Long-term readers know that when we renovated our house last year I had the garage wired for electric car chargers. Well, my old Sequoia finally broke down (RIP) so we bit the bullet and got one. It is super fun to drive and the acceleration is unreal. The need came up all of a sudden at kind of a bad time for us cash flow wise (big tax payments coming), so we had to get a little bit creative.
The first thing we considered was just taking out a loan from the whole life policy we bought as part of our estate planning process we're doing this year. We're real believers in banking on ourselves but we just didn't have enough cash value in there to cover the entire price of a Dual Motor Model S with Autopilot, the model I wanted. So we had to get a little creative.
This was all going on at the same time as all the excitement with my last post on Bitcoin. I figured all the HODL (hold on for dear life) zealots would keep a floor under the price of a Bitcoin so I opened up a RobinHood account (super easy to buy and sell options and cryptocurrency) and bought a couple of Bitcoins (and a little $Doge just for fun) at a slight dip a few weeks ago. Sure enough, BTC came roaring back (and Dogecoin really took off, should have bought more of that).
Then the whole Wall Street Bets thing hit the news. It was sure fun to watch, but by the time GME hit $300/share (remember it was trading at $3/share a year ago) and AMC started pushing $20 a share it became pretty obvious how this was all going to end. I didn't know exactly when it would end, but I knew how it would end. So I decided to short them both.
Unfortunately, it turns out that you can't short stocks at RobinHood. I did buy a few puts on those two stocks there but had to go back to Vanguard to actually short them. My new Vanguard margin account was approved surprisingly quickly. I wanted to do the same with Ethereum while the Redditors were pumping it, but the only way I could figure out to do it was to short the ETF Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETH), so I did that.
The license plate is a nice touch, right?
While I was waiting for GME, AMC, and ETH to drop in value, I thought it would be pretty cool to actually pay for my new Tesla with Tesla stock. Elon Musk was in the news almost every day (don't think I didn't appreciate him buying $1.5 Billion in BTC at just the right time for me) so I figured Tesla wasn't going to crash any time soon. Besides, I had this new margin account. So not only did I buy a hundred shares of Tesla, but I bought it at 50% margin!
Well, a few weeks later GME, AMC, and ETH were all down, BTC, DOGE, and Tesla were all up and it was time to get that Tesla. I cashed it all out. Thankfully I had a lot of tax loss harvesting losses I had carried over from the pandemic-related crash so there were no capital gains taxes to pay and we went down to the local Tesla dealership to order one. It turns out some other guy wanted out of his order because he had lost a lot of money in some hedge fund debacle, so I was able to assume his order. In less than a week, my new Tesla S was carrying me and my snowboard through a storm to ride 12 inches of fresh powder!
Some of my neighbors are giving me a bit of a hard time about it, but I usually just ask them why they hate the planet so much and they back off. Honestly though, I didn't buy it for the environment. I just really admire the company, the technology, its founder, and frankly, I'm a car guy. So a lot of it is just a consumption item for me. I bought it because it's fun to drive and because I could afford it. I hope you get the chance to drive one too.
What do you think? Do you drive a Tesla? Why or why not? (i.e. What do you love about it or why do you hate dolphins so much?) Did you short GME or AMC when it was obvious to do so? What have you done with your Bitcoin profits this year? How are you “celebrating” April 1st? Comment below!
Well played.
april fools?
Over here on the east coast in NJ we hate the environment- bought a mclaren 570s!
Sadly a couple of years ago I really did have 2 whole life policies where the cost basis, not the cash value, could have bought a Tesla . . .
I guess I’m old fashioned… I just took out a second mortgage to get mine!
Hahaha good one, had me fooled for a second, and so confused…until I looked at the date. Gonna blame it on the fact that I’m 2 hours from the end of my overnight shift.
At the end of my over night trauma shift- was so confused… and honestly felt slightly betrayed. Relieved to realize it was an April fools joke haha!
Same !
Good to see you finally are thinking like a Rich American Doctor.
That is exactly what my children would say! They are tired of me acting like a poor doctor. I can’t wait to share it with my Wall Street son , So he can tell me “this is the way it’s done”
In all seriousness, how do people think all that power is going to be generated if we all transition to electric cars? Turbines and solar??
For every 10k tesla3 miles driven per year, u need about 7 solar panels. So instead of a 100k car, u could get a tesla3 and enough panels for 30k/yr.
Man, I wish I had that kind of solar panel. As I understand it the Tesla 3 gets about 3-4 miles/kWh, so the 7 panels in your example are producing something like 30 kWh/month every month. I live in GA and have some shading from trees, but the panels in my 5 year old array produce 6-12 kWh/month in the winter and 15-20 kWh/month in the summer.
I support the expansion of solar but anyone who is considering panels for their home should realize that the real world application seldom lives up to the projections.
Had me scratching my head there for a second until I remembered the date! Also, I never figured you for a guy that would buy a red car haha
I have to admit this was pretty funny.
You had me until Whole Life
Agreed. I thought Tesla, not his style I thought but OK. Then I saw whole life and remembered.
Same here!! 😂
Well, now I’m curious…
Does that Car/License Plate combo actually exist? Or is it Photo-shopped?
100% photoshopped by a certain 16 y/o daughter of WCIs with rudimentary photoshop skills. 😉
Looks much more than “rudimentary.” Good job!
Well written. Happy April Fools!
