# Doing the Math By [Michael Crupto](https://paragraph.com/@michaelcrupto) · 2022-05-26 --- With the bear market clearly in full force, and the crypto naysayers screaming “told you it was all a scam!!!” I’ve been taking stock of my accounts and allowing the deep-seeded fear and anxiety to percolate a touch. Some say it’s dumb to allow these feelings to bubble up, but I think they’re an important part of the process of healthy investing to avoid falling for the plethora of scams out there. Let me start by acknowledging that I’m terrible with money, haha. You’d think growing up poor would have made me more keen to always be conscious of exactly how much money I have at every moment of my life, but I adopted the exact opposite mindset growing up because of my mother. When I was two, my mom snuck (cringe away Brits) away with me when my dad went out looking for a job. In her defense, he had written off being a father and a husband months earlier and my mom realized raising me was up to her, so she packed a bag and left. She had a high school education and and a few college credits and no job. She was a hippy and we had even spent some time in ashrams along the way. She made all the right decisions from that point on though, constantly bettering herself with degrees and mental health work, but things were never easy, and the one thing she was never able to manage to stop (till I was older and out of the house) was freaking the fuck out when money got tight. I grew up watching her have meltdowns wondering how bills were going to get paid, or if we’d have enough money that month to eat. Watching this, and noticing how no matter how much she freaked out, things always had a way of working out, I adopted this weird zen mindset of just allowing things to unfold, accepting that things would work out, or they wouldn’t, and no amount of fear or anxiety would change the outcome. And that’s where I am now. If you put a gun to my head and asked me how much fiat I’ve put into crypto, I couldn’t tell you. I have a general sense, but I could be off by thousands for all I know. I’m the guy that remembered three days after the Terra meltdown that I had funds in a Curve UST pool from my SDIRA fund (of which I’ve now officially lost over 70% of to date). I’ve spread myself too thin, investing in everything under the sun and every shiny NFT out there to have any sense of my net-worth or whether it’s in the black or not. I look back at all those maxis of the Bitcoin and other persuasions and chuckle at their vehemence that it’s smarter to pick one crypto and go all in to make life easier. And maybe it is, until that one crypto becomes like LUNA, or Cardano , or Nano (sorry nano fam), or the long list of cryptos that have punched their way into the top ten only to be forcibly pummeled back down the ranks into oblivion. So here I am, sifting through my endless Cosmos staked tokens, my locked HEX and BAO, my painfully smaller stack of USDC after losing tons of it to those damn UST Curve pools, and I’m wondering if I’m better off today than I was 5 years ago when I first entered the crypto space. My mental math tells me I’m technically up if I include scammy Richard Heart’s locked away HEX, and I might even be up without it, but if I am…oh man is it just barely. I’m also not including any of my NFTs because at this point I haven’t picked a single winner (financially) so I’m living life assuming they’re all going to be worthless (as I should since I bought most of them to support artists and projects). There’s the CT joke about the friends made along the way, and I can’t help but chuckle because it has been a pretty wild ride and even though I’ve never met 99% of you IRL, I look back at some of your tweets and can’t help but want to have a beer with you, chatting about the past scams we survived. So am I better off? Well, I’m still alive, and I still have some funds left, and there’s a decent chance we’re close to a bottom, so…sure? What about you? Either way, maybe don’t be like me and choose to be better with your money. Or don’t, and just enjoy the journey, making sure you don’t invest more than you can afford losing. Stay safe, fam, \-- Michael Crupto --- *Originally published on [Michael Crupto](https://paragraph.com/@michaelcrupto/doing-the-math)*