If you want to retire in cryptocurrency, the Internet Computer Protocol is, in my opinion, the absolute best crypto to get into. I was talking with a viewer live who asked me, "Jerry, I am helping my parents with their crypto investments to put them in a position to retire." Right now, the strategy they were using was to keep everything liquid and then try to exit at the top and rebuy at the bottom. If you want to retire with ICP, I think that is exactly the wrong strategy to use. None of this is financial advice — it is just how I see it after years of doing this myself.
Locking up forever is my ideal retirement strategy
The ideal strategy, if you want to retire, is to lock up forever at least 80%, and perhaps keep 20% if you want to try and time an exit at the top. But the ideal scenario for retirement is to get on the Internet Computer Protocol governance system. The way it works is that if you lock your ICP up for eight years, you can get around 15% APR right now. If you just leave it locked, it will be pretty stable. And that is based on the principal, which means as the price of ICP goes up, your APR is earning based on that increased value. To me, that is an absolute dream scenario for retirement.
What most people in crypto drastically underestimate is the difficulty of trying to exit at the top and enter back in at the bottom. That, to me, is the exact wrong strategy for retirement in crypto. Locking up, on the other hand, is extremely predictable, peaceful, and easy. If you have got a nest egg right now, for example, you could load up some ICP, lock it up, and right now just start selling the rewards or compounding them. Then, based on the price of ICP, you get more or less US dollars worth of rewards each day. Depending on how many ICP you have, if you get one maturity, you can sell that every day. You need a few thousand ICP right now to get an ICP every single day. I right now get about one and a half ICP every day, indefinitely. That is an absolute dream come true for retirement. If you want to see how I built up to that, I wrote out my ideal ICP accumulation strategy separately.
Trying to enter and exit and do all of this stuff — almost everybody who is telling you to do that is, in my view, giving you bad information.
Why timing the market is bad information — I have lived it
Why is it bad information to try and keep it liquid and get out at the right time? Because I have done that, and you seriously underestimate how relative things are. It might be easy to look at the chart today and think, "Okay, when it hits this price target, I'll sell, and when it hits that price target, I'll buy." But emotionally, you seriously underestimate how hard that is.
I did that with Bitcoin. I dollar-cost-averaged for years into Bitcoin after losing thousands when I started in 2014. I DCA'd for years into Bitcoin, worked up and traded some altcoins, and I had 60 Bitcoin. I was sure I was selling the top at $1,700. Then I watched the price go up to almost $20,000 just a few months later. I felt like an absolute idiot for selling that early.
The worst part, though, is the emotional rollercoaster that goes with that. If you are trying to save for retirement, the last thing you want is an emotional rollercoaster. What you want instead is stability. And if you ever needed your entire nest egg, you could always sell your entire account on IDGeek.
The biggest risk in crypto is self-sabotage
To me, the biggest risk in crypto is self-sabotage. The main way you are going to screw up your opportunity in crypto is to make bad decisions yourself. I had enough money many times in crypto to be a millionaire and literally do nothing — except with Bitcoin and Ethereum, when I had them, you did not get anything for just holding them. Now with Ethereum, if you stake it, you can get a much smaller APR. What you do not want is this emotional rollercoaster.
If you just lock this up indefinitely and you do the calculations, then if you are getting back around 15% a year, you will get your entire principal back in just a few years. You may get that back in fiat within a year or so. There is almost nothing out there that, in my opinion, sets you up for retirement this well. This kind of long-term, boring approach is exactly what I talk through with people inside the Jerry Banfield Family.
What I am personally doing with my ICP
What I am personally doing is keeping about 90% of my ICP locked indefinitely. Then I am keeping about 10% liquid and stockpiling my rewards. If things get crazy at some point, I may sell that small percentage. But what I have noticed is that you want to stay in this for the long term and keep taking that APR.
Even if that APR goes down as more people stake and the overall circulation changes — the voting rewards are about 6.91% of supply, so in a few years it will go down to about 5%, which will bring the APR down — you will get an age bonus if you lock up and leave it there indefinitely. So it will about cancel out. And if a lot more people stake, the supply will be a lot more scarce, which to me means a lot more value. There is no better retirement opportunity I see in crypto than this. If you want the mechanics of how the locking and rewards actually work, I walked through it step by step in my ICP NNS staking tutorial.
