How much are you making per minute?
I've have always been pretty narrow in my way of looking at money and income, associating both with time. Time, as they say, equals money. The two main drivers of my way of thinking involved income from time spent working and asset growth over time. Getting into crypto and DeFi has opened up a whole new way of looking at income, specifically passive income, and how it is measure in time.
The biggest influence on how I look at money certainly comes from working the majority of my life. In the workforce, you trade time for money and that dictates how you see money to a large degree. Most workers will look at two timeframes when considering their income, how much they make per hour and how much they make per year. Think about it, if you make $15 each hour your mind will translate something that cost $30 into two hours of work. I've been conditioned to think about most purchases this way. Bigger purchases, think houses or cars, can be looked at in terms of your annual salary. If you make $50,000 per year, a car that cost $25,000 will take about six months to earn leaving out taxes and other factors.
The other influence on how I have looked at money and its relationship to time comes from assets. There are two primarily assets that I consider here, real estate or more specifically my house, and stocks including mutual funds, retirement accounts and college savings programs. As for my home, I purchased my home in 1997 taking out a 15-year mortgage unlike most who take out 30-year mortgages to get as much house as possible, and made extra payments to pay it off in under ten years. I bought a house in a relatively rural area that I new was about to see huge population growth which it did with the city going from under 10,000 residents when I moved in to over 200K now which has driven home prices skyward. But my home is not just an investment, it is where I have raised my family so it has more value there than in pure price appreciation.
Stocks, on-the-other-hand, have really given me my concept of using money to make more money. I've saved and invested for years generally expecting a ten percent per year return and targeting seven years to double my investment. Fortunately, I've been able to beat those returns staying pretty aggressive over a number of years but I still look at those general expectations in terms of investment returns. I've done well here, retiring early and having my kids education saved for before they could even drive a car.
I understand the power of compounding and have lived my life using this to my advantage...
Crypto, and more specifically DeFi, has completely altered how I view money. I turned to crypto almost as a little hobby about six months into retirement to give my brain something to focus on besides Netflix and other minor distractions. Little did I know how it would quickly become an obsession, the more I learned the more I wanted to learn even more. Who knew?
I mined some coins on GPUs, opened up accounts on exchanges and bought some coins focusing on Bitcoin and Ethereum. But DeFi is where I found my passion. My calling if you will. The true power of crypto and when the crypto market is down I don't really care anymore. Bring on the Bears!
Forget ten percent returns and doubling your money in seven years. That is life in the slow lane riding in a horse and buggy. DeFi takes place in the fast lane driving Lambos where the world of traditional finance is simply a blur that I am speeding past at a breakneck pace. Pedal to the metal if you will.
I'm using various DeFi protocols to generate passive income. This is my new job, my new career and where I spend much of my time and brain power. Let me get a little more specific here, when I say DeFi I'm talking primarily about yield farming and liquidity pools to a large degree, with nodes and some high APY staking to a lesser degree. I've detailed some of this journey in past articles and will continue to do so.
I no longer think of money in hour terms, I think in terms of minutes. I no longer think in terms of eight hours a day, five days a week. I think in terms of 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Let me illustrate:
OLD THINKING: $10.10/hour = $10.10 * 2080 (or 40 hours times 52 weeks) = $21,008
NEW THINKING: $0.04/minute - $0.04 * 525,600 (or 60 minutes times 24 hours times 365 days) = $21,024
Someone asked me recently how much I make in crypto, I told them whatever return I make on my coins plus $0.04 per minute in decentralized projects, or a penny every 15 seconds. They laughed at the thought of how little $0.04 per minute, it does sound like nothing after all until you actually do the match. I proceeded to tell them I planned to make around $0.20 per minute by the end of the year. While I could see their brain attempting to figure this out, they simply weren't wired to calculate math this way after being conditioned in the work force. "How much is that per year," they eventually asked realizing they were not up to the challenge. I quipped, "a little over $100K." Suddenly questions started to flow out like water in the Niagara Falls, I mean who wouldn't want to earn one hundred grand a year hitting by hitting a few buttons on their keyboard after all.
Toward the end of the conversation I dropped another bombshell. The best thing is, unlike a traditional job with minimal pay raises which doesn't keep up with inflation, I'm using the power of compounded to grow this income higher day after day. Just imagine what it will be after six months? A year? Multiple years? Of course those calculations were out of reach of the unsuspecting mind as well, however, I left those figures up to the imagination rather than simply laying out the math once again as my point was already made.
I don't consider myself an expert in DeFi, but I've learned a few things since first taking a shinning to the space earlier this year. The yield returns are something I never dreamed of and can't believe the whole world isn't catching on. This is a good thing because if they did, the yields would tumble. Stocks and even crypto may not have done well since I first got involved, but DeFi is like the gift that keeps on giving and keeps on growing thanks to compounding. Pitfalls are abound and I've made some mistakes, a small price to pay for the education I have received.
Don't think of money in terms of big timeframes, forget years, months, weeks, days and even hours. I'm down to minutes but look forward to some point in the future when I think in terms of seconds. How much is a penny per second equal to? Try $0.60 per minute or $36 per hour, that is $325,360 per year. I look forward to hitting and surpassing that milestone in the near future as anything seems possible once you shift your way of thinking both in terms of returns and timeframes.
How much are you making per minute?
