💸 Why Saving Feels Like a Scam

FIRE BTC Issue #26 - Fiat money broke your future (but bitcoin fixes it)

Most people feel like they’re doing the right things.

Working hard, budgeting carefully, cutting back where they can. Maybe they even follow all the personal finance advice: stash money in a high-yield savings account, max out their 401(k), and invest the leftovers in low-cost index funds.

And yet, despite all this effort, they fall behind. Prices rise faster than paychecks. Savings accounts don’t keep pace with the rising cost of the most important goods and services. And the idea of “getting ahead” feels like something that belonged to a different generation.

For these people, there isn’t a failure of discipline. It’s a failure of the system, the center of which is the money itself.

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📉 The diminishing dollar

The dollar is a melting ice cube. You can’t always see it day to day, but the dollar’s value slowly evaporates, especially when measured against things that are hard to produce.

In 1980, the cost of attending a four-year college was about $10,000 per year (adjusted for inflation). Today, it’s closer to $30,000. Median home prices were under $75,000 back then. Now? Much higher. And it’s not just the big stuff. There’s sticker shock on eggs, insurance, streaming subscriptions, childcare, and your go-to burrito order. Everything creeps up over time, some things faster than others.

Wages also rise, but not nearly as fast, and often not at all relative to the soaring cost of living. Purchasing power erodes. People work more and still feel like they’re falling behind.

Why? Because the dollar is designed to lose value. Central banks expand the money supply, and governments run deficits year after year. New dollars get printed to cover the shortfall, which dilutes the value of the dollars already in circulation.

So even if you’re saving responsibly, your money is leaking value. You’re storing water in a cracked bucket, and the cracks are getting wider.

My colleague at Unchained, Joe Burnett, wrote an excellent piece that goes deep on this issue. I highly encourage you to check it out.

💰 Investing became mandatory

The idea of saving money the old-fashioned way has quietly slipped into irrelevance.

This slow erosion of purchasing power made traditional saving strategies, like savings accounts and CDs, ineffective. But people need a way to save for the future to grow purchasing power, plan for retirement, and provide an inheritance for the next generation. So, investing became a necessity.

But most people don’t want to invest, nor do they have the expertise to do it well. They just want to live below their means, save diligently, and build a nest egg for their future that they can rely on. That used to be a reasonable plan, but it no longer works.

The approach taken by the FIRE movement embraces the reality that you can’t save your way to freedom. You have to expose your money to risk and hope the market rewards you for it. This has worked well in the past, and I still believe there’s value in it, but there’s a better solution.

🧱 Bitcoin provides a better foundation

As a society, we’ve given up control of the very language of value, trusting governments and banks to speak for us. They’ve taken advantage of this position of power to distort that communication mechanism to their own benefit.

These elite institutions are able to quietly drain our savings over time through debasement of the money. It’s a slow, parasitic theft that’s hard to notice in real time. Taking that power back liberates us from the hidden costs of this parasitic system. That’s what bitcoin enables.

Bitcoin gets us back to saving directly in money. A perfectly fixed supply means debasement of your savings is completely eliminated. Bitcoin is designed to solve the root of the problem, not just treat the symptoms.

Since no central authority or privileged few control it, the fixed supply of 21 million BTC is unchangeable. This is at the very foundation of why bitcoin is valuable. No political whims, emergency situations, or backroom deals can debase your savings. No crisis, real or manufactured, can enable printing more.

With bitcoin, you don’t have to chase yield just to preserve wealth. You can save, knowing the value of what you own isn’t quietly decaying in the background. You don’t need an interest rate to provide a yield, because the purchasing power of your savings grows as society produces more. It’s a natural yield from increased productivity across the world economy, the value signal uninterrupted by changes to the measuring stick.

Despite recent volatility, bitcoin’s adoption will continue to grow, while its supply remains fixed. Over time, the monetary premium propping up inferior assets will shift into bitcoin, rewarding those with the foresight to see it coming and position themselves early.

The beautiful thing is that you don’t need to wait for someone else to give you permission to build your estate on this stronger foundation. Bitcoin is sovereign unto itself, offering you a system that honors your time and rewards your work.

If you’re pursuing financial independence, you owe it to yourself to build your savings on solid rock rather than quicksand.

All you have to do is opt in.

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That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading!

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Until next time,

Trey ✌️