Two Investments, One Platform

In my last post, I was looking at some hypothetical scenarios regarding inflation and how unless we are invested and have significant supplementary income streams, we are probably going to suffer over time and increasingly have to limit our lifestyle. However, if we do have enough alternative revenues coming in, we can not only beat the inflation rate, but also keep investing to ensure we can increasingly build our investment. It isn't always easy and it isn't without risk and sacrifice, but I believe that in the longrun, we would be better off building alternate income streams that do not rely on us getting a raise.

So what can we do?

Well, this is a question that we each have to consider for ourselves as it is only us that knows our situation and also, we are the ones that have to take responsibility for our actions and live with the consequences. But pretty much, we are going to have to invest something in order to close the income gaps if we want to just maintain our current lifestyle.

Let's start here:

A secondary job is a very good and viable option and if choosing well, it can be something that is easy, flexible and can provide enough income to for example, save a bit or cover investments. The challenge is that if already working a job, working another isn't very attractive and if you are already a professional, doing something like "flipping burgers" is a knock to the ego.

I have been told many a time that I am wasting my time writing here for peanuts and I would be better off working the same hours in the fast-food industry. This was absolutely true for much of my time here and having worked several jobs in the industry, getting and doing work wouldn't have been a problem. What would have been a problem is the times I work, but more importantly, the lack of skills I would get (I am experienced at this already) and most importantly, the lack of quality information.

source

Fantastic. A base job, which is essentially making cheeseburgers in the kitchen, pays $9.68 per hour. This is not too bad depending on your life position, but if you consider that if you were to work 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, the before tax salary is $20,100 for the year and remember, this is a second job, so it is more likely that you will work 10 hours a week, taking 5,000 a year.

Can we do better?

In the previous post, there was information regarding the average Australian has 15,000 dollars in their savings and investments. Assuming that it was all in investments, and could earn 10% for 1500 dollars a year, it wouldn't be enough to cover the cost of inflation on an average salary, meaning that it would that it would still be a bleed into lifestyle degradation. Not only that, this was the average, not the mean. About 50% of Australians have less than 10K in the bank and 20% have less than 1000. There is little hope for them to be anything other than heavily affected with little opportunity to break the cycle... or is there?

Risk and reward, right?

What does Hive offer?

Let's use 10K as our baseline investment, but essentially, this is going to scale depending on how much one puts in, so it is fine - it is just easier for me to calculate. So @Azircon added a hypothetical of someone putting 10K into Hive, with 5K going to Splinterlands (he is very bullish), so let's have a look at that.

Now add $10K and open a hive account. Blog. Put $5K in Splinterlands, play-earn-stake, and have fun. :)
@azircon

Firstly Hive

5K into Hive buys 6666 tokens today. Lets catch a dip and make it 7,000. Curation will earn a nice steady 10% a year, so on that 5000 dollars with all things remaining equal, it would generate 700 HIVE or about 500 dollars worth. Of course, prices can go up and down in this, but a person can post on Hive too and have some fun with various social activities, so possibly, a few more hundred to a several thousand could be added on top through posting rewards, depending on how much time, effort and skill a person inputs.

However, if you are the kind of person who has 10K to invest into Hive experience, there ae already two content topics that you are able to potentially earn on - investing and Splinterlands. The first is going to sit on Hive and will also qualify for LEO content, depending on how you present it. The second will post to Hive and potentialy also be suitable for the SplinterTalk community and 1up. This means that there would be at least 4 different tokens of varying values available, and all you are doing is spending some time talking about your investments and gaming experiences, two things that will help you improve. While rewards are not guaranteed, a little bit of effort in and they are very likely. This could be in the hundreds or thousands in a year, especially if people get to know your personality and see your dedication to the community.

Not only this, this amount attracts airdrops like the upcoming @threespeak LARYNX token and, can be very volatile on the markets. This means that what it earns could be sold at the highs and used or rolled back in at the lower points to enhance the return further. This is what I have done.

Next, Splinterlands

So, here we have the other half we are going to drop into Splinterlands. Hmmm, what are we going to do with this? There are many options and I don't know them all, but I will cover a couple that I can. Let's use the whole 5000 for each first.

SPS Yield

Buy SPS on the market and stake it in the pool. This is volatile and is going to be affected by price of SPS and other stake etc, just like any DeFi pool.

$5000 = 7250 SPS

Staked, that will get a current yield of 60% (paid in SPS which fluctuates), so it would attract 4350 SPS a year, which is (surprise, surprise) 3000 dollars worth of SPS, with it paid daily - which is $8.20 a day. Not bad, but also volatile. However, it is good to note that for at least the next three weeks, that would also collect about 1.5 vouchers, which has a current price of 17 dollars (volatile) so that is an extra 24 dollars a day or, some amount a day for a bit.

However, compared to the 10% on the investment we were using as a baseline, it would have to drop a lot and stop returning a fair amount in order to stop being valuable. But not "that much" - For example, if SPS dropped 505 overnight, it would then be worth 2500 and the 60% yield would be 1500 - so we would have lost 500. Keep this in mind.

