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How do you provide for your family?
So I was watching this show recently and it kind of made sense.
The guy said that treat your money like your oxygen supply. You don't have one specific plant that gives you that sweet H2O right? That's how you have to think about your money because both are that important. Now I don't know how good you guys are doing but like most ppl, I'm a one job dude at the moment (Though I'm doing some Adult Education at night as well to upgrade). Do you guys have anything else coming in besides your job? Like a side business on ebay, Studypug, Thinkific or a brick and mortar venture? Heck even an investment perhaps thats giving a nice return or what not. I just started freelancing by I'm paying more in invoicing then making any real cash. Cuz if you think about it, if my one source (Job) disappears, I'm going to be in trouble. Yeah I'm sure I'll find something but it's just annoying. |
Yep, I have a bunch of forms (I think ~5 right now) of income besides my 9-5. I think its very wise to have multiple streams of income. None make as much as my 9-5, but I could probably live off them if absolutely necessary.
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The key factor in this discussion is this: to get ahead, you have to have money set aside to multiply. Be it a small business, an investment property or portfolio, or whatever, this money must be separate from your everyday life, and not drawn from. You will be amazed at how much harder that money works than you can, how fast it grows, and how difficult it is not to spend any of it.
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A whole bunch of altcoin mining rigs - a few cheap smartphones and old tablets plus a small ASIC board. Altogether, they use about 15W or so and yield around $80/month worth of altcoins - enough to cover the Internet bill and then some. It also sets a nice budget for "small" hobby parts and other gadgets.
It's down quite a bit from the days when 4 cheap smartphones would get $100/month mining Perk. (Which doubled in difficulty just shortly before crashing, made nearly $1000 and only lost $15 of coins that were waiting to reach the exchange minimum.) My best month of mining was on a (then) experimental coin bringing well over $200 that month, although the difficulty level caught up pretty quickly. I got to understand the life cycle of altcoins - birth, high profitability early stage (some coins fail to get to this point - "infant mortality" or "never got off the ground"), difficulty level hike+maturity, and eventual crash/"death". (Most memorable for me was Realbucks that went through the whole cycle in about 2-3 months, although I made a good amount with just one miner in that time.) My cousin wanted to get into mining but he didn't want to do the research or IT work needed for the highly efficient coins. Since he is renting a place that has electricity included in rent, a cheap Bitcoin mining appliance was a perfect fit. A friend of mine was selling an Avalon 4.1 (once a favorite among college students in that it's actually quiet enough to run in a dorm or apartment), so I bought it using profit earned from one of my other mining ventures. If all goes well, all three of us get happy. |
Nice!
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Good to hear that it's possible :) |
I have my own business but I am the only employee. We also 3D print some things we sell. I make a cell phone adapter to put Samsung galaxy phones in download mode. I make some pinball mods that we ship all over the world. For a while I bought used pinball machines fixed them up and sold them. My wife will buy old retired Lego sets complete them and sell them.
So yes it all helps. |
In today's internet age, making money has never been easier IMO. The more I learn about business and stuff (read lots of books), the more you see opportunity everywhere. The biggest limiting factor is time IMO. And, that is exactly why I'm working half a dozen income streams, so that they will build and I'll be able to start trading my money for time vs trading my time for money.
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First, you have to maximize your oxygen production. The easiest and quickest way to do that is decrease your O2 consumption. The Average person living in the USA (which I would assume also applies to you as well) will make $1.4-$2 million in their entire lifetime. If you are living paycheck to paycheck, you are likely NOT on a written budget and do not track where all your money goes. Small decreases in ones lifestyle (limiting eating out, cutting cable off, decreasing thermostat, etc) can pay big dividends and you can then put your money in places where it will work for you. Second, you need to have oxygen storage. Cover that momentary blip in increased O2 consumption. Murphy's Law will always strike, so if you have $1000 saved up in an Emergency Fund you won't be as worried about an emergency. Third, again, reduce your oxygen consumption. Pay off all your consumer debt. Debt is stupid. Car loans are stupid. No one gives a rats behind on what car you drive, except for you. A $3000 2002 Toyota Corolla will get you to work and back just as well as a $15000 2017 Chevy Tahoe. Debt does not get anyone ahead in life. "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it." -Albert Einstein Fourth, again, increase your oxygen storage. Save 3-6 months of living expenses in a Emergency Fund. The average American family should save around $10,000-$20,000, and NEVER TOUCH IT AGAIN EXCEPT FOR AN EMERGENCY! Put it in a money market account or a savings account and leave it. The point of the emergency fund is not to make money. It is there only to stave off Murphy's Law. If you do those four things, you will be ahead of about 75% of ALL North Americans. I guarantee you the potential stresses that come with the thought of loosing a job will be nearly zero. I am a huge Dave Ramsey fan and these are his principals. If you are, indeed, worried about a potential job loss, I would highly recommend reading his "Total Money Makeover." There is nothing wrong with bettering yourself, and making more money. I say, go for it, but also learn to manage your money as well. Unfortunately, so often, most will adjust their lifestyle with pay increases and never really get ahead in life. |
Another of the most massive things that can be done to provide for the family is to own where you live. Regardless of what happens to the market value of real estate this month, it is less expensive than it will ever be, long term. If you are daring, find a "distressed" property and fix it. If you are vain, find something snazzy and pay more. If you are a nomad, buy an RV. The earlier in life that you can do this the better. This is one excellent way to put your money somewhere that it will without a doubt increase in value over time.
