Almost every article about dollar-cost averaging into crypto is written by someone who is either selling something or showing you a chart that goes up. This one is neither. It's my own plan, the real numbers, and the part nobody publishes: I'm down about 14%.
I live in Vietnam, so I think in dong. Every month, on payday, the same three transfers go out — no decisions, no timing, no checking the price first.
| Coin | Per month (VND) | ≈ USD | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| BTC | 1,650,000 | ≈ $65 | 55% |
| ETH | 1,050,000 | ≈ $41 | 35% |
| SOL | 300,000 | ≈ $12 | 10% |
| Total | 3,000,000 | ≈ $118 | 100% |
Ten months at 3,000,000 VND is about 30,000,000 VND — roughly $1,180 at current rates. Small money. That's the point: it's an amount I can keep sending without thinking about it.
I want to be honest here, because this is where most articles invent a thesis after the fact. I didn't have one. I used an AI to help me reason through a split, and landed on: most of it in the oldest and largest asset, a solid chunk in the second, and a small slice in something with more upside and more risk. Then I stopped optimising it. The specific ratio matters far less than the fact that it hasn't changed in ten months.
There's no clean "buy crypto with VND" button where I live, so the flow is:
On P2P there's no obvious fee line — the cost is hidden in the rate each seller offers, so it pays to compare a few before you accept one. I don't track that cost to the decimal, which is itself a small confession: the true cost of my plan is slightly worse than the numbers above.
Everything sits on the exchange. I haven't moved it to a hardware wallet.
Ten months in, my roughly $1,180 is worth around $1,015 — an unrealized loss of about $165. If I'd left it in the bank I'd have more money today. That's just true.
It doesn't change anything, because a monthly buy plan only does its job over years, and a drawdown is when it's actually buying more coins per dollar. But I'm not going to pretend it feels like nothing. Watching a number you deposited go red is the part of DCA nobody's tutorial prepares you for, and it's the exact moment most people quit.
I could never save money. Not "I saved less than I wanted" — I mean savings accounts never worked for me. Money arrived, money left.
With this, somehow, it sticks. Ten months without missing one. I still don't fully understand why. My best guess is that a savings account felt like money sitting still, doing nothing, always available to spend — while buying an asset on a schedule feels like it's going somewhere, and it's just annoying enough to undo that I don't.
I'll add the uncomfortable caveat myself: that feeling isn't automatically a good thing. The same psychology that keeps me consistent could keep someone consistent into something far riskier. What made it work for me is that the amount is small enough to be boring, and the schedule removes every decision.
Single-coin calculators couldn't show me what my whole stack was doing, so I built the Multi-Coin DCA Planner — you enter each coin, its monthly amount and an expected return, and it projects the combined and per-coin value. It's free, runs entirely in your browser, and the source is public so you can check the maths.
One warning about it, and about every projection tool: the "expected return" is a number you invent. Mine has been negative for ten months. Use the planner to compare scenarios, not to predict the future.
I'll update this page as the record continues — including if it gets worse.