(Cruise to the bottom if you just want the quick stuff)
Ok lets address one thing up front, yes I took out one loan and paid off another. However my car was not an investment that made me money every day. Here in the US many of us are stuck in a life style and system that requires us to own a vehicle to be able to get to work. Right, we have to spend a lot of money before we can even go and make some money. Its really as bad as it sounds. If you have public transportation you do not know how lucky you are. However if you’re in a situation similar to mine then here you go. This is how I did it and this is how I plan to make more.
First off I spent about a year looking into cryptos and hobbyist mining off my home computers. Initially I had a gtx 970 and gtx 760. This made me about $1-$2 a day. Also bitcoin was only worth about $680 (2016). In fact I can still remember how ecstatic I was when it hit $1000. Later that year I decided to invest into an rx 480. This averaged about $1-$1.2 but had days when it was as low as $0.80. So between 3 computers I was lucky to make about $2-$2.50 a day.
I swear this story is going somewhere.
So early 2017 bitcoin was starting to go crazy and because I already had a heads up I knew what was going to happen. I got on the mining band wagon early. I took out a personal loan for around $8000 and build a bunch of mining computers. Man did I make costly mistakes though. In the long run not overly expensive ones and I definitely learned from them.
So really what did I do?
First I bought as many rx 470s as I could. Since my distributor only let me buy 5 at a time in a 48 hour period I ended up buying some 480s. At the time an rx 470 was only $170 and an rx 480 was only $210. Right good luck finding them at that price now.
For the most part at the beginning I would just sell my bitcoin on coinbase as soon as I got a payout. During the peak of the mining boom around May I was making as much as $140 a day. I used the money to buy more gpus and other parts. My primary goal was to make sure I was still profitable for the anticipated bitcoin hard fork or scare of one. And it came and that was totally ok.
During the main decline in bitcoin I used that as an opportunity to sell off some parts I did not wish to use anymore. Although the rx 470s were a great starter choice they are difficult to maintain due to modded bios and running on windows. And right now is a great time to exchange them. I turned 6 rx 470s for $1950. Not bad since they cost me $1020 and I mined with them for about 3 months making about $3.50-$4.50 per card per day with them.
Since everyone is getting into the mining game right now card prices are going way up. Now is the time for me to wait. With my remaining cards and the reduced mining efficiency on Nicehash compared to a few months ago I’m still making around $50 a day. Certainly not the best idea but its what I’m doing, I am utilizing gdax to buy and sell throughout the day to make anywhere from another $20-$30 a day.
(Did you just cruise? Right heres a good place to stop)
So how did I make sure mining was right for me? After determining a general idea of how much I could make per card I setup an excel sheet which auto calculated my cost of power, builds, and loan. After that I determined how much per month I would like to see in profit and set a year goal to see if this was possible. I found that as long as I can make at least $1.65 per card this is a very realistic goal. Heres my excel sheet.
So thats how I did it. In less than 6 months I was able to pay off my car and develop a system that would generate income that would pay off my utility bill and the loan for the build and still put money into the bank at the end of the day.
Whats next? Well more money would always be nice. A steady and predictable income with a cushion. Are you interested in my plans for that? Would you like more detail on my successes and failures during this adventure? Let me know.
