What are the benefits to thinking of Steem as an investment vs considering our earnings extra income to spend? Financially once of the largest steps we can take to financial freedom is thinking like an investor instead of a consumer. On day seven of Steem basic training, we take that step as we decide consciously whether we are going to be an investor on Steem, or if we are just going to use this as a paycheck and take everything we make out as soon as we can. View previous basic training days and more guides at http://steem.guide and watch the video on 
As we start getting the rewards from our posts on Steem, we may be tempted to just cash it out right away and celebrate. I've seen people with as much as twenty or thirty thousand dollars in payouts on a post, just take all the money straight off the platform and sell it, and miss the majority of the opportunity on Steem.
We work hard on Steem to do these blog posts. If we are lucky we have somewhat of a payout coming after seven days and when we have got that payout coming, then our initial response might be to just go straight to our wallet and say, "Okay. How do I sell this?"
If we have got some Steem or Steem Dollars we might initially be thinking, "How do I sell this? How do I turn this into real money?"
What I've noticed is that my friends that took that approach with Steem have missed the majority of the opportunity for success. Meanwhile, the friends that I have who have continued to double down, to reinvest, have done extremely well on Steem. I will show you one in particular who has done exactly that.
My friend Joe Parys has had several posts that have had huge earnings. We will take a look at his profile. What @joeparys has done since he started, he has both earned very well on Steem and he has continued to reinvest.
Now, he didn't start out earning a whole bunch of Steem. He didn't start out with a bunch of followers. He started out just posting basically to me. I was one of the only people that read it.
What Joe has done is continue to keep posting and posting. For his initial posts back when Steem and Steem Dollars were worth a dollar, he was lucky to make five dollars on a post just from me upvoting.
You will notice that most of the posts he made initially were voted up mostly by me and he didn't get a big payout for a while, and he kept posting and kept posting, then he got some higher payouts on here.
After 20-plus posts, he introduced himself and got a higher payout, and then he has one post that earned about $300.
He continued posting, which is often a big let-down after having a post that earns a lot to go back to posts that just earn normal. Then, I continued to upvote Joe and on some posts, he was getting a little bit more, and then over time he has continued to earn more and more on his posts.
He started using voting bots with the money he has earned to promote his posts. He has continued to buy more and now he has had some posts that have done extremely well all on their own and had huge earnings.
This one, in particular, is a $914 payout. Half of that in Steem Dollars, which at the time was worth about $10, which means thousands of dollars earned on this one video and consistently earning good now.
If we look at @joeparys' account, what we see is that Joe now has an account worth about $33,000 today, and Joe has not put in maybe more than ten or twenty percent of that in terms of actually buying into Steem.
What he has done is to continue to reinvest what he has earned. He reinvested in terms of taking the Steem Dollars and selling them into Steem, and then powering them up into Steem Power. Joe has also used his Steem Dollars earned with upvoting bots to then vote his posts up even higher.
Voting bots helped him to get more visibility on his posts and to get over 3,000 followers since he started in July 2017. It's six months later and Joe Parys is now one of the top users on Steemit.com, probably top 10, if not 5 percent, in terms of reputation and in terms of investment.
Now, the thing that happens with this is an investment mindset, that this is not something to just make a quick profit on today, to take it out and put it in our wallet, and celebrate, but that this is a long-term investment, that we serve on Steem, and we contribute to the blockchain on Steem.
Then, we have something that can potentially pay us out indefinitely like a retirement plan, like holding stocks, maybe not bonds, but like holding something of value. We must think like these Steem Dollars and Steem powered up into Steem Power, is something of value where we get indefinite influence off of that.
Therefore, it's incredibly powerful to think of our work on Steem as an investment, and an investment in our future online, especially as Steem continues to grow, as the value of Steem grows along with the number of users on Steem.
Looking at this as an investment is the opportunity of a lifetime. I've seen some of my other friends just put some money in and hoping to make some quick money back out by the price going up, or did not make it through the beginning, because the beginning on Steem is often brutal.
Joe Parys is one of the top instructors on Udemy.com. He has a very good income online already and he didn't think it was looking like it'd be worth his time getting started making $3 or $5, even $30 on a post that he worked hard on.
He didn't think this seemed like it was worth his time just on the amount of effort he put in versus the amount of money he got back out of it in the short term, and I explained this is a long-term thing, this is an investment, you keep working on it and you are building something that has gigantic potential.
I hope today this is useful to think of Steem from the beginning as an investment instead of something that's just a profit machine because that's how I think of Steem. I think of Steem today as an investment and I'm all-in on Steem as an investment.
I've got essentially all of my retirement, I've got everything in Steem as far as my investments go. I don't have any other investments. I have Steem Power and that is how I look at Steem.
You can see the results from that as I go to my profile. I bought about $50,000 of Steem by selling all of my stocks, all of my other cryptocurrency investments, and I'm grateful today to have $500,000 worth of Steem along with 23,000 plus followers, along with consistent earnings on my posts, even though I run a voting bot and don't vote anyone else up, people are kind enough to vote my posts up.
I'm very grateful for that and all of that comes from being an investor instead of a consumer. As long as we are consumers we never have enough money and we essentially always spend what we earn before we get a chance to have our money make money for us.
The one percent holding the majority of the wealth in this world, we think of wealth, we think of money, we think of earnings as investments. These are not something to just go buy a new car with and try to look wealthy, this is something to invest in.
I hope this has been useful to avoid the worst trap that happens to us on Steem after we have actually earned something, we don't think of it as an investment we think of it as shopping money or a little extra money. Those of us who reinvest in Steem and hold it as value, we are likely to make something way more valuable than a retirement portfolio somewhere else.
We are likely to make the investment of a lifetime in ourselves and in Steem by taking our Steem Dollars earnings, trading them on the market to buy Steem.
We go back into our wallet to power up that Steem into Steem Power, and then we have reinvested.
We can leave that Steem Power alone indefinitely, and we keep powering up.
Now, obviously, at some point, we might want to take a little bit of a paycheck here and there.
What I did, I just put my earnings back in for months before I took any paycheck, then when the price blew up, I took some paychecks for a while, and then for months more when the price went back down, I just reinvested.
Now that the price blew up again, I've withdrawn some, and yet all my total withdraws are less than 10% of what my account is worth.
In other words, I've kept most of all the principle intact and continued to actually earn interest that way.
If you just literally refresh my account, you will see that my Steem Power goes up all the time, and that's because I'm actually earning a little bit of interest all day, every day.
Thank you very much for experiencing day seven of Steem Basic Training.
I hope this has been useful for you.
Thank you for reading.
Thank you for reading this blog post, which was originally filmed as the video below.
If you found this post helpful on Steem, would you please upvote it and follow me because you will then be able to see more posts like this in your home feed?
Love,
Jerry Banfield with edits by @gmichelbkk on the transcript from @deniskj
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