It’s Christmas 2017 and hairdresser Jacqui Wilkinson is snuggled up with her husband on the sofa watching the TV news in their council house outside Birmingham, when an item about Bitcoin catches her attention.
A property is for sale in London for 3,000 Bitcoin – the equivalent of £17 million – with the owner so confident in the future of the cryptocurrency he is refusing cash. ‘I wouldn’t mind some of that,’ she nudges Neal, a gas engineer.
Little could Jacqui have known that when she Googled Bitcoin that night it would change her life. Within five years she would no longer need to work thanks to her success with cryptocurrency.
It’s doubtful, too, that Jacqui could have predicted she would have also corralled more than ten of her family and friends into buying Bitcoin.
And when she reveals that her own 82-year-old mother’s initial investment has shot up from £12,000 to £57,000 in two years, you can see why Jacqui’s eyes light up when I arrive at the avid Daily Mail reader’s home to learn the secrets of her success.
‘I want to tell people about my own positive experience with Bitcoin,’ says the 57-year-old grandmother, who with her thick glossy hair is more Bitcoin Babe than Crypto Gran.
‘Bitcoin is not just for the super-rich to make even more money,’ she says. ‘It can be for people like me, people who left school at 16 with no qualifications.’
Crypto winner: Hairdresser Jacqui Wilkinson no longer needs to work after the investing £40,000 in Bitcoin over seven years
Bitcoin was the world’s first cryptocurrency when it launched in 2009. Hundreds more digital currencies have followed but Bitcoin remains the most popular.
Jacqui is among the 12 per cent of UK adults who now own cryptocurrencies. City watchdog the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) warns that crypto remains largely unregulated in the UK, is high risk and that owners should be prepared to lose all their money.
It is highly volatile: for example, in the year to November 2022 the value dropped by close to 75 per cent. Nonetheless, interest in cryptocurrencies is rising as prices hit new record highs.
Bitcoin is up by more than 150 per cent in the last year alone and this week breached $106,000 – largely thanks to the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House.
Were Jacqui to crystallise her current holding today she’d be looking at £250,000 from an overall investment of £40,000 over just seven years.
Might it not be prudent to cash in while she’s ahead?
Jacqui shakes her head: ‘I think in decades – this isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a long-term investment.’
When pressed on her motivation, as to whether she gets a kick out of the risk of investing in a decentralised, unregulated currency that essentially exists only on computers or a thrill out of watching the peaks and troughs, she shakes her head again. ‘I do it because we never had anything growing up. And I never wanted to be poor.
‘My friends say, “why don’t you spend the money on a holiday?” But we take our caravan with our family ten miles up the road every year – we live frugally. I see Bitcoin as hope for ordinary people who have no chance otherwise of making any money.
‘Bitcoin has given me time, the scarcest commodity of all. My husband pays the bills and now we have enough money that I don’t need to work which has given me the freedom to pick up my two granddaughters from school, take them swimming, cook for them, and be there for them in these precious years.’
Self-deprecating and softly spoken, Jacqui says dyslexia left her barely able to read.
Born one of four siblings in a Catholic family with a coal-miner father and a factory worker mother, Jacqui was told that life on the production line was her only future.
‘On my first day in the factory I was gluing cupboards to make kitchen cabinets. I asked the woman next to me how long she’d been there and she told me 27 years. I went home that night and cried to Mum that I didn’t think I could do that job. She said, “Tough, that’s just the way it is” .’
At 19, Jacqui could be found living in a bed and breakfast in Wolverhampton with a baby, her relationship with her childhood sweetheart over.
‘I remember bouncing my son on the bed and saying, “Right kid – it’s just you and me. Let’s do something.”’
That something was training to be a hairdresser and Jacqui worked her way through college and into a career she loved. Fast-forward to a steady job as the manager of a salon in a care home that ended when Covid struck.
Let’s return to that December night in 2017 when Jacqui was at her kitchen table Googling ‘What is Bitcoin?’ on her laptop. ‘I had to look up the jargon and learn everything for myself.
‘I did it all in one night. My next question was “How do I buy Bitcoin?” and up popped companies selling.
‘I chose a few I liked the look of in Europe and read the backgrounds on each company website. I found a Belgian company, SwissBorg, a crypto wealth management platform. I liked the sound of it and bought £100 worth of Bitcoin.
‘I had to fill in a form – I didn’t even know how to upload a form at the time.’ The questionnaire was to confirm the identity of Jacqui. It took three days to verify, after which she had a fraction of a Bitcoin.
