![image.png](https://ipfs.busy.org/ipfs/QmZAKoaPdAscfFFxnrupn2scKo1NMLeL9J3gDGW2oMJHZd)


I guess all of us have asked ourselves this question. I believe the answer depends on where you live, on what your expectations are, if you can invest a decent amount of money and also if you can and are willing to interact with other users.

Where you live plays a big part in this, for someone in Canada or the US, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand Japan or other very developed nations you will need more money to live decently, but also because salaries are way higher you probably can invest more money into Steem.

In less developed countries, you can live on far less but probably you don’t have enough liquidity to be able to invest in Steem, this makes it harder to earn money on Steemit.

Let’s say someone has been able to get to a level where, with the 50/50 cash out option that person is able to receive $1,000.00 in cash-able SBD, this is certainly not enough for someone in Germany to live off of, but for someone like me who lives in Honduras it is quite enough to cover my expenses completely, heck I think I can manage on $700.00 because things are much cheaper around here.

But in reality to be able to get to that level of income you have to invest enough to have at least some 60000 SP, which if Steem were stable at 1 Steem=USD2.00 would make my vote worth somewhere around $6.00, just from curation with 10 full votes I would get about $15.00 a day plus if I write an article daily I think with a self upvote plus all the people who would vote for me based on my vote value and the knowledge that if I return the vote it would have a good value, I could get at least $60.00 per article, this would give me about $1,000.00 a month ready cash, of course I would have to invest USD120,000.00 for this to happen.

But it would be a good investment as I would also get the same amount in SP, increasing my Steem by about 10% yearly plus some USD5,000.00 from curation. Better said a return of about 25% on my money every year. This is parting from the concept that Steem would remain stable, it could also crash and I would lose my investment, but it could also go all the way to USD10.00 and my investment would grow five fold, which would be reflected in my daily earnings, better said I could get 5 grand a month.

Now, this can only happen to people who have a nice stash of cash available and even then at $2.00 per Steem if they are from a developed country, they could not make a living with Steem, only if Steem’s price were to sky rocket would they be able to, still it is way better than putting that money in any other investment scheme that I can think of.

For people in poorer countries the goal is smaller, because they can actually live on USD1,000.00 a month, of course this varies on the country and if you live in a larger city or a smaller community, but I think in Latin America, at least USD1,000.00 is enough to get by on, in some place like in Honduras you can get by on less as I said before.

The problem is that most people in third world countries don’t have the cash to invest so they have to start from scratch, and it is difficult, you can believe me. That is why we have to look for alternative ways to get votes, because it is difficult to get high value votes if you don’t have much to give in return so we end up in curation trails, upvote bot programs and some even try the begging approach which really doesn’t work.

For example if you are good at developing apps you could get a good return, but if you are good at that you’re probably better off selling your expertise somewhere else. So most of us really don’t have that much to add to the value of Steemit except a lot of energy and probably the will to not quit.

So I guess for the majority of people Steemit is a place for the future, work every day and grow your account a little every day, I know it will take a long time but with patience you can probably do it, but also Steem could take off, its price could soar, and that would make getting to the goal of living off of an internet platform that much more reachable.