It's a simple question. Every Bitcoin (BTC 0.99%) investor must have given it at least a passing thought. Can this newfangled digital currency make me enough money to let me clock out for early retirement?
Unfortunately, I can't share a simple yes-or-no answer with you. In reality, the correct answer in your specific situation must lie somewhere between "I don't know" and "it depends."
However, we can take a look at some of the most important factors that can lead to a more concrete solution for your personal situation. Let's put our thinking caps on.
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1. Let's set a reasonable target
The standard retirement age for Americans is between 65 and 67 years, depending on the year you were born. That sliding scale determines when you can start collecting full benefits from Social Security, but you can also ask for those checks a few years early -- at a reduced rate. If you were born in 1960 or later, you could enter retirement as early as the age of 62, but then you'd have to reduce your Social Security payouts by 30%.
So the real question we're asking here is, will bitcoin help me cover up that gaping 30% hole in my Social Security benefits so I can take a comfortable retirement five years early?
2. Time is your best friend
The younger you are, the more you can do to secure a comfortable retirement. Let me show you the power of compound returns on your investment over long periods. You can play along at home with a handy Foolish calculator. Below, I'll use the one called "What could my savings grow to?"
Imagine you started from zero, saving $100 per month for your retirement in a simple investment account at an average annual return of 8%. We'll leave the tax bracket at the standard level of 22%. The results will be modest at first, speeding up dramatically later on. After the first 10 years, you will have $16,995 in your retirement savings account. After 20 years, the total value should surge to $48,125. And if you keep this up for 30 years, you'll have $105,151 in your pocket.
That's not too shabby for a total 30-year investment of $36,000. The effective return on your invested cash lands at 42% after one decade, 100% ten years later, and 192% at the three-decade mark.
Mind you, the compound average growth rate (CAGR) stays the same at 3.54%. The money-magic magic lies in putting your cash to work for a long time, allowing further gains on top of the investment returns you already earned. This effect really adds up over time.
So if you're just a decade away from that early retirement age you wanted, you'll have to earn much greater annual profits from your investments than someone who started saving in their 20s. Sorry, but I don't make the rules. It's just mathematics.
3. Bitcoin might help
There's a slight problem with the idea of using Bitcoin to patch a 30% deficit in your retirement savings. Diversification is an important and helpful investment tool, and it's not particularly healthy to allocate 30% of your retirement portfolio to a single asset. The exception to this rule would be when you own inherently diverse assets such as an S&P 500 index fund. Bitcoin doesn't fit that description.
However, a more reasonable Bitcoin allocation could presumably outgrow your other investments and reach a 30% portfolio share the hard way -- by delivering superior investment returns over the years.
How hard would that be? Again, it depends on how much time you have.
So let's say we have a $100,000 portfolio to manage. You bought $5,000 of Bitcoin, which works out to roughly 0.3 digital coins at current prices. The rest is invested in a low-risk mix of stocks, delivering a modest but rock-steady return of 8% per year regardless of market conditions. How high must Bitcoin's annual CAGR be if you need it to account for 30% of the total portfolio after a certain number of years?
We're not adding any new money to this hypothetical investment account. Tax rates don't matter either, since they apply equally to both Bitcoin and non-Bitcoin investments (assuming that regulations for cryptocurrency taxation treat Bitcoin like a stock several decades from now). I have a solution, but it only works if we assume a spherical cow.
- If you have 40 years to work with, you could work with an annual return of 13.9% on your Bitcoin investment.
- To get there in 30 years, you'll need a Bitcoin CAGR of roughly 16%.
- All you have is two decades? Okay, then you'll need an annual Bitcoin return of 20%.
- And when you really want to retire at 62, but you already celebrated your 52nd birthday, Bitcoin would have to do some heavy lifting. Here, the required annual return would rise to 33.5%.
4. There are no guarantees
Can it be done? Oh, sure -- Bitcoin has posted average annual growth rates far above 30% over the years. If you bought a Bitcoin for $0.09 way back in 2010 and held it to today's price of roughly $16,635, that's a mind-blowing CAGR of 154%.
But the largest and oldest cryptocurrency is also notoriously volatile. Single-year returns along the way have varied from 5,571% in 2014 to a 72% loss in 2019. Bitcoin has taken a 65% haircut in 2022, underscoring the risky side of this digital coin.
So it is entirely conceivable that you could squeeze an average annual return of 33.5% out of your originally modest Bitcoin allocation, but you sure shouldn't bet the farm on it. The good years can be stellar but the bad years could also do serious damage to your retirement plans.
Will Bitcoin let me retire early?
In the end, the short answer is that you should not trust Bitcoin alone to fill a 30% hole in your Social Security payouts. Furthermore, Bitcoin doesn't pay dividends and you can't earn percentage-based rewards for staking it, as you can with alternative cryptos such as Ethereum (ETH 0.90%) and Cardano (ADA -0.53%). On the other hand, the staking-capable cryptos tend to carry even more unstable price tags than Bitcoin. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
So you can include a small helping of Bitcoin in your retirement portfolio, but results may vary wildly from one year to the next. You should see your Bitcoin returns (and other crypto investments) as a speculative bonus on top of your fundamental retirement savings strategy. And if you really want to retire early, you'll need to make up the difference in Social Security payments by socking away a few extra dollars in savings along the way. Again, let time work its magic on your investable assets.
