“How did you lost 1 million dollars?”
Probably the most asked question by far while I was live streaming. And I answer that question with one word: ‘Bitcoin’ And normally no further questions follow.
I made 1 million dollars at my age 30.
Isn’t it interesting that while many people are interested in how I lost all that money, only very few people ask how I was able to gather that money.
So let’s start from there. How I started making money and why.
A kid became obsessed with money.
My parents aren’t rich. But most of my childhood friends’ parents were so rich. For one reason or another, I spent most of my adolescence in a city where many of Korea’s middle and upper classes were concentrated.
It’s the second largest city in South Korea. The name is Busan that appeared in the Korean zombie movie “Train to Busan”.
When I was younger, I would visit friends’ houses and be amazed at how big they were. So I remember being ashamed to invite friends to my relatively shabby and small house.
Having been close to such friends since I was young, I experienced indirectly how great the power of money is. Some related episodes will be covered in another posts later.
Because of such surroundings, I have had the idea that I have to make a lot of money since I was a child.
I went to Australia
I graduated from university in Australia, and it was thanks to my parents who supported me a lot despite my poor family circumstances.
Why I chose Australia, and the story of life in Australia can be long(and good?), so I will cover it in another post.
A year before graduating from university, I was under tremendous stress. Because I was an international student, the tuition was very expensive, and if I failed to meet the standard score in many tests during the semester, I could be fired from school without a chance to try again.
So, with one year left before graduation, I sincerely thought about quitting school. I figured I wouldn’t even need the graduation certificate anyway. Because I had the confidence that I could do anything on my own without getting a job at a company.
But, of course, my parents didn’t think so. My parents told me to just graduate. And they said that they wouldn’t care if I got a job or started my own business as long as I graduated.
I wanted to quit school right away, but my parents wanted me to graduate, so I had no choice but to continue attending school. From then on, I started developing a jewelry retail site.
Money is great.
Soon after launching the jewelry site and starting marketing, orders started pouring in.
As sales started coming in between $2,000 and $3,000 every day, I was able to have a business I never thought of before I even graduated.
I didn’t have rich parents, but I was able to touch a lot of money on my own at a relatively young age.
I did a lot of stupid things with that much money. I bought a lot of things I wanted to buy, went to luxury restaurants and traveled a lot, so I was able to accumulate a lot of new experiences and broaden my knowledge.
I was approaching the rich man I had been dreaming of so much, and I started to get more and more greedy, so I started investing in stocks.
Most of the stocks I invested in were jackpots, and I poured all the proceeds into Bitcoin. With amazing timing, Bitcoin also hit the jackpot, and I was able to call my assets 1 million in about 5 years after I started business & investing.
Now that I think about it, I was just really lucky. But the problem was that at the time I didn’t think it was luck and I was under the illusion that I had a good sense of reading and analyzing charts.
And I lost them all.
I became more and more greedy as the money in my account increased.
I still remember the moment I realized that I have lost almost all my life savings which was about 1 million US dollars. It happened slowly over about two weeks.
I was all by myself in my workroom, feeling sweaty and shaky. It was too late to go back.
It was Bitcoin margin trading. I was so stupid and greedy to put all my money on 30x leverage. Yes. It was all-in.
At that time, I struggled desperately, as there were a foolproof strategy to discover. In reality, all I could do was sit in front of the monitor all day, staring blankly at the charts or drawing meaningless lines on them, indulging in the delusion that things would turn out well.
Even then, I had no idea that it would completely change my life. At that time, I was 32 years old.