How to maximize your STEEM investments through proper money management.

This guide will create the basis of money management and long term investing, this should be the goal of any rational steemer. I will also touch base on some Ideas to start building up our STEEM dollars without blogging or investing and how to reduce overall risk by diversification.

This guide is a tribute to some of the great books I’ve read finance & building wealth. Books like "the barefoot investor", "rich dad, poor dad" & "what I wish I learnt at school but didn’t". We take some of the key principles of these books and put them into an easy to follow step by step steemer blog.

once a master, always a master

Common Sense

This might seem like common sense advice but I know most of my friends and other people I work with have this all backwards, they run everything of 1 or 2 accounts and when a bill comes in they panic, they seem to have no spare caps for investing and never can save anything ether. This is especially true to young people who haven’t had great experience in managing their own finances outside the vault in the real world.

still living at home?

Setting up your bank vaults.

I have 7 bank accounts and numerous other crypto wallets, stockbroking & foreign exchange accounts & even physical bullion Investments. Now if you are like me and still have a job and get paid like most regulars Joe’s, setting up your bank accounts properly should be our top priority.

sample of my accounts in no particular order

Account 1 – SLUSH FUND (link to bank/debit card 1)

• This your slush fund & weekly spending money

Description: Pay yourself a wage of say 200 caps per week for all your spending needs like food, nuka cola, coffee, outings, hair & other recreational activities. We may have to adjust this overtime, most people underestimate how much they need to spend in a week. Don’t cut yourself short, pay yourself first and make it a fair amount.

the tools you need to survive

Survival Tip 1: Use an online bank to save money, an online bank can give 2% back on every purchase and charge no fees whatsoever. Deposits & withdrawals can be done via any post office.

Account 2 – BILLING (link to bank\debit card 2)

• All your weekly/monthly bills.

Things like fuel, phone, internet, rent, loan payments, insurances, health care and all that kind of stuff. You’ll have to add all these up for the month and determine how much you need in this account from your wage weekly/fortnightly wage.

This is really helpful at tax time too as all your bills will been shown on the one statement. Trust me your accountant doesn’t need to know every time you buy a coffee at Starbucks.

Survival Tip 2: Don’t carry this card with you, it stays safe at home, far away from our sticky impulsive shopping fingers. We just need it to be a debit/card account so we can pay our bills.

Account 3 - PERIOD BILLS (Net Saver)

• Our electricity, car rego, medical & car service/maintenance account.

Pretty straight forward just work out what these bills are over the year and work them into a weekly payment. Be sure to add a few bucks to buff the account. You'll never get caught out by an unexpected bill!

Survival Tip 3: Keep all your paper receipts in a shoebox and at the end of the year give to your accountant along with the bank statement of our billing account, simple but effective.

Investing Time?

Now we are thinking we can get started on investing right? That’s a big fat NO! We need to set-up some security for unexpected situations. If you skip this step you going to get caught out sooner or later.

put some money away for a rainy day

Account 4 – SAFETY & SECURITY (Net Saver)

• For the unexpected, boy scouts are always prepared.

I like to have $2000-3000 in this account depending on my circumstances. Sick of your house mate? Move out, you got enough for a bond payment. Got to have time off work due to a medical issue? No worries! Your car just broke down for no reason? Buy another one. It's all ok, we planned ahead.

The Plan

We keep topping this safety account after we have budgeted for all the previous billing accounts for the week. We don’t do any Investing until he have hit our target amount for this safety/security account. This account allows us to make ongoing payments into our investments & holidays all year round!

Survival Tip 4: Give your accounts a creative cool nickname, not just “Account 1 or Billing account”. We need to put our aspiration and dreams into it. It will help motivate us and keep us inspired to achieve our goals, put the Mojo back into your finances.

Accounts 5 & 6 – HOLIDAYS/TOYS/DREAMS/GOALS (Net Saver)

• Before we start saving for luxuries we need to pay off our debts, personal loans, credit cards & creditors. These come with a hefty interest rate and that hefty interest is wasted money that we could be used for investing. Imagine paying 17% on a credit card every month, wouldn’t we rather put that 17% into STEEM dollars instead?