Why ICP, and not anything else
This is because of all the other videos I have made where I discuss ICP's technology — there is nothing like it. You can watch all of those in my ICP Crypto playlist. It solves real problems. Cybercrime is a $10 trillion-a-year problem and one of the worst places our economy is getting drained right now, and to me ICP and the technology behind it is the best solution to that very real problem.
ICP has the best platform right now. If you wanted to do a global currency or build real Web3, it is, in my opinion, the best platform — and the only platform for on-chain, blockchain-based AI, which is very important. So this is positioned for 10 or 20 years from now. This is the absolute ideal scenario for retirement, where if I am right with all my research — my hundreds of hours, my 10 years in crypto, looking for which crypto is a true wealth-building crypto and not lies and marketing hype, and which crypto has the biggest team — then if all my other videos about ICP are right, these estimated rewards are an indefinite, life-changing income. And it is easy.
What this looks like in real paychecks
What you want to be able to do if you are trying to retire is just get paychecks every month or every day, depending on how much ICP you have got. I have about 4,000 ICP, and I get something like 1.7 maturity, which can be converted to ICP at about the same ratio, an average of around a hundred percent. That is roughly 1.7 ICP a day between my two accounts, indefinitely.
I am looking at this paying off all the debt I have. Literally all I need to do is sell the rewards, and this is going to pay off all the debt I have. It is going to provide an income indefinitely. I will never need to do anything for money again — which, for somebody who has been in debt ever since I took out that first student loan at 18, is pretty sweet. That is the same reason I now treat ICP as my easiest passive income setup.
If you are planning for retirement, think longer term
I made this because if any of you are planning for retirement or hoping for retirement, you need to think longer term. I have talked to people on my one-on-one calls, and I see those of you following along thinking about retirement like you do not have time. Many of you have told me, "Jerry, I can't lock it up for a long time because I don't have that long." That is ridiculous. If you are trying to retire, you should be taking care of yourself and planning to be here 10, 20, 30 years from now.
Many people do not do that with retirement. Many people die right now or get sick right after they retire. So if you are going to retire, you need to make a plan where you are going to have a purposeful, meaningful life, and that should generally be a long-term plan. If your crypto investing for retirement is purely short-term — "I need to make a hundred X within the next year" — I would tell you to step back and start thinking about why you are here, and why you are having such negative short-term expectations for your life.
If you just want to gamble, go to the casino
If you have such negative short-term expectations for your life, just go to the casino and bet on something. You will know exactly what the odds are, and you will be able to see it instantaneously. Do not go throwing your money around in crypto trying to get a hundred X and then lose it because you lost the key to your wallet, or somebody called you on the phone and pretended to be someone and you gave your recovery phrase to them, or you bought some meme coin and it went to zero. Do not do that. If you just want to gamble, go to the casino, get it over with, and move on with your life.
I do not encourage gambling — I have had a gambling addiction — but I am just saying, if you are thinking so short-term and so hopeless, then just get it over with. Then you will either have your big retirement money, or you can look at spending the rest of your life broke, or you can put your money into ICP and get a paycheck indefinitely. I am telling everybody in my life, and it seems to me a lot of people do not want wealth. They literally want to struggle financially.
Big retirement paychecks can be a trap too
Here is another thing about retirement: in some ways, ICP paying you huge amounts of money could be bad. I see some people who have these big retirement paychecks set up, and they get to be utterly selfish and self-centered, because, hey, they have money. They can just buy whatever they want, pay people to bring their groceries, and they do not need to do anything anymore except go to the doctor and sit in their house and watch TV. Is that the kind of retirement you want? Is that the kind of life you want to have? I am never going to live like that.
ICP will help you, in investing, get to thinking long-term and toward a purposeful life. And if you get so much money with ICP that you do not know what to do with it, then you should be giving back and helping others and having a meaningful life in retirement.
I think I have ranted long enough on this, so I will wrap it up. Thank you for reading. I hope it helps change someone's life. I enjoyed talking about it, and I hope it was good for you.