I actually used this post to convince my wife to let me get a Tesla, in a couple years…. It worked until we remembered the date
Cute! April Fool’s!
My god I almost had a heart attack. I read this three times waiting to see some disclaimer about this being featured on The Onion (or Gomer Blog) or this being a guest poster or something…I nearly lost it wondering what the hell happened to Dr. Dahle until I realized it was 4/1. Well played.
For anyone not too familiar with the $GME stock — it is shorted to absolute oblivion and sometime in the next 1-3 months the hedge funds that shorted it to death are going to pay and there will be a short squeeze (price will skyrocket to tens to hundreds of thousands depending on what you read/believe). IF you’re one of those curmudgeons that are too lazy to read the reasoning and math behind that and don’t believe there will be a short squeeze – GME is still undervalued as it is right now. They’ve replaced most of their old board with prior Chewy and Amazon hires over the past few weeks and as a stock alone will be worth several hundred if not $1-2k in the coming year(s). If you think that’s crazy, go look at the price of Amazon. Anyway, not recommending people buy individual stocks, but getting tired of the lazy idiots shitting all over GME because of its association with Reddit despite them knowing NOTHING about the stock and getting all their info from the morons/crooks like Cramer or Motley Fool.
Is this Dr Dahlgren?
You totally got me. But I did get chest pains and palpitations until the comments clued me in.
LOL from the East Cost… figured it out at “Whole Life Policy”… nice one Jim 😀
Guess I have to rewrite my financial plan to include btc, tsla, timing the market. Also have to switch out my term life insurance to whole life. Thanks for all you do WCI! 🙌
Although a post like this is only appropriate on 4/1 on the website, this seems pretty on point for your typical WCI Facebook post.
I get it. And I have quarterly lectures/finance talks with my residents where I teach them the basics, reference your philosophy, Bogleheads, Bernstein etc and never mention individual stocks. I’ve bought multiple copies of your book to give out to them. I appreciate that foundation which I happened upon in about 2010 as a resident and needed to get my financial life in order (from a financial baseline of zero knowledge, and orders of magnitude less than zero dollars of net worth). However my individual investing strategy has diverged over the years. I learned early that with inexperience any money I invested in individual companies underperformed the same money in an index fund. We agree there. And I understand that statistically this will remain true for the majority. However, I love thinking as an investor and putting capital into companies I believe in, and specifically companies that I feel are shaping a very exciting future for our world. I have pulled away from WCI (especially the FB group) because of this. Tesla (and now crypto maybe) was serving as the philosophical dividing line between the docs who drive a $200 rusted out pickup truck for their first 24 years of practice and those that are day trading penny stocks, as if there is no middle ground. There is this idea that if you own a tesla, or gasp a share of TSLA that somehow you are fundamentally flawed or at least reckless. I do not own a Tesla. I own TSLA shares that now sit at about 4% of my non-retirement investments (my main retirement accounts are in index funds – but my roth IRA has some individual holdings – blasphemy). Of course, that is after about 3000% growth. Also, I have a crypto position of 1% of my total investment portfolio – I know, I’m out of control. I love spending time reading, learning, looking at earnings reports – and it takes that commitment to make managing your own portfolio of individual stocks worth it (currently around 150 for me, with about 40 doing the heavy lifting). I’ve never “traded”, I don’t use margin, I don’t buy options. I almost never sell except for rare circumstances. I invest in companies that I believe will win in the long term. I love red days, weeks, months and I’ve been through a lot of them – buying all the way. Doing so has now made my taxable accounts larger than my retirement accounts – mainly because they are significantly out-pacing S&P, total stock market etc. No, not just since last March. It’s been years. My saving/Investing rate averages 40%, and was 52% in 2020. So I’m on your side with a lot of things including the psychology of money. I only buy bikes and stocks. Sorry for a super long post. It is in response to your post – which, by the way, I found clever and funny. In fact, my wife thinks that sarcasm is the only emotion I’m capable of – so I’m on board with the tongue in cheek-ness of your post. But it also exposes the ideology that there is only one right way which has caused me drift from WCI. I sleep well at night knowing that doing it the “wrong”way has drastically changed my timeline to FI. I also know it’s your blog, so I should shut up and mind my own business. I also know that the FB group, like most of social media, has grown it’s own brain. But I retort respectfully and just wish to share my own contrasting viewpoint.
You’re using 5% of your investments on Tesla Bitcoin etc. most here including WCI don’t have a problem with that. I’m pretty sure I’ve read Jim say you can use up to 5-10% of your money as play money if you need to satisfy that itch. It’s the people pushing putting more than that or all of your money in it that diverges from wci principles.
Actually less – because TSLA is 4% weight of my individual stocks only. 401/403/457 excluded and all in funds. In fact no Individual company holds more than 6% of my non retirement portfolio and the ones up in the 3-6% range have grown from my usual allotment of <0.1-0.3%. And I get that I’m not the target here. Just some pent up frustration in me left over from when I was in the FB group was re-awakened. I think that WCI is a priceless asset to the masses.
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I’m not going to tell you what you are doing wrong. Save the article and the
photo for 2026. Look back and you will know for yourself.
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LOL, I was really mad at your for mentioning whole life insurance until I realized this was a joke.
We are holding out for the VW electric car in 2023
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Sadly, I know many doctors who your post describes perfectly on March 31st.