Lately, I've been wondering about what it what would take to do Steem for a living. Full-time. First time I was pondering that was around new year, where obviously STEEM & SBD prices were really high and it would've been much easier to do Steem for a living. Now, it's so much more difficult, but I suppose there's still quite a bunch of people who do, or at least could do Steem as their only / main source of income.

I recalled the idea after reading @timcliff's interview with @neoxian who gave a number of examples of how to make money (or STEEM) and what kind of ROI (I suppose also in STEEM) to expect from investments. Very insightful series by Tim, so I even flipped through all the other interviews with large Steem stakeholders (100k+ SP).

How much monthly income do I need?

There we go with the most difficult question right away. How much do I need to make in terms of STEEM / SBD in order to be able to pay my bills? But not only that, I would also want my stake to remain stable in terms of the voting value that I have. Let's do them one by one:

• I probably need around 3000$ (roughly 2600€) net / month of income because of my family, maybe less
• At the current price, this would make about 3750 STEEM and/or 3000 SBD or liquid income per month
• In addition, I need to account for inflation / dilution of my stake of ~8% per year to keep a stable income

What does this translate into?

Now, that means that if I make a 15% ROI as suggested by @neoxian, roughly half of that would go into staking up against dilution, the other half I could liquidate. So 3750 STEEM / month = 45000 STEEM / year, at a rate of 7% I would need roughly 640k STEEM. Phew, that's quite a lot.

In addition: How do you actually make 15% ROI (STEEM denominated)? I wouldn't know for sure. I suppose that the good bots are pretty close to that, maybe 12-13%. If I simply voted my own posts 10 times a day, the rewards would be around 30$ per post pre-curation (according to this calculator), which makes ~23$ reward post-curation. If I really do that 300 times a month, it seems like I'd really get close to my 15% (23x300x12 / 640000x0.8 = 0.16). Ok, that's not gonna make me one of the most popular people on Steem, but it is kind of a backup plan.

That's not the only thing, though

Alright, I didn't really say I want a passive income by just ROI on my stake, so let's imagine I actually do post awesome content (I wish my hopythetical self good luck with that!) and get some upvotes from actual, real people. I don't think I'd do 10 posts a day, more like 2-3 plus comments. That makes about 75 posts per month. If I had to cover half of my income with posts, it means that on average I'd need 1500 / 75 = 20$ payout for myself per post, apart from selling my own votes for this 15%+ ROI on stake. 20$ from other people (obviousl without buying votes) sounds pretty decen and kinda doable, given that my content is actually awesome, which it likely won't.

Roundup

In any case, this would bring me to needing

• About 320k SP, invested at ~15% ROI
• 75 posts per month at an average net reward value of 20$ post-curation
• A stable STEEM price

Sounds pretty unrealistic, so I'll have to postpone my "going all-in on Steem" lifestyle a little longer ;-)

Maybe, if any of the people steeming for a living (or anywhere close to that) read this, you could share some insights of what it's really like to do it and what it takes to get there, apart from what I wrote above.

As a sidenote, I'd wish I'd be at Steemfest right now, so I hope everybody's having a ton of fun there. I'll be following the action from home via the channels that I've been given.