Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

This is an issue I didn't expect to happen if I am being honest.

I live in Texas. Deep in the heart of Texas, just north of the city of Austin.

For around 37 hours from early Monday morning towards the end of the day on Tuesday, the electricity from the power grid was shut off.

Fortunately, and I mean extremely, fortunately, I had taken a bit of a financial risk several years ago and had solar panels and a tesla powerwall installed in my house. It was expensive, and at the time I am not 100% sure I could afford it.

So why did I have it installed?

For two reasons:

1. My fiance had recently come out of a coma from a catastrophic brain injury, and I had an idea that our home would need to become much more capable of taking care of her.
2. I had recently built cryptocurrency mining rigs, and at the time the mining rigs would more than cover the monthly cost of the solar panels. Electricity converted from the sun, converted into Bitcoin? Yes, please.

Of course, then the price of Bitcoin dropped dramatically in 2018, and my plan kind of went out the window, but the ball had already started rolling on the solar panels.

I was committed.

I'll tell the rest of the story in the next section, and explain why it ended up being a massive help these last few days.

Let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here.

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🧠 Wisdom Thought of The Week: Nothing beats Preparation

So fast forward several years to the snowpocalypse of Texas and many other states in the south.

Texas is built to withstand summers with temperatures over 105 degrees Fahrenheit on average. The state is not designed to withstand multiple days in a row of temperatures below 20 degrees Fahrenheit.

So when the coal plants, nuclear plants, natural gas plants all started having their instrumentation freeze, the State's ability to produce enough electricity started to dramatically drop.

Anyway - how does this pertain to the solar panels and powerwall? Well, because I have solar panels I can produce my own electricity during the day. But more importantly, because I also have a Tesla powerwall battery to store that power, I am able to power my home off of the grid.

Without the battery to regulate everything the solar panels wouldn't work when the grid is off. This is because when the grid is shut off, there are people out working on the power lines and other infrastructure. Any house that has solar panels without a battery system to regulate it could send a charge back into the grid and electrocute and kill anyone working on the grid.

So basically no battery, no solar when the grid is down.

Here is a picture of the Tesla app showing me how things are going. I can't tell you how many times I watched this app in the last two days.

I was always in fear of the battery running out of power, because if that happened...if the battery reached 0% and we lost power, we would not be able to get it back again.

As I said, no battery, no solar due to the dangers, and once the battery runs out, it can't regulate the solar panels anymore.

Fortunately, I'm able to dramatically reduce the amount of electricity use at night, and the lowest I saw the battery get was 28%.

So this is my story this week.

A story about how a somewhat scary financial decision led to my house being able to retain warmth over the past two days.

Silver Linings:

Sometimes peace of mind is more important than perfect financial decisions.

We will get back on track to a more normal newsletter next week, but for now, I need to go out and continue shoveling snow for myself and for my neighbors.

Stay warm my friends.

Quote of the week:

I've used this quote before, but I've learned so much this week and it is a stark reminder that wisdom comes from both knowledge and experience.

Never stop learning and growing.

Have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources:

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

BlockFi - Earn interest on your crypto. Currently, you can earn 6% interest on BTC, 5.25% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.6% on stable coins like USDC.

Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter.

I've earned thousands of dollars (in crypto) using blockfi the last few years.