I want to thank @crollins, @greensmile, and @madstacks for leasing me their SP. Today, I got the final installment, putting me over the amount of my own SP that I leased out earlier.
Having 1,500 SP to work with on STEEM is so much better than running on 50 SP. I had forgotten what it was like when I first signed up. Upvotes do not count for much. Posts do not earn as much unless people with high SP give you a vote. It’s tough. Especially when not very many people follow you.
Rather than bail out on the people who leased my own STEEM, I decided that it would be better to lease other people’s STEEM. My view on this is similar to how real estate investing works. Allow me to explain.
If I owned three houses, I could lease them out for rental income. This is like leasing out STEEM, except that with STEEM you can change the size and number of houses. For this example, let us go with three houses.
If I want to increase my income, I would need to buy additional houses. If I do not have enough money to buy a house, all I need is a down payment.
The monthly payment on a mortgage note would have to be less than what the properties would bring in on rents. My cost this month is approximately 30 SP. I didn’t do the maths before putting out the lease requests.
My rental income is roughly 15 SP per month. I would need to create another 15 SP or more per month to break even this month. In retrospect, I should have limited my personal leasing to about 1000 SP, bringing my cost down to 20 SP per month. So, my shortfall would only be about 5 SP, which I could optimistically make up with creation and curation.
Ultimately, most of the generated STEEM will get put into SP. The more properties I have to lease, the more cashflow they can generate to buy more houses. The greater my SP ownership, the greater the cashflow to buy more SP. At some point, I will find the correct ratios in which I can lease back STEEM and still come out in the black. For now, I’m guessing about 2:1 ratio of out to in. It may be better to suffer through lower rewards in the short-run to be able to reinvest more. Definitely, it is not worthwhile to operate with low SP. Leasing SP for my own use may be good leverage.
This brings me to realize something important as the price of STEEM has been rising. It will be more costly to buy STEEM for leasing. 20 STEEM to lease 1000 SP was about $7.60 at $0.38. Now that we are at $0.42, it would cost $8.40 for the same 20 SP. Eventually, if prices continue to rise, it could make leasing with fiat more painful. At least when you use earned STEEM, you are playing with house money.