There are so many benefits to owning your home, it's difficult to choose where to begin describing them. I believe that the best benefit home ownership provides is psychological. When you have this fixed point in the world that you own and manage, it builds confidence, shelter and strong defenses against many sources of chaos that can come your way. Plus, the while home equity subject. If the world starts crumbling down around you, or drastic life changes strike, the real property provides options that would otherwise not exist. When you rent or live on someone else's property, all the money paid to live there goes towards someone else's struggle in life. There is very little responsibility or commitment involved. You can "bug out" or be evicted in short order. It is much more difficult to manage personal finances and plan strategically in this situation. Having a regular recurring mortgage payment and a deed of ownership changes all of that. During hard times, there is no choice involved: the mortgage must be paid OR ELSE. During good times, inflation is now your friend, as it will increase your net worth as a direct result of the increase in property value. This is indeed the money you can't lose, because you have to live in it. The whole process of buying a house is a big eye opener into the arena of bank financing, business dealings, law, and government regulations in itself. The sheer amount of paperwork, the hoops these people have to jump through, the inspection and appraisal, the approvals that must be earned , just to close the deal, is staggering. This is further proof of how important owning real property is in the world. It is a life-changing event, a rite of passage that builds your reputation. Even if you don't feel it at first, the reality of the event will manifest itself the next time you attempt another purchase of something expensive. Salesmen and bankers have a completely different attitude towards clients or customers that are homeowners. The debt they can attach to your property is extremely low hanging fruit, a greased chute that virtually assures a successful transaction. Without this leverage, your negotiating ability is severely limited, even if you have cash in hand. If you are a sucker, the added expense of removing the attached debt will teach you how to live within your means, and encourage you not to make the same mistake again. |
The cost of living is pretty much high nowadays. I am fortunate to have a stable job as an IT consultant to support my family.
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workworkwork
hey greenmachin! It's pretty awesome that your one job provides enough to live on! yay. as for us..My husband works his full time job for the city schools...AND he builds computers AND he works for one of his retired coworkers mowing lawns and cleaning move out rentals. I run my own business. I sew specialty dresses for Renascence and for cosplay types. I also teach voice and piano. I also have a small animal rescue but I suppose in the grand scheme the rescue costs me money! lol. The hubby also has retirement investments but they give no income yet. We are eventually going completely off grid in NorCal. The goal is to be 100% self-sustaining. Our kids are all moving out this summer and the past 30 years have literally been a fight to keep afloat! now it's time to be able to have some fun and I still feel young enough to do it! woot.
Happy day from Humboldt! https://scontent-sjc2-1.xx.fbcdn.net...03&oe=59BA0AA5 |
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I have a job, and try to invest when I can, so I can have multiple sources of income. I also try to save as much as I can (including not having a car and using public transport to save).
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Buying stock in a start up company or even a apparently failing company thats too big to fail with rock bottom stock prices can line your pockets , there is more then luck at play but a educated guess is often all it takes.
Many corporations have government backing keeping them alive stock prices can be cheap one day high the next. Buy cheap sell high tip don't listen to investment brokers they want to milk you for your money ! |
Just an update on my cryptocurrency mining - I broke a personal record for profit from one device. My old Kindle Fire managed to mine $100 of coins last month and $75 so far this month. The difficulty level is creeping up like it almost always does. The coin it's mining has somehow managed to survive a number of issues, but it seems like it could crash at any time. (A lot of coiners apparently thought the coin was going to crash and panic sold all they had, causing a backlog of transactions that then caused one of the pools to "temporarily" disable the daily mining limit per IP. Hence the "gold rush"!)
