Invest $20 a Week in this Asset to Grow Your Wealth

Not that I want to be a burger-flipper at 60 years old… but honestly, I’m kinda jealous of the burgeristas over at Steak ‘n Shake.

First, an aside: I had my very first Steak ‘n Shake burger in the early 1980s, while visiting my dad and stepmom in Creve Coeur, Missouri, a suburb west of St. Louis. Great burgers. Great shoestring fries.

But the food’s not what has me all Kermit the Frog (green with jealousy).

It’s bitcoin. 

We’ve not visited the cryptosphere in well over a minute, so today we rectify that because lots of news is happening there—starting with Steak ‘n Shake.

Last year, back in May, the burger chain announced it would begin accepting bitcoin as payment.

As one might expect when it comes to the love-it/hate-it views on bitcoin, lots of detractors called the scheme a joke when Steak ‘n Shake announced the plan. Over on Reddit, never the most level-headed source of critical thinking, one post noted that “there is literally 0 demand, even from the most hardcore bitcoin maxis, to be able to pay in bitcoin.”

That comment aged like fine milk.

Steak ‘n Shake reported an 11% increase in so-called “same-stores sales” in Q2, and 15% in Q3. (Same-store sales measure sales at stores open for at least a year; the metric is designed to measure organic growth at existing stores rather than growth through store expansion.)

In those same periods, McDonald’s same-store sales grew 2.5% and 2.4%, respectively. Taco Bell’s were 4% and 7%. Domino’s clocked 3.4% and 5.2%.

Clearly, something sets Steak ‘n Shake apart.

The C-suite told Wall Street that “our same-store sales have risen dramatically ever since” the pay-with-bitcoin option rolled out.

And returning now to my jealousy… Steak ‘n Shake management recently announced that, starting March 1, the company will begin paying employees a bitcoin bonus. It’s not a ton—$0.21 worth of bitcoin for every hour worked, or about $437 per year.

For me, the amount isn’t what’s important. It’s that a legacy business has successfully integrated crypto into its operations. The bitcoin that customers spend flows into Steak ‘n Shake’s Bitcoin Reserve Fund, which the company then uses to reward employees. And the fact that sales have grown after the eatery started accepting bitcoin is a sign of what’s to come: crypto as spendable currency, and the blockchain as the new financial architecture that will replace the slow, outdated, and inefficient systems we’ve relied on for the entirety of our lives.

Burgeristas earning bitcoin bonuses, however, isn’t the end of our news.

Up in Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University’s endowment now has BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) as its largest stock market holding, valued at more than $400 million, or roughly 20% of the endowment’s stock market allocation.

Back in November, Texas stuffed $5 million into its new Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Arizona and New Hampshire have enacted laws that officially allow both states to start snapping up bitcoin.

Pension plans in California and Michigan now hold bitcoin directly, while at least 10 other state pension systems own exposure to bitcoin through shares of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), a tech company with a strategic reserve of nearly 710,000 bitcoins, or nearly 3% of the entire supply of bitcoin.

I could keep rattling off data, but you get the point: Even governments are rapidly moving into bitcoin as an alternative to dollars and other assets.

Which is why I routinely remind anyone who will heed my urgings that they, too, should be building a personal Bitcoin Strategic Reserve.

You don’t need to sink a ton of cash into bitcoin.

Be judicious about it. Invest a little here and there and let it grow.

As I’ve noted many times, bitcoin is destined to top seven figures because the world increasingly sees it as a non-fiat-currency asset in an age when fiat currencies are falling apart because of extreme Western debts.

At some point, the West, particularly the US, faces a financial reset—it’s the only legitimate way to deal with the amount of debt that has accumulated. Cumulative Western debt is now about 112% of cumulative GDP in Western economies. The US? It’s at 125% and rapidly worsening.

I want to have exposure to an alternative currency that no government can control because when dookie and fan finally acquaint themselves, you’re not going to want to own dollars. You’re going to want to own one of the few assets the world will rush into for protection.

Bitcoin is one of those assets. (As are gold and Swiss francs.)

The easiest strategy for building exposure to bitcoin over time is to follow my lead: Buy pieces of bitcoin every single week.

I’ve set up that exact strategy through my Coinbase account. I’ve given Coinbase instructions to buy $X worth of bitcoin every Monday. I don’t care about the price. I just want to slowly accumulate my own Bitcoin Strategic Reserve, slowly, bit by bit.

Invest as little as $20 a week. It’s an entirely painless way to grow your wealth and to build into your financial life an insurance policy that will help you survive and thrive in the financial reset to come.

Or maybe consider a job at Steak ‘n Shake?