I've been meaning to make a post about getting into a crypto from a frugal/low-income perspective with careful considerations of all the little gains and losses. So here is MY guide.

One of the anxieties with crypto as a complete beginner was the gas fees, exchange fees, deposit fees. (I was on the waitlist for Coinbase Earn for far too long but I finally got in and my frugal crypto experience was complete)

Exchanges - Promotions and Sign Up Bonuses

So as a newbie to crypto, one of the big questions is what are all the exchanges and which offer the best fees overall? As a Canadian, I luckily had the BitcoinCA subreddit that listed a few exchanges along with the power of doing your own research I was able to learn about the various exchanges. I noticed a lot of them had signup bonuses. If I wanted to dip my toes into crypto I could cover any early losses or fees by making use of them. I knew nobody in crypto so I used random referral codes I found on google.

• Shakepay - Deposit $100 get $30
• Newton - Deposit $100 get $25
• Coinberry - Deposit $50 get $20
  

And the list goes on, all of my initial crypto purchases were on brand new exchanges that gave me essentially free crypto for my purchases. I made hundreds from bonuses.

Furthermore I made $130 from multiple Celsius promotion codes + sign up bonus and $10 from depositing into Blockfi when I tested these platforms out.

Passive Income

Staking - Now I used Celsius and Blockfi which are Centralized platforms that basically lend out your crypto like a traditional bank. So by having my BTC/ETH on their platforms it was basically netting roughly 5-6% interest. I did my research and was okay having a lot of my crypto on a platform that wasn't my keys. As of now I use Celsius exclusively and with enough of a crypto balance one could be making a few dollars every week for "staking".

Brave is basically the crypto browser that everyone knows about which can be elaborated on for an entire post but I won't. I did NOT want to stop using Google Chrome but Brave is based on the Chromium engine so you can practically just transfer all of your data from Chrome to Brave and it's like nothing changed. Except you get paid for its ads, which I averaged out to basically getting $5 a month for doing the same internet things you normally do.

Shakepay is a Canadian exchange with a feature where you shake your phone everyday and get free satoshis. It's pretty great and as of today I've received 0.0007 BTC from the feature which nets to about $28. Just for shaking my phone once a day.

Coinbase Earn is a feature on their exchange that basically tries to educate investors about specific projects but it's basically just answer a quiz and get free crypto. I converted it all to Algorand and sent it to my wallet. As of today it was a free $35.

Mining Crypto is something that can be done on just your PC if your GPU is good enough. I used nicehash which is probably the most user friendly and hands off way for beginners like me to mine crypto for money. My GPU is a 2070 SUPER and I rarely play video games nowadays so It really was collecting dust. Instead I made use of it and let it mine crypto. Over the course of a few months I managed to casually mine 0.0033 BTC which is $133. For the most part I only turned it on when I was on my computer so I didn't leave it on 24/7.

Reddit Moons I didn't want to talk about this but this post is for absolute beginners so feel free to look at the reddit moons wiki for more information. Basically I used the cryptocurrency subreddit as a way to read discussions, news, opinions which helped me build the foundation of my knowledge. If I had any questions I could ask and someone would answer. I got rewarded free crypto for engaging in discussion which is nice.

Faucets are an extremely slow passive income source which I still use because why not? There are a huge list of them but I primarily use algorandfaucet since it's been the easiest and simplest one. I basically am getting half a penny a day but it adds up and I have over 1 Algorand just from using the faucet everyday.

Crypto Visa

Okay so I was most interested in crypto.com's ruby visa card, basically hold $500 of their native CRO coin and you'd be able to get a 2% cash back visa with the additional benefit of 100% rebate for Spotify.

Here was my logic: Spotify is something I use on a daily basis. The cost of Spotify for me was roughly $133 EVERY YEAR. So in 5 years I would spend $665 on Spotify or $1330 in 10 years. If I invested in this crypto visa, I'd have all of that money back. In addition you can stake the CRO cash back for 13-14% APY instead of converting it back to fiat. Up to you. Basically this was enough incentive for me to get this card.

Conclusion

Now I come from a low income and frugal lifestyle so I really enjoy free things and little gains (just as much as I appreciate the conventional long-term investing gains). I know not everyone is in a financial situation where all of these small trivial gains is significant to them.

Rough estimate of the amount of "free" crypto I have made is $470 and 4297 moons. I hope this post helps people get some confidence in getting into crypto.