Meanwhile, my cluster of three Moto Es and a ZTE Speed has went down to $30-35/month thanks to the difficulty increasing. And my little ASIC board (Jameson Hasher, RK3288CX ASIC) went down to $5/month. All of those are still worth running, so they'll stay running. As for the Avalon 4.1, it turns out to be a collectible since it was the first Avalon 4.1 sold to a medical student (not my friend, one of her friends who sold it to her, then my friend sold it to me). It's currently making about $40/month of Bitcoin, but unlike most altcoins, Bitcoin is actually worth holding on to. Without accounting for the Bitcoin price rising, break even happened about a week ago, but actual break even happened well before that. |
Interesting stuff NiHaoMike.
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The difficulty level is continuing to rise, faster than expected in fact. However, I was able to counter that. Or rather, I found an online friend who happens to be a programmer.
Long story short, the coin I was mining with the Kindle Fire turns out to be not so ASIC resistant after all. It defeats the simpler, large scale ASICs (e.g. Antminers) quite well, but smaller, higher complexity ASICs like my RK3288CX can still mine it quite well. (Large scale ASICs exploit parallelism, which ASIC resistant algorithms try to impede by increasing the logic complexity so that it would make building a large ASIC for it uneconomical.) Basically, I plug my tablet into the USB port on the ASIC board, then my friend wrote a daemon running on the ASIC to accept requests over USB. On the tablet (already rooted and running Cyanogenmod), she replaced a library with a hacked version to forward the requests to the ASIC, then get the "nonces" much faster than calculating them locally. There's a latency penalty going over USB, but that becomes less and less significant as the difficulty keeps going up. I then discovered another bonus. When I first got the ASIC, I tried merge mining to boost profits. That worked initially, but there was a bug that caused that to stop working after the difficulty increased. It turns out that whatever my friend did on the ASIC fixed the bug so now I'm merge mining *and* dual mining on it. (Merge mining is mining multiple coins with the same algorithm, while dual mining is mining multiple coins with different algorithms, so as to maximize utilization of the miner.) |
Main source of income is my steady job.
One year ago I read about a 'local' cryptocoin that looked promising to me and I invested some money into it (Refund on energy bill, yes extra insulation does pay off, and working overtime.) , it's value (and my investment) quadruppled by now. Aside of that I had a look into trading with that coin on the exchange and with some bumps on the road I made ~$2000 in a year. (Trading on an exchange isn't that hard but it is also easy to loose money with it so I can't recommend that to just anybody.) |
Cryptocurrency mining, in general, is not meant to be a primary source of income. (If you build up a big setup, keeping it running *is* a full time job in itself!) In my case, I like to think of it as my electronics hobby getting its own job. ("I heard you like to make money so here's a miner to leave running at home when you're at work, so you can make money while you make money.")
What my friend did might not have had anything to do with my ASIC not mining certain altcoins reliably. Strangely for something so low powered (rated 6W TDP!), it has a feature often called "auto tune". More or less it works by lowering the voltage to the crypto engine until it gets errors, then backs off a step or two. In doing so, it invariably misses some nonces and the pool for that altcoin doesn't like it, interpreting it as a broken miner. The fix for that, of course, is to disable auto tune. The extra fraction of a watt it uses is totally lost in the noise and I already replaced the small stock heatsink with a substantially bigger one I salvaged from an old motherboard. I should have mentioned that I broke a personal record for time to break even on investment. I paid my friend $5 to write the software, which paid for itself in just a day and a half. In return, I managed to boost the effective hashrate by about 50x, half of which is more or less going to my friend so I end up with 25x. (That's how I got her to accept such a low initial payment *and* give her an incentive to make something that actually works well.) How that's going to map to actual profit remains to be seen, especially since the effective hashrate increases with difficulty. The coin in question is rather unstable and might crash soon, but given the difficulty has already increased to the point where it would no longer be worth mining with the tablet alone, there's little to lose. Currently trending at about $65/month, not bad for a setup that uses about as much power as an energy saving light bulb. |
Difficulty has went up but the rate of increase is tapering off. My ASIC is handling it quite well, currently getting $50/month or so. It seems like the coin is getting dominated by GPU miners. Looks like that while there are altcoins that are more profitable to mine on a GPU, dual mining ends up with a higher total profit.
