One of the most important things to realize in the world of personal finance, is the power when compounding your earnings. It's something I do every single day here on Hive and occurs in the background while I go about my daily tasks.
I first began noticing its utility when I began my financial journey while choosing my first stock. This was pre-crypto, and I spent a lot of time improving my financial education. With a love of reading, I devoured book after book on investing, and that's where I learned about the program known as a "DRIP" or Dividend Reinvestment Plan. It played a big part in helping me select my first stock, and is something I use even today in the world of crypto.
Being new to investing at the time I was cautious and spent six months in research before I made my first investment purchase. Unlike most people just out of their teens, I knew I didn't know it all and sought out the advice of older and wiser mentors. These days many people in their teens and twenties that I run into, think they know everything already and refuse to listen to the advice and counsel of people who've been there before them. That was a mistake I was not going to make as a young investor.
The general consensus was for me to choose something generally safe and conservative as a new investor. Many of the older people I spoke to invested in stodgy utility stocks, choosing the regularity of an income play versus the wild ride offered in the world of growth stocks. Others split their funds between a selection of both, but to a man, they all advised me to find a good utility DRIP to participate in as my first entry as a new investor.
Utility stocks may not be as sexy as the latest tech play, but everyone has a need for water, heating and power. Plus, they tend to offer steady dividend payments, which had me comparing yields amongst the different plans. But which to choose from? There were many all across the country, but the advice from the wise elders was to see if I could find something unique amongst the plethora of utility choices.
And I did.
One thing I noticed was the competition offered by the ability to switch utilities at the time. I switched my electric company from the local monopoly to an out of state firm that specialized in green energy. The marketing was intense to get customers to change their utility providers, but I was on the hunt for a company that found a way to mitigate that.
That's when my research finally paid off. After months of questions, scouring articles, and reading books on the best DRIP plans, I found an awesome company to make my first investment in. Far off the coast of the continental United States, squirreled away in the remote US state of Hawaii, I hit paydirt.
This little company had a unique twist of its own. The firm HEI (NYSE: HE) or Hawaiian Electric Industries, had been providing power to the people of Hawaii for over a century. And due to its location, had almost no competition as the first choice energy supplier for the state. They didn't have to fight to keep customers from being lured away by other electric utility companies, because in Hawaii, like Neo in The Matrix, they were the one. After checking the firm out and receiving compliments from my mentors for my diligent search, I made my first investment.
Watching my quarterly dividend payments come in and be converted into new fractional shares of HEI stock, was like seeing a snowball of dividends slowly accumulating as it rolled downhill. Quarter after quarter the numbers Kept. Going. Up. While I no longer own shares in the company having sold at an opportune time, I did learn sound investment principles which I still carry with me today.
I used the same principles when crypto began to spread its tentacles throughout society both here in America, and all around the world.
We have our own versions of a DRIP here on Hive. Players of Splinterlands may be aware of the ability to delegate SPT tokens as part of the yearlong daily SPS airdrop. If you blog about the game, your earnings in SPT can generate SPS tokens which will have even more "utility" (couldn't help myself there), in the future of Splinterlands. I delegate my SPT to 
Esteemed Hiveian 
I continue to buy more SPT, DEC and NEOXAG tokens from time to time to help accelerate my earnings even more. This virtuous cycle is also aided by other tokens such as BRO, UTOPIS and DHEDGE, which drip fractional shares of their own. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Every day I get to watch my token numbers grow and know that whether I'm blogging, studying, or just going about my business, my crypto is earning even more crypto, which I stake and reinvest again and again. Of course none of this is investment advice, just sharing a principle of the lessons I learned, that have carried over into this exciting new era. I wish you many happy crypto returns along the way!
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Image Credit: [1] @EverNoticeThat Created using Canva
