1st February

Portfolio: £205,931.84

So that was January, and boy was it shit. The less said about it the better, so onto better news.

Quite a big moment for me yesterday in my crypto journey. Not only was I able to pay off my original investment with my crypto earnings I was able to pay off two other credit cards at the same time. The main reason I came into this was to pay off my debts, but I never expected things to work out to the point where I would be able to scale up my ambitions as much as I have been. That’s also something else that has driven me on to scale up my ambitions – my eldest was diagnosed with autism two years ago and can’t go to school for various reasons, and so I’m worried about his potential to hold down a job in the future and live a normal life. Therefore if I can give him a headstart by reducing the financial pressure on him then I’m going to do whatever I can do achieve that. I took a risk by investing from a credit card, but I had a strong feeling I could make it work and I have to the point where from now on everything is profit and I’ve cleared debts much quicker than I ever could have done without crypto and the community who have helped me learn as I’ve gone on. I still have a loan and my student debts to pay off, which I hope to do after the next bull-run.

The withdrawal of my funds has also got me thinking more about tax. I found a really useful website, https://cryptotax.uk/guide/, which broke down the current (outdated) guidelines. Long story short, I will be charged capital gains tax on any profits made over £11,300 which is handy, but what’s also good is that I can transfer the same amount to my wife, meaning a combined £22,600 tax free. By all account there will be huge clamping down next year so we’ll have to see how that shakes out (hopefully Brexit will delay them!), but I intend to make the most of the next bull run and use every penny of that. My mining is charged at income tax rates so that’s straight forward, as are the dividend from passive income. As tempting as it is to try and avoid tax, if you’re going to use crypto funds in the real world to any great extent then you run the risk of being found out due to the disparity between your regular income and this extra income/spending. HMRC have had a ‘Connect’ computer system in place whose job it is to track these things automatically, so for the kinds of gains I want to make it doesn’t make sense to try to cheat the system and have the tax man looking over my shoulder!

In terms of the market, nothing’s happening still, hence the research, although I did finally take the plunge and buy some PPT. I was waiting for it to dip but it’s a stubborn bugger and the Beta is out soon which will shoot the price up. I was hoping to flip some Elastos from the ICO to buy more but the opening price on Huobi wasn’t worth it so I left it for a bigger exchange down the line (nudges Binance). I might but a lowball offer in on PPT and see if anyone bites. I have very high hopes for this long term – if this takes off then there is the chance for this to be my primary source of income years down the line.

Today’s lesson: The taxman, he comin’