DEC Pooling

Staying with a similar them have our 5000 and split, that buys us 190,000 DEC that we could pair with 3333 HIVE and put it into the Diesel pools on TribalDex to earn SPS. this is 380,000 points. Today, that would have earned 50 SPS, so 35 dollars for the day. This is again going to fluctuate on the price of SPS and other factors, as well as the buy price on DEC which is also volatile, but in the impossible world that it was a daily return, the yield on that would be 12,775 dollars for the year. Oops! that is 250% on our investment.

But remember this requires holding DEC and HIVE, as well as the value of SPS and all of these things are going to move dynamically.

Card purchase (a)

Buying Cards to play come in packs and let's say we are going to buy on the full release in a month or so, which means $4 a pack. This is very hard to predict what the values of the cards will be, so we will take the safe route and say that out of the 1250 packs we buy, our deck is going to be worth our initial investment. Out of that many packs though, we would be pretty unlucky to not pick up some decent cards along the way and they can inflate the price a lot, plus the cards are going to fluctuate in value too. I bought most of mine four months ago and have put in about 8-10 thousand - and my deck is worth about 55K at market price today. But, let's pretend that it is the 5K.

This depends on many things, but assuming there is a range of cards, there is some combinations of decent cards that are in demand, without doing anything other than a little management, currently it will earn about 20-30% on the rental market, with more toward the end of the season.

Fore reference, we are 5 days into the season, I have played for a few days and rented some cards to get into Gold I, and now I am renting everything out.

5200 DEC is around 90 HIVE, so it is $67 in rental income a day. But, as @azircon was saying the other day, if there wasn't money to be made in playing, people wouldn't be renting - this is the way a marketplace works and for many people, they are able to earn on the rentals well, even though they don't own cards and, they do not have a high initial outlay, nor do they have to risk holding. As said, to get the 67 a day, I have 50K in cards.

What this means though, is that without our very conservative estimate of our cards being worth the same as we paid for them, we would be able to earn about 8 (EOS rentals included and spread to average) dollars a day or, 2920 dollars on our initial investment. I suspect the cards would be closer to 7500 worth or more.

Card purchase (b)

Of course, we can play these cards and depending on how we play, we can actually earn some decent rewards, do the daily quests and get lucky with valuable cards and more importantly, *these are ours. While the DEC, HIVE and SPS are fungible, each Splinterlands card is an NFT and as such, is scarce. The more rare a card is, the higher the value, and it also affects rental prices in various ways too, whether it be to have collection points to go up leagues or, because it is a useful card to play and win more to earn.

So, this means that like the cards that I opened (I think I opened about 1000 packs all up), the actual price can be much higher for particular cards. But, because the way the game is engineered, pretty much all cards are useful somewhere.

So, what to do?

Now, having said all of this, Splinterlands is still a volatile investment class, but it also has four years of track record, high usage and a lot of people interested in investing and playing in what is fast becoming a very large industry, the play2earn gaming industry.

If we took a hybrid approach with our 5000 and spent 2000 on cards (500 packs and assuming they are worth what we paid), put 1000 into the SPS pool to yield and get vouchers and pooled 2000 with Hive and DEC - what we get using todays values?

2000 on cards will get us $3.20 a day in rent
1000 in SPS will yield $1.64 + 0.25 Voucher ~$4 = $5.64
2000 in the DEC:HIVE pool is 20 SPS = $14

That is a total of $22,84 a day or, $8336 a year.

Add to this what we get in curation and post earnings on Hive and we are looking around 10,000+ dollars worth quite easily, which is 100%+ on what we started with. That beats the inflation rate and definitely the 1000 that the 10% investment would have got us, but, it also spreads our risk a little and, gives us assets that you own. From the Hive to the other tokens, your account and your cards - everything is yours.

People like the security of banks, but that security comes at a price, and it isn't only a low ROI, it is also the inability to take risk. One of the most valuable things in participating on Hive for me is, hearing about opportunities that the mainstream media or a financial advisor does not know about, let alone would recommend, because it is not in their best interest to do so. They want to manage your funds and take a cut, not have you manage your funds and cut them out.

Now, this still requires that 10K investment, but I know that if I didn't have it, I would be flipping those burgers for the extra and every pay day, it would be hitting a blockchain somewhere. I have used Hive as I am "Hive-positive", but there are so many opportunities out there for those who are willing to do some research, learn about what is going on and how they work, and then - take some risk. In many instances, the risk is no more than time and effort and then once that has been capitalized on, the capital can be used to invest further.

I might have been around a while, done a lot of work and got luck, but my Hive and Splinterlands accounts are worth 12 years of full-time burger flipping as a second job, and if the end of the year is good, it might very well be worth a career of fast food that I never had to do. Plus, I have a ball in the process and don't smell like I work at McDonald's. It has taken me five years, but in five years from now, where will you be financially?

None of these posts are to convince you to buy or invest anything, but it has to be noted that no matter what level you come in at, there is possibility.

I am sure I have failed to mention 101 things here, so feel free to add more into the comments section please!

Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]