The Road (Grind) To My First Land Plot: Update #3

After 14 days, I'm methodically and organically accruing the funds to buy my first Splinterlands Plot. While HIVE's price has surged, land prices have primarily remained pegged to a USD valuation between $700-$850, a relief.

While the process is the fun part instead of buying one outright, I've had to reconsider the way I accumulate these funds to buy the Plot in Hive-Engine.

• First off, the STEEM I powered down is stuck right now at a miserable ratio to HIVE. I have 272.8 STEEM parked with no other place to exchange it. I have another 137.8 STEEM that'll be powered down in 2 days. This 410.6 STEEM, currently worth $278, is going to be tough to sell unless I take a decent hit with the trading gap. While I normally wouldn't care, this is 35% of my goal at today's Plot price of ~$800.

• I've stuck to the plan of allocating a fixed $20 per day of DeFi income that I'm holding on another platform. I've accrued $280 worth there after 14 days, which is also oddly about 35% of the Plot at today's price. I refuse to use more DeFi income to simplify this because it's being compounded at over 120% APR, and/or distributed to places to increase upcoming airdrop benefits. While I want this land NFT, I don't want to sacrifice too much opportunity cost on the way.

• I bought 536 DEC with 3.2 HIVE I had on Hive-Engine, but otherwise have simply been earning it for fun in my Splinterlands account. Since the launch of this (ad)venture, I've earned 1,907.699 DEC, which is actually worth just over $19. Sum of 2,343.799 SPS is 2.9% of my goal.

• HBD. While my ability to swap HBD for Hive has gone out the window for now, I have 52.4 HBD liquid in my wallet. I tried throwing most of the over to Hive-Engine when the HBD/HIVE pair had a huge arbitrage, but was slightly too late to the party where people were paying way too much for HBD. I had a nice sell order of the books, but either bots or others kept undercutting me, so I gave up and shipped it back for a slight loss from transfer fees. Two of my last post did very well (thank you), so I have a projected 40 HBD more coming in over the next 7 days. Not counting this post here, that'll give me 92.4 HBD, for roughly $92. This accounts for almost 12% of the current ~$800 cost.

Checkpoint: 35% + 35% + 2.9% + 12% = 84.9%.

• With 85% technically accounted for on paper, I could feel good about this progress. However, the STEEM swap is going to drop that 35% allocation down a good bit unless I find another way to dump it. Network, transfer and swap fees will also chew up a little more. As I've mentioned before, I considered buying one good Splinterlands card to resell instantly with STEEM>CREDITS, but would be risking it if the buyer paid with CREDITS. I can't swap CREDITS for anything except other cards, etc..

Questions: Is there always a 5% fee on a Splinterlands card sale, or is it just when the sale is on third-party platforms? Is there a way to set card sale payment as for DEC only?

• I'm not counting the sale of any Hive Punks as I originally did. I only have one listed and have the rest hanging out in my gallery. I'm not looking to sell these for a quick flip. I'll hold most of them for a while for better or worse.

• I've accrued some SPS from the airdrop, but it's fairly small, and the price keeps dropping. I'm planning on simply holding this and not swapping. I may also just keep the DEC too, but that's to be decided later.

• With the $20/day DeFi interest allotment, that'll be roughly 2.5% more to goal per day if the Plot prices hold. If I need about 20% more to make my target, before any future HBD rewards are accounted for, that's about 8 more days.

• I'll do my best to post once a day from now on and not skip any days to keep building my liquid payouts. Powering down is not part of my plan, but I'm not attached to HBD. I don't want to put any expectations on my blog payouts, so I'll treat every upvote and HBD I get as a gift towards my objective. I think it's a safe bet to get 2-3 HBD a day though, but will simply tally the results in my next post instead of any lame quota strategy.

That's my progress for now. I'm getting there and am eager to get this done. Ironically, I saw a Lev1 VALNAMOR summoner for only $999 on Splinterlands' in-game market, but I checked an external market to see that the transaction to buy it completed 45 minutes before. It sucked to get my hopes up of grabbing that card with other funds since the price was a relative steal, but the Splinterlands site was extremely delayed in refreshing the current inventory. Sigh, got my hopes up for the card I've been eyeing for weeks now. Even if used it for a bit, it'd be such a good card to hold or resell later. What a tease.

As of now, I have two Splinterlands accounts to get as many chests as possible for my level. I've been doing almost all of the quests and pulling a few cards from time to time. I haven't been or won't be selling cards for now. I just don't have that much yet and they're only worth about $550 at this time.

Lastly, if anyone has a clever way to trade Steem for anything without a big bid/ask gap, please let me know. I'll presume that I'll opt to hold the Steem for later and just keep earning new funds for this Plot, although it'd be nice to get this in my wallet and then focus on funds for card packs.

Thanks for following and all of your support,
@steemmatt