I remember the relief of signing the settlement papers — the calls stopped, and I finally had certainty. I owed $24,664.40 and settled for $8,920, paying $518.45/month into escrow for 37 months (~$19,198 total). Debt gone, peace bought — but no assets gained.

Then I had a what-if moment.

If I had DCA’d $518.45/month into Bitcoin from Nov 2022–Nov 2025, I’d have put in ~$19,182 and accumulated ~0.74 BTC (avg buy ~$25,855). At today’s price, that’s ≈$82,780 — an unrealized gain of ≈$63,600. Enough for a car, truck, or even a solid house down payment. And this is just an average, and not mathing in month spot check, so It's probably off, but still conveys my example.

Debt relief has real value, but once I ran the math, I realized the group that “helped” me made about $10K off me. That’s close to just paying the settlement amount directly, except they effectively charged me ~22% credit card fees.

I can’t change the past, but I can redirect the lesson: once my final payment is done in Nov, I’ll take that same $518/month and put it into Bitcoin. Playing it safe bought me certainty, but it also cost me big. Over time, Bitcoin’s highs and lows have always trended upward.

Lesson: quantify the cost of certainty. Sometimes “playing it safe” costs more than you think.

(Clarification: I used an LLM to help summarize and run the numbers, then edited it into my own style. Tools like Duck.ai and Warp Terminal are pretty great tools for this.)

nostr:nprofile1qythwumn8ghj7ct5d3shxtnwdaehgu3wd3skuep0qyt8wumn8ghj7etyv4hzumn0wd68ytnvv9hxgtcqyr4cs2ctkevm7u3r2qs2pwyycjnas9lq4uusxu2hx6c5vxytr5yxsyg3c9t your welcome to put this in your podcast as a thought experiment. I think that might help some people realize the value of an asset like bitcoin.