‘Crypto values can change round the clock so I downloaded a Coinbase app so I could check my account every day. I invest with sterling but Bitcoin trades in dollars so I use a big desk calculator to work out the exchange rate.’
Jacqui tapped into her savings and bought £1,500 and was elated to see the value of her Bitcoin soar to £18,000 over the next few months.
And then the value dropped like a stone – first to £10,000 then to £2,000 and finally £180. She was £1,320 out of pocket in less than a year of investing.
‘I felt a bit silly having lost so much money and told my husband I would take out what was left. He told me I might as well leave it there, so I did.’
She says it taught her to play the long game. After a year, she decided to try again after becoming enthused by a programme she watched on Bitcoin.
‘I put in another £1,000 of my savings into Bitcoin, but again, the value didn’t rise.’
The reason, Jacqui has since learnt, is that she bought in a ‘bear market’ in 2018 – in other words, during a sharp, deep downturn. In a bear market, investors see the value of their portfolio take a dive and many choose to sell off assets.
‘Then on April 1, I watched my Bitcoin go up $600 overnight. I was thrilled. Any savings in the bank were doing nothing but Bitcoin was rising in value.
‘Where I come from financial gain is not open to people like us, who have done well to buy our council houses.’
Trump bump: Bitcoin is up over 150% in the last year alone and this week breached $106,000 – largely thanks to the imminent return of Donald Trump to the White House
Financial advisers tend to recommend investing in a balanced portfolio of shares and bonds for those looking to achieve a return higher than that offered by savings accounts – but without risking everything.
For example, if Jacqui had invested £1,000 in a low-cost global shares fund at Christmas 2017, it would be worth £1,844 today.
This is less than her return on Bitcoin – where £40,000 has turned into £250,000 – but she would have experienced considerably fewer highs and lows. She would also have benefited from protection from the FCA.
In spring 2019, when Jacqui found out she had lost her job due to the pandemic, she put her £6,000 redundancy money into Bitcoin.
A legacy of lockdown is that Jacqui’s two-bedroom house is neat as a pin and she devoted the time to painting the interiors. ‘I listened to long podcasts about cryptocurrency while I was painting and I didn’t understand most of it to start off with,’ she says.
‘I’d say to anyone who wants to understand Bitcoin to do their own research.
‘I read everything I could and watched YouTube videos. I came across Michael Saylor, founder of MicroStrategy, which is the world’s largest corporate owner of Bitcoin. He spoke in a way I understood. He believes Bitcoin is the most powerful digital network in existence.
Jacqui is aware she is immersed in a world rife with scams and money laundering, and that it is unregulated.
Indeed, Money Mail approached companies to give financial advice on cryptocurrency and investing and they declined, saying it is too risky even to warn against it on the record.
President-elect Trump has pledged to back digital asset markets, saying those behind digital currencies are the innovators, the Thomas Edisons and the Henry Fords of the 21st century.
It helps that his chum, Elon Musk, supports Bitcoin and Dogecoin, another cryptocurrency, but the volatile nature of cryptocurrencies means even the President and the world’s richest man cannot control the market.
When asked about the ‘crypto bros’ of Silicon Valley, Jacqui jokes that she couldn’t be further from the trendy young West Coast founders of digital companies – but in her own way her cryptocurrency trading has been just as life-changing.
She reels off names of investors who inspired her, such as twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss of crypto exchange Gemini, also known for their dispute with Mark Zuckerberg about the founding of Facebook.
‘They bought their first Bitcoin in 2012 when it was worth less than $15,’ she says. ‘Now they own an estimated 70,000 Bitcoins worth $4.72 billion.
I know bits about crypto but don’t ask me about the technical stuff. As with driving a car I enjoy it, but I don’t need to know how it works.’
During the pandemic, Jacqui kept buying ‘£50 here, £50 there’ with a view to getting one Bitcoin. ‘I was staking away – that means locking in my money – and watching the price go from $3,000 to $12,000 and it was like living in a parallel universe.
‘I was putting the washing out one day and I suddenly thought I’d take all the money out. I’d had friends warning me crypto was a risk, I lost my nerve. But I wish I’d stuck with my gut instinct to keep the money there.’
How easy is it to cash in? I ask.
‘You go into your wallet and press sell,’ she explains. ‘The amount gets transferred into another wallet and because I was dealing with a European firm I had to fill in a KYC (know your customer) form.’
‘I had to look it up but figured it all out. It’s to show proof of funds and to check who I was, not laundering money. I then received the money in my bank account within minutes. I took out £9,000 – I’d made a profit of £3,000.’
‘Despite what my friends had said, it was probably only a week before I started buying again. The user experience was much easier than when I first started out.’
