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Gerrard Kaonga
A 12-year-old decided to invest in Bitcoin and ended up becoming a millionaire.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing isn't it? However, for Erik Finman, he certainly doesn't need to look back with any sort of pang of regret after investing in Bitcoin at the age of 12 and going on to become a millionaire.
At the age of 12, many of us were splashing our pocket money on Pokémon cards or sweets at the local corner store, but not Erik Finman.
In 2011, instead of wasting away his pocket money, Erik decided to put his money where his mouth was after striking a deal with his parents that he'd prove he could make his fortune outside of traditional education in return for being able to skip out studying a college degree.
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But how would Erik build such wealth? Well, luckily for the 12-year-old, Bitcoin had just been launched in 2009 and data became available the following year, so after receiving $1,245 from his grandmother, Erik decided to invest in the cryptocurrency.
At the time Erik invested, trading was at around $12 - and this gave him about 103 BTC.
While I'm sure most kids that age would have likely been lost at how he managed to invest this money on a new emerging online currency phenomenon, it certainly paid off.
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In December 2017 - when Erik was just 18 - Bitcoin reached a high of around $20,000 and his initial $1,245 investment increased to a staggering $2.07 million. Not bad, eh?
Reflecting on his decision that paid off massively, as an adult Erik said ‘people didn’t really get what I was trying to do’.
He told the Business of Business: "I really didn't like high school. People didn't really get what I was trying to do, get what I was searching for or what I was dreaming of.
"I had one teacher tell me, yeah, drop out, work at McDonald’s since I’ll never amount to anything more in life.
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"I dropped out of high school and made a bet with my parents: if I make a million dollars by the time I’m 18, I don’t have to go back to school or go to college."
And Erik didn't just stop after making his first million either, building the amount of Bitcoins he had to 341 - with an estimated worth of more than $4.8 million by mid 2020.
However, Erik, now 25, hasn’t been too happy about his claim to fame and insisted he is 'desperate to get out of crypto' and was 'sick of being the Bitcoin person' so he's recently been putting his finances into aircraft which he said has made 'good money'.
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Whatever makes you happy champ. More power to you.