How Crypto & Blockchain Technology Impacted My Personal Finance

TheyCallMeDan's Initiative

I've been seeing a few posts about this initiative recently and so thought I'd share my perspective in addition to the post I wrote last week. The initiative from @theycallmedan is fully outlined in here so feel free to get involved and if you have already written your post, let me know in the comments so I can check it out!

Impact On Mindset Towards Finance

For me, cryptocurrencies have definitely changed my mindset towards finance. Although I've been buying BTC steadily in 2020 and learning more on ways of earning, I haven't taken any out in to fiat yet but if the time comes when I really need to, I will. At the moment, I'm just accumulating what I can so you can probably say that the way it's impacting my finances is by converting fiat in to crypto like some sort of fiat black hole!

First Discovery

It was in 2012 I actually first heard about Bitcoin from an ex-banker at a temporary job after I finished my undergraduate degree. Somehow we ended up in the same dank office, opening endless amounts of envelopes and exam results for various courses, wondering how we ended up there! He told me a lot about Bitcoin and it was SO far over my head - I had just gone through 3 years of money sucking university and having student loans but the guy never showed me how to buy any, not that I could anyway because of my financial situation at the time. The rest of that story is in this post.

Ownership Of Your Finances

Fast forward to today, I've learned a lot through doing things in crypto and I've always said since the beginning of my involvement that the onus is on YOU here. What you have the keys to, is yours and no-one else's. This is both scary but exciting at the same time and made me realise that for most of my working life, I hadn't been in control of my finances.

This lead me to build my own finance spreadsheet to help me realise what I had and where and what I can do about it. Instead of thinking in terms of "what my salary is", I was thinking more in "what I have in total". I found where I was wasting money on pointless spending and it smartened me up.

Savers Have An Option

With interest rates on savings at rock bottom here in the UK, where they've been pretty low for a long time, that didn't sit well with me either. When I found out that crypto can earn interest with staking or "hodling" with CeFi, along with the compound interest effects, this played right in to my "saver" mindset and the more you get involved with a network, the quicker your account can build such as with Leo or Hive. This has given me some hope again for long term savings.

Learning From Mistakes

Of course, along the way, I had some strong lessons to learn. Mistakes were made by either spreading myself too thin across various crypto projects, not doing enough research and then seeing them crash and burn along with what I'd spent. Things happen for a reason and I'd say I'm in a better position now having spent about 3 years in the space and developing my own strategy that is both affordable and low stress, based around dollar cost averaging and earning tokens in a fun way. Remember, never spend more than you can afford to lose!

I doubt I'd have found that strategy and new mindset around finance had it not been for jumping in to the simultaneously exciting and scary world of cryptocurrencies but I'm glad I did.

Get Involved

So that's how cryptocurrency has impacted my personal finance - feel free to get involved and check out the guidelines in this post.

How's it been for you? If you've already written a post, let me know in the comments below!

Take care

Nicky

Originally posted here