u/Charmsial2

*I've been on roughly a 1-year journey trying to turn some crypto gains into actual wealth.*
*Me and a few friends had made a decent amount from crypto, including a sizeable position in XMR. We got into it relatively early and eventually sold after the big run, so we ended up with several times what we'd originally put in.*
*The next problem was actually getting the money into the banking system.*
*We were looking at the UAE because we wanted to eventually buy property in Dubai. The difficult part was source of funds. Once crypto has gone through XMR and then back into USDT, proving the entire history of the funds isn't exactly straightforward. We eventually were able to get the funds into a bank account.*
*But we didn't immediately rush into buying property.*
*We left the money sitting in the account for a couple of months and made sure everything was settled. By around the third month, we decided to start looking seriously at property and after much considerations, we ended up buying several villas, including some fairly expensive ones in what we thought were good areas.*
*At that point, we genuinely thought we'd done everything right.*
*Crypto gains -> bank -> property.*
*Then Feb 28 happened.*
*The US and Israel launched strikes against Iran and Iran retaliated. Suddenly there was a lot of uncertainty around the region.*
*We're technically UAE residents and have Emirates IDs, but we're basically non-residents in practice. We don't live there full time, so watching everything unfold from outside the UAE made us pretty nervous. We started asking ourselves whether it really made sense to be sitting on several expensive Dubai properties while a war was happening in the region.*
*And honestly, we panicked.*
*Instead of waiting it out, we decided to sell and put the money somewhere else.*
*We ended up selling a few months later. Between the prices we bought at, the prices we eventually accepted, transaction costs and everything else involved in exiting, we gave back a huge chunk of the gains we'd made in crypto.*
*Basically, a year's worth of work and we managed to undo a big part of it 😂*
*The funny thing is that I've since had plenty of people tell me we should have just held the properties. The Dubai market obviously didn't just disappear, and there were still transactions happening despite everything.*
*But hindsight is easy.*
*When you're a non-resident watching missiles being fired in the region, you're not necessarily thinking about what Dubai property prices might look like 12 months later. You're thinking about getting your money somewhere you feel is safer.*
*Looking back, the whole experience taught me something I didn't really appreciate before:*
*Making money is one thing. Turning it into wealth is another. And keeping that wealth is a completely different game.*
*Curious to hear from people actually living in Dubai, if you had been holding several expensive properties as a non-resident when Feb 28 happened, would you have held or sold?*