What is significant is the record high "stake payout" at the beginning of the month - a little more than $7 or nearly double what I normally get. The stake payout (for that coin at least) has to do with how the mining pool works. The pool is "pay per share" which means miners get paid for "shares" or "partial solutions". Only a tiny percentage of "partial solutions" actually solve the block. A miner that does solve the block gets a bonus on that round, but most of the block reward is shared with other miners with the remainder "staked" by the pool. After the end of the month, the staked coins get distributed to the miners based on their number of shares and hashrate consistency. (The latter discourages "coin hopping".) The reason for the high stake payout has to do with a trick my friend coded up. The ASIC is capable of calculating nonces faster than the pool is able to accept. Thus the pool was the bottleneck. The solution was ingenious - calculate more nonces than could be submitted, then submit the ones that lead to the most favorable "Hamming distances". Alas, that trick is becoming obsolete as the difficulty increases. (If you're wondering why not just search if any of the nonces lead to solving the block, the miners don't know they solved a block until some time after they submit the winning nonce to the pool. That is to prevent an attack where rogue miners discard winning nonces in order to "steal" from the pool while losing almost nothing themselves. Miners can only statistically guess if a nonce is going to win, which means they'll lose a lot if they tried that attack.) What gets interesting is that the fast rise in difficulty happened shortly after the exchange announced that users can donate their coins to help the hurricane victims. Also remember that the stake payouts are distributed based on shares and consistency. Therefore, at one point, my ASIC was making an estimated profit of several hundred dollars of coins per month, although I was only able to get about 1/8 of it since that's what the pool thinks it was making. I got a tiny amount of the remainder, but most of it went to other miners. A large percentage of that presumably ended up going to the hurricane victims. In other words, my friend, as beautiful as she is on the outside, is even more beautiful on the inside and her code is helping to make the world a more beautiful place. (Can't post pictures because she wants to stay anonymous. I can understand because a lot of the coiners who used to mine with their old smartphones are upset that it's no longer profitable for them and would be hostile towards the ones who made it that way. I'll just say that if you met her in the city and tried to guess what she does, you'll guess "actress" or "rock star" and not "programmer".) I had to buy something special with the profits made from that mining venture. It had to be something I actually want and something that lasts a long time to make it memorable. The answer is obvious - a 100W solar panel. And yes, among other things, I'm planning to run my mining setups from solar. |
Time for a pretty big status update. The investment I made to have a working high N Scrypt ASIC miner early was well worth it, even after considering "losing" half the hashrate. One of the high N Scrypt coins passed its halving point (that's when the reward for solving the block is cut in half), so a lot of miners jumped to other high N Scrypt coins including one that was making a huge profit on my ASIC. The difficulty was up nearly 8 times compared to last month, which was already high enough to obsolete "Hammingboost". In short, one month of mining back then is worth 8 months of mining now if difficulty doesn't increase further, which it probably will. The "intercept point" where having all the hashrate but a month late (estimate) vs. having half the hashrate early then pushes out further than I would care for, so I call it a big win. And that doesn't even consider that the time I would have spent figuring out how to make it work is definitely worth something, or the fact that the "lost" hashrate is not really lost.
I also used the solar panel along with the 4 Snapdragon 410s and part of the ASIC to make the world a better place. Yes, the positive impact of just one solar panel was felt around the world! https://twitter.com/RealSexyCyborg/s...36250454163458 One side effect is that my friend Allie Moore became really jealous of what I'm doing with alternative energy. The "green war" that was going on between her and I has officially concluded, but I'll broadcast to the world that I will still help her set up her own solar power system if she wants and also try to make her (somewhat) famous if she wants. And despite her knowledge of biology, she's seemingly mystified (and probably also jealous!) at how Naomi can eat so much and be so skinny, but that's a discussion for another time... My cousin was also really happy to hear that I did something significant with my cryptocurrency mining. Also got a lot of likes from many of my friends. "When I used the power of the sun to solve complex math problems, the world became a better place. When we use the power of the sun to solve even more problems, the world would become an even better place." |
Found this interesting article about Bitcoin mining:
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~mbtaylor/pap...puter_2017.pdf Many of the basic concepts also apply to altcoin mining, except altcoins generally use some other proof of work algorithm and have somewhat different rules on how they operate. |
Status update time again! The most profitable coin I was mining with the Jameson Hasher ASIC turns out to have jumped in difficulty because a "mass produced" ASIC - the Kesha 3+ - was able to mine it. Even the investors caught themselves out because one of those ASIC boxes costs a bit more than a grand and might make about $150/month at current difficulty. Now they're trying to hype up the coin by bragging how much they're making while hiding how much they paid to get there.
