What's Next? 2023 Predictions You Didn't Ask For
(Originally published January 16, 2023)
2022 has come to a close. Assets were down. Almost across the board. The economy was flying for the first half of the year. It then started a rapid slowdown. The Federal Reserve raised rates. Then, they did it again. This was repeated over and over again.
I previously did a post about the year in review. I'll be honest, January has been a pretty difficult month. Things were busy in December, my budgeting suffered, and January has mostly just been an effort to catch up. In fact, I have put any and all new investing on hold to start 2023, which pains me to say, but is completely necessary to ensure no serious setbacks in my overall plans. The year, as a result, will be starting on a slow note, but that doesn't mean the whole year will have to be this way. I look forward to further work on so many awesome opportunities once I have things more normalized.
So what's first? Well, for one thing, I got behind on my credit card debt. I hate admitting that. I've been so good about it for 2+ years. Always paying everything off at the end of each month. Now I finally have a balance that I can't pay, and that's the first thing that needs to be taken care of. It's been a focused effort and I hope to only need the month of January to resolve this problem.
After that, I need to rebuild my emergency savings. I feel comfortable funding all the things that I do because of this emergency savings buffer. It is crucially important for all people to maintain some type of liquid cash account to ensure that they can cover unexpected expenses in life. Some unexpected tax issues and unplanned expenses caused my savings to diminish. On one hand, I'm grateful that the money was there to take care of the expenses when they arose. However, the inability to do this again in the future as of this very moment must be fixed. This is the second priority once the credit cards are caught up.
I'm almost embarrassed this happened because I know that these things are Personal Finance 101 and any good financial planner would tell you that these are the things to start with and immediately take care of when trying to right your finances. This is why I called a complete audible on my finances and decided to halt all investing. There's no replacement for fundamentals and trying to tell yourself that a good investment can fix these errors down the road someday is just not fiscally responsible to yourself.
So, once I get these things taken care of, what are my focuses for 2023? What do I think will provide the best opportunities?
This is solely me speaking my own opinions. I am just a guy who blogs on his website. I by no means intend for anyone to follow my advice or use this as a definitive guide.
I think that 2023 will be a difficult year to invest. There is not going to be an ease up on the economy until things stabilize. Every single bank last week in their earnings report listed their outlook for a mild recession in 2023. Things are not just going to turn around on a dime. I expect the year to continue to be choppy and difficult. In fact, I have cash in my stock portfolio for the first time basically ever. I intend to be patient with this. I want to increase my dividend income this year and make that a focus of my investing again.
In 2021, I focused a lot of attention in publicly traded stocks. Investments started in 2020 and a lot of that was also in public stocks. 2022 was likely the first year that the majority of my investments did not go into publicly traded stocks in my brokerage account ($4,225 in brokerage, $6,927.64 between crypto & NFTs). I would anticipate that that heavily weighted investing into crypto and NFTs would not continue in 2023; however, I'd be lying if I said I didn't think there were a lot of opportunities in the space while prices to purchase/buy in are cheap.
One area that I'd like to move into further in 2023 is real estate. I personally think that 2023, as with most asset classes, will be a bad year for real estate as the huge price hike we've seen across all real estate markets slowly comes down as the year continues. I believe that this year will end up being a good longer term opportunity to put money into both public and private REITs, which can help create cash flow for future investments down the road.
I'm also always interested in exploring new asset classes and investment opportunities. I look forward to continuing to learn this year. Outside of investing, my biggest focuses for this year are to continue to grow my irl work, as well as my work here in the web3 space. I believe that the best is yet to come despite some serious headwinds and problems over the first year, but honestly it took this type of market reversal to get my interest and efforts to begin with. I don't enjoy investing at all time highs, just like most people, so I waited for a good portion of the air to come out of the tires before beginning to explore web3.
I want to continue to work on depressivehacks.com and grow what this entity has to offer. I love providing random updates of things that peak my interest and having somewhere to share that and express that with others. I truthfully just want to be able to afford to try a bunch of random ass shit and review it or post it or whatever. I just invested in a solid upgrade for my work station at home and that has me excited for my next series of irl upgrades. Hopefully that also comes in 2023. I also am excited to continue to work on Birdie Golf and partner with more people and projects in the space. Even if I can't be an investor all the time, I can still contribute despite my personal finance situation and add value.
I thank you all for your readership and following along with this journey. I look forward to further blog posts in 2023 and seeing where this goes all the way to the end of the year for another summary. I can only imagine what is in store given where I went in 2022...