracker. No checking the price first. No waiting for a dip. Just auto-buy.
This process of just setting it and forgetting it felt ridiculously slow at first. It didn’t have the excitement of chasing a 10x return, but I was sleeping through the night again. I wasn’t waking up in a sweat every time the market hiccupped.
The Unwelcome Call Back
The funny thing is, once I started doing the boring stuff, people noticed. A few months later, the old crew that I used to talk junk tokens with tried to reel me back in. They’d found a “new coin,” a “new sure thing.” They were calling, texting, trying to get me back in the chat. The market was bouncing back a bit, and they figured I’d want to recoup my losses the “fast” way.
One guy, who I used to trade ideas with, called me out of the blue. He talked for twenty minutes about some new project. I just let him ramble. When he finished, I said, “Nah, I’m good. My money just automatically buys a slice of the whole world now. No more late nights.”
I could practically hear the disappointment through the phone. They needed validation; they needed others to share the risk with. That day, I blocked his number and deleted the last of those old contacts. I didn’t need their permission or their risky “best strategy” anymore.
What I learned wasn’t some secret formula. It was that the best investment strategy is the one that lets you live your life without constantly staring at a screen. It’s boring. It’s stable. And it actually works. The money isn’t doubling in a month, sure, but it’s growing steadily, quietly, and most importantly, it’s still there.
