http://i.imgur.com/R5v3fl0.jpg
<sup>[source](http://www.cleanegroup.org/wp-content/uploads/blogphoto-Solar-Wind-Battery-Storage.jpg)</sup>

I'm not ashamed to say that I live paycheck to paycheck, and I'm hardly alone in that boat. My growing readership on Steemit has given me hope of escaping that cycle, but as anybody who has been on here for any length of time will tell you, Steemit income is highly variable.

There was that huge surge last Summer during which some of my posts made over a thousand dollars, and making several hundred per post was the norm. I should've saved most of that but a lot of stuff in my life badly needed fixing. 

I was wearing tattered, worn old clothing from a decade ago, my PC was running a 2005 CPU and GPU, I was working in the VR industry but couldn't afford my own headset, my ebike had been torn up for scrap by a dickhead who shall not be named here, etc. 

The sudden massive influx of money fixed all of these problems. I now have a modern PC and VR headset, so I can actually test the games I'm writing and consulting for. I have a brand new top shelf ebike which saves me from dumping money into gas for my car, and insurance for an electric road scooter I have since sold off (the ebike does the same thing but doesn't require insurance)

But I didn't save any of it, except what was automatically stored up in my account as Steem Power. A man my age ought to have emergency funds of at least a few thousand dollars. To that end I've begun putting away roughly half of what I make on here per week. 

http://i.imgur.com/wkJW020.jpg
<sup>[source](http://krisdedecker.typepad.com/.a/6a00e0099229e8883301bb0820445e970d-pi)</sup>

How does that relate to solar power? Or wind turbines, or any other similar form of energy? It's highly variable. The weather does not always cooperate. The wind is not always blowing, the sun is not always shining. Whether it's energy or money you're concerned with, if your income is unreliable, you need a buffer. Some way to store it. 

Even a small amount of storage capacity smooths things out. If you have batteries, like the Tesla Power Wall, then when the sun isn't shining you can run everything in your home off the battery pack. During the day, if it becomes cloudy, you're still making some energy with the panels but the battery makes up the difference. 

The equivalent would be that long, miserable dry spell between last Summer and this one. Hopefully that won't prove to be a recurring pattern, but if it does, I plan to ride it out by saving much more of my Steemit profits this time around. This is a lesson I should not have had to learn by direct experience, but better late than never.

Nobody would be more pleased than myself if Steemit were to become a reliable, steady source of income you could pay utilities or rent with. But it isn't "baseload" yet, if it ever will be. It's very much a fickle, wildly fluctuating source of supplementary income at best. At least for me. 

Until then I'm going to start socking away my pennies, because having endured nearly a year of paltry earnings during which time I was barely keeping my head above water, I am now determined not to make that mistake a second time. 

You'd think, given my experience with solar power systems and batteries, that I would've already worked this out for myself. I never claimed to be a smart man, haha. I do eventually learn though. Let the saving begin. 

http://i.imgur.com/DZzLpNB.jpg
<sup>[source](https://www.choice.com.au/~/media/0ade8655a42b4dd18bffdc7e7a86ffc8.ashx?jq=80&w=994&h=559)</sup>