Set up some accounts for your goals and dreams: For example I went to New Zealand last February and brought myself a new mountain bike Account 5: New Zealand Holiday and Account 6: New Mountain Bike

your almost ready to go it alone

Survival Tip 5: Remember it's your life & you need to do things your way, set up 1 account for each goal or item of your desire. Perhaps we want to undertake some educational course or buy your first car before you start saving for holidays. It will teach us the real value of our caps, we want to avoid getting a credit card at all cost because that’s the opposite of investing.

Account 7 – INVESTING (Net Saver)

• We did it! We followed all the previous principles and now we have a plan to be a long term survival Investor.

All right we have made it this far and how much you want to invest is up to you. I like to split my Dream/Goal accounts with my investing 50/50 I think this is a nice balance. Conservative investors could have a 70/30 ratio and an aggressive investor might like to have a 30/70 just depends how aggressive we want to be.

Initially I use to save about $2000 before buying securities (shares in company eg. google/apple). This was mainly due to get me a better brokerage to investment ratio. With crypto currencies brokerage & fees are not as important but still something we should look out for.

Survival Tip 6: Start scavenging through all of our accounts, do we really need to buy that coffee at Starbucks every morning for $5??? That’s $35 a week in Steem Dollars we could have! How about we roast our own fresh delicious organic coffee beans ourselves :D

the best investments are the ones you make yourself

Getting down & dirty

Research and evaluate everything that our caps go through, my old bank use to charge me like $400 a year to have an account with them (if I added up all the fees & charges), now my online bank pays me $400 a year.. so that’s a saving of $800 I now have for investing.

Check out phone plans, internet plans, insurances, investment brokers, private health & even groceries. Scour the web for the best deals. I know people who have phone & internet plans which are 3 times more expensive than mine for the same data/talk time, it's all money we could use for investing! You will be amazed on how much you can save. I'm even known to buy a 4kg bag of frozen dim sims to eat for the week or cook up a 5 kg batch of spaghetti from time to time.

keep holding on, you are almost are an investment survival master!

Building Steem dollars without blogging or investing.

A lot of people have been making good income from commenting and upvoting on people’s blogs, that’s all you have to do! You can easily build up over $1000 steem dollars just by doing this alone, it does take some time though but be persistent. This is probably the easiest way to build up our account, Steem offers a great interest rate on our account too. This is great for people who can’t do investing or devote time to blogging straight away.

Diversification

Like fallout we can specialise our attributes/caps all in one area. It will make us strong in some area’s but weak in other ways and it will come with its advantages and disadvantages. We should think about diversifying our investments, a more balanced approach to playing the game of Investing. You'll soon get to the stage where you current investments are funding new ones!

don't put all your eggs in the one basket

Survival Ideas

I have a portfolio of stocks, commodities, foreign exchange accounts, physical silver & now recently multiple crypto accounts of BTC, ETH & SBD. It doesn’t really worry me if one of these accounts drops to zero because I know I have my investments spread out. I am a long term survival investor, I may not be strong in one area but I am balanced and my risk is managed.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not proposing that we withdraw all of our Steem dollars, Steem is my most exciting investment at the moment and I’m trying to build it much as possible. I’m keeping the majority of steem dollars in but I take out 10%-20% of my payouts to kind of “secure” or “guarantee” I am getting something for it, the market is new, volatile and I still associate some degree of risk to it. We can use that money to fund some ETH & BTC investments or we could start collecting silver bullion coins or buy some google shares, the opportunities are endless.

The End

I hope these guide finds many people like the books I've read have found me. I'm confident that if you follow the principles in this guide you will succeed in your investment career. I owe many thanks to people shared their valuable information and experience. Special thanks to Thomas aka senseiteekay for letting me know about Steemit.

Thanks for reading and good luck in your journey.

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