So confident is Jacqui about Bitcoin she says she’s ‘always trying to get people I love and care about to buy Bitcoin’.
Is she not concerned that they might lose their money?
‘Only put money in you can afford to leave in crypto. I’ve learnt the typical financial cycle is four years so I say, if you haven’t made your money back by then I’ll give it you back.’
Jacqui shows me proof on her phone. Dave, her ex-husband, thought Bitcoin was a scam in 2021 until she convinced him otherwise and he’s got a 25 per cent return on his money.
Her friend Sam never looks at her wallet but her £150 has risen to £800. Then there’s ‘the girl across the road whose wallet I sorted out – her £1,000 – it’s now worth £2,000 in two years’.
She adds: ‘When my four-year-old granddaughter was born I bought her a fraction of a Bitcoin and every birthday I give her £500 and it’s now worth £17,000.
‘In 2022 my mother, who doesn’t even own a mobile phone, and my stepfather, put in £12,000 of savings and it’s now worth £57,000.
‘I’m not interested in the money. I’ve got a nice life. I just want a future for my grandkids and that means more than anything to me.’
Truly inspirational, but don’t bet on copying Jacqui… I won’t be
By JEFF PRESTRIDGE
I’m out: Jeff Prestridge is concerned the bubble will burst
I defy you not to be inspired by the Bitcoin journey of former hairdresser Jacqui Wilkinson as relayed to my colleague Sarah Hartley.
It’s a quite brilliant and uplifting interview which I implore you to read – and read again. It’s one of the best examples of financial democratisation that I’ve come across in a long while.
The message is loud and clear: you don’t need to work in the City and wear red braces to make yourself a pretty fortune.
Through keeping her nerve, doing her homework and trusting her own judgment, this 57-year-old grandmother has amassed herself Bitcoin currently worth £250,000 – more than five times the amount she has invested over the past seven years.
It’s proof that sometimes fortune really does favour the brave – and boy has Jacqui been brave. She stuck with Bitcoin when its price crashed in 2022, and other investors fled for the hills. Her nerves of steel have served her well.
Yes, I confess, I’m a wee bit biased about Jacqui because she comes from my neck of the woods (Birmingham), a city whose residents are renowned for their modesty, hard work, friendliness and droll sense of humour. Forget Peaky Blinders!
But her rags-to-riches story confirms that, even in Sir Keir Starmer’s overly prescribed Britain, there are still opportunities aplenty to financially better yourself.
I am sure that if Margaret Thatcher were still around today, she would be mighty proud of what Jacqui has done for herself – and her friends and family whom she has encouraged to become ‘Bitcoiners’.
However, I feel it is my duty to urge extreme caution if you are thinking of following in Jacqui’s footsteps. I’ve been writing on investments for more than 30 years and the big lesson I’ve learnt is that financial ‘assets’ which go up dramatically in price can just as quickly plunge like a waterfall.
Too often, I’ve seen the financial misery heaped on novice investors who jumped on board the latest fad far too late. So, please be careful.
Although Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general have their detractors, it’s understandable why many people are drawn to their charms (more than one in eight adults in the UK currently have exposure).
Bitcoin is exciting, offers the prospect of rapid returns, and now has Donald Trump as a vigorous cheerleader. A few months ago, the President-elect likened Bitcoiners to some of the country’s industrial pioneers – ‘modern day Edisons’ – and said he would let them do what Americans do best: ‘Win! Win! Win!’
But no one knows where the price of Bitcoin is going to go from here. With Trump intimating that he is keen to build a ‘strategic reserve’ of Bitcoin, it could continue to reach new heights, breaking through $110,000 (it currently sits a bit above $106,000).
Yet, equally, the Bitcoin bubble could burst – as most financial bubbles invariably do (remember the dotcom bubble of the late 1990s which burst spectacularly in early 2000?). We just don’t know.
I’ve never once flirted with Bitcoin. It doesn’t tick any of my ‘investment’ boxes – it’s unregulated in the UK, there is no compensation scheme in place if things go wrong, and it’s a magnet for fraudsters.
I have also yet to fully fathom what drives its price – upwards or downwards. But then, having said that, share-price movements often bemuse me – and I still invest in stocks and shares.
Jacqui sees Bitcoin as empowering – providing ‘hope for ordinary people who have no chance otherwise of making any money’.
I understand that, but I wish that she would crystallise some of her gains now just in case the Bitcoin bubble pops.
Well done Jacqui. But for everybody hoping to be the next Jacqui Wilkinson, please don’t part with money you can ill afford to lose.
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