I could have actually used my bit of fame to hype up another coin but it would be a one shot deal if it even works. And the risk of fallout from angry investors having a negative impact on my best friend is not worth it - my friendship is worth more than a few tens of bucks. I did get a new mining device - a Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA board with USB 3 expansion. I don't know any friends who have the knowledge to work on FPGAs and have free time to help me, so I'm on my own. I was able to grab a few bits of code online and get it mining pretty easily. The profitability - $5/month or so for a $100 board - is not very good but that's not the full story. The nice part about FPGAs is that they can be used for a lot of other things. Out of curiosity, I decided to look inside the Verilog code that makes it all work. To say it's complicated is a huge understatement. And what's in the picture is less than 1/100th of the code! https://i.imgur.com/MkCu31o.png And the Snapdragons are back to doing what they like to do - using their power for good. Along with part of the ASIC (because one of the coins it mines does not readily convert to a form my best friend can use) and the new FPGA. All of those except the FPGA have paid for themselves long ago. Actually, thinking beyond just money, the FPGA already paid for itself. "A good engineer uses technology to help him/herself. A great engineer uses technology to help others who really need it." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATsIdNJ4pMc So what did I provide to my family with all that? A feeling of happiness because not only am I learning about technology and having fun in the process, I'm using it to make the world a better place. I think about all the events that led me up to now. The two most significant ones are when my dad gave me an electronics kit for my birthday and the time an intern got me into crypto mining. And I conclude this update with a picture of my ASIC board, the Raspberry Pi that manages it, and an old router used to work around a bug in the ASIC. (Short description: broadcast packets are not properly handled by the network controller and direct memory access controller, causing a huge loss of performance on busy networks.) https://i.imgur.com/LYlP52H.jpg |
I don't know the back story but her plight seems to me to be her own doing.
http://www.garythefairy.com/comics/fishy.jpg |
From my understanding, the magazine refused to allow her to look over the article before release to public, she got misrepresented in some embarrassing/hurtful way, and the result was a storm. (Compare that to how Rinoa Super-Genius does content about others - she specifically lets the subject review the content before public release to prevent that kind of problem.)
I realize that many reading are curious exactly what a FPGA is. It is a chip with a large number of programmable gates, hence its name - Field Programmable Gate Array. Easiest way to think of it is more or less a digital breadboard on a chip. One use that is very relevant to this site is that FPGAs are well suited for generating the waveforms used to operate motor inverters (VFDs). That's especially true when implementing modulation schemes more advanced than plain PWM such as Delta Sigma. fpga4fun.com - FPGAs - What are they? For crypto mining, FPGAs tend to do better than CPUs and GPUs because they can be "wired" to compute the hash function as opposed to running a sequence of instructions that together compute the hash function. ASICs do better still because the routing and configuration parts of a FPGA use a significant amount of power and space, but ASICs are only available for some algorithms because they're really expensive to design. And there's a lot of effort being put into new cryptocurrencies to make them not minable on existing ASICs. It's also interesting to note that I solved a paradox in crypto mining. If a better way to mine a coin is shared with the public, everyone jumps on board causing the difficulty to rise and efficiency to fall. Hence sharing a better way to mine is generally not helpful. The most profitable/energy efficient coins tend to be pretty small/unknown with the coiners being very secretive and selfish about what they do, with any sharing being restricted to a small community. So by sharing the mining profits, I (and other coiners) still get to mine efficiently while I contribute something to the community other than increased mining difficulty. And as an Eta Kappa Nu (the honor society of the IEEE) member, I get to show my friends how I live up to the IEEE slogan "advancing technology for humanity". |
I made an unexpected breakthrough in FPGA mining, that I don't think actually involves the efficiency of the FPGA in itself. Combining a bit of hacked code on the PC with some downloaded code on the FPGA, I found a coin that it apparently mines really well. Quite a bit more profit than what it should theoretically make - on the order of $20/month as opposed to $7/month.
My theory of what's going on has to do with how the nonces are incremented. On the CPU version of the mining code, the nonce has a fixed portion to take advantage of SIMD and the variable portion is simply incremented each round because that's very fast to do on a CPU. Addition is relatively slow/complex on a FPGA (propagating the carry signals slows things down) so a LFSR (Linear Feedback Shift Register) is used instead. The nonces "jump around" in a seemingly random order instead of incrementing sequentially like the CPU version does, so the winning nonces are scattered over a wide range. That confuses the accounting code for the pool server so it gives a bigger share of the reward than it should. I have no idea how long this "FPGA boost" trick would last, but I'm not going to detune my FPGA just to make it "right". Instead, I'll only take the share I should be getting and giving the rest to my best friend who will effectively share it with the whole world. Here's a little excerpt of the Verilog code for the LFSR: Code:
reg nonce [32:0];My family is really happy to see me learn about FPGAs because that's a big growing field in modern electronics. |
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