It's Saturday, Week 26, time for my #SaturdaySavers update, and we're halfway through the year !

Image created by AI in NightCafe Studio

Here's my table of progress for the week;

How's The Year Looking At The Halfway Point ?

We're halfway through the year, and I'm really not sure where the time has gone !

Looking at how it's going, probably the main factor is changes in the price of HIVE.

Having started the year at around £0.24, it climbed in the first three months to about £0.34. But since then it's had a series of crashes, each time losing about 15-20% of it's value. With each crash, some people have capitalised by stacking more, while others have lost heart at the reduced rewards and drifted away.

When the first big drop happened, I bought a bunch of liquid HIVE. I've still got some of it sitting in my wallet, but it's now looking over-priced relative to the current cost, so I'm mostly just using it to buy SBI's.

Real life has been expensive recently, so although I'd like to buy more HIVE at the current price (and hope we don't get yet another dump !), it's uncertain how much I've got spare cash for.

Hive Power

I'm 4% behind on my Hive Power goal, which is frustrating. A big part is that I haven't been able to power up as much as I'd like on the last couple of HPUD's.

Rewards for curation are holding up well. I've been working hard to keep my posting rate up, although the rewards have been very variable. Some posts have been picked up by curators and performed very well, but ones posted to less high profile communities now tend to really underperform.

What it tells me is that with HIVE dropping in price and some people fall away while others have to be more selective with their votes, there's a winnowing out process underway. The less popular communities just flicker out and remain as historical unused archives, while the busy ones are picked up by automated curation trails. I guess it's a natural Darwinian evolution.

HBD

HBD is the real success story. Even though I've stopped DCA'ing until the HIVE price recovers a bit, I'm still earning decent rewards, and the monthly interest (due in a couple of days) is making a big difference in keeping on target with my goal.

LEO

LEO has almost hit it's goal, which is impressive. But with real life taking up so much of my attention right now, I'm not finding the time to spend lurking around InLeo, so my monthly earnings there have dropped from about 75 a month to around 55.

Part of it is also that I find PeakD so much nicer to post in that the InLeo interface, particularly with it's template functionality, so that's probably losing me some LEO.

But the reality is that I'm less worried about LEO than HIVE. LEO is a "nice to have" and I think it has a lot of very long term potential, but I'm happy to let it just grow on it's own rather than really trying to push it.

EDS

EDS are still one of my favourite projects. I think I like it because it's relatively low effort; I just buy some occasionally, do a weekly increase in my delegation to @eds-vote, and then sit back and let it quietly grow, dripping liquid HIVE into my account in the meantime.

SBI's

Although the SBI interface on PeakD still doesn't work for me (does it work for anyone ?), and their website isn't working, SBI's themselves are still purchasable and seem to be functioning as they should. I've bought quite a lot of them, and well on the way to completing my goal - I'm looking forward to the day when they get their reporting side of things working again.

Posting & Curation

This last week has been monstrously busy in real life, as I try to speed-build and deploy a secondary e-commerce website and make Royal Mail Click & Drop work properly on the main one.

But I've kept up with posting (admittedly in short bursts rather than the one a day I planned to do). I'm still slightly behind on my goal, but the gap is holding steady and not widening. I'm definitely keeping up with curating, if anything the problem is not enough vote power !

Overall

Overall, I'm happy with progress - most of my goals are on track, and the ones that aren't are fixable.

I'm concerned about the impact of HIVE's price drop, but think the best answer is if we all hold our nerve. I'd love the price to really go up, but I think that's out of our control. We either need some developers (who can actually code, unlike me !) to come up with some new "must have" app or game, or for Hive to hit the internet in a positive way that creates a buzz and brings new users in.

Anyway, that's where I'm at halfway through the year. Enjoy the summer, and I hope all of us hit our goals !

If you're not familiar with SaturdaySavers, it's a fabulous initiative run by @shanibeer writing as @sally-saver on the @eddie-earner account, where we all support each other in getting to our savings goals.

If you are one of my friends reading this (or just someone who tripped over one of my posts), I really recommend this as a great community that's well worth joining.

I'm normally very disorganised about saving, and the support of the wonderful people in #SaturdaySavers has been invaluable in keeping me focused. I can honestly say that without it, my HP would probably be half what it is now.

So join ! You don't have to wait until the start of the year. The best time to start saving is ten years ago. The second best time is right now !