People talk a lot about setting goals, benchmarking and such things... and I am definitely in agreement that they are important.

Our yardstick is often "this year vs. last year" and every now and then people might extend that goal setting out towards five years.

Beyond that, the future starts to look increasingly hazy and it becomes much harder to have meaningful visualizations, especially given increasingly turbulent geopolitical scenarios making it much harder to project what might be "important" in the future.

Even so, it's pretty common for fresh college graduates to be told that "it's never too early" to start financial planning for retirement.

In spite of that advice, we're likely to hear an older person say that and think "oh, come on... that's 40 years away!" But maybe our skepticism actually has a point: Who knows what "retirement" will even look like, in 40 years' time, given the march of automation and AI. What would a person even be retiring from?

Meanwhile, dedicated long term saving and investing is hard because the majority of us live lives in which it seems like "there's always SOMEthing" unexpected that comes along and results in our having to dip into our savings.

Which brings me to some thoughts about Hive.

On paper, Hive has a really interesting (and convenient!) built-in mechanism to help people stick with a long term investing plan, in the sense that all our curation rewards and typically 50% of our creator and engagement rewards are immediately "saved" in a sort of out-of-reach location called HivePower. Even if you think you want it for something, it'll take you 13 weeks to get your hands on it! And that's often inconvenient.

That's a cool thing to keep in mind if you're fairly young and reading this... if you are even moderately active in the Hive ecosystem and "make a deal with yourself" to not touch your HivePower... that has the potential to build up and really become something, if you stick with this community for a long time!

What I have mostly been telling myself is that it is "not real money," in the sense that don't actually have it in my pocket and choose not to spend it... it's more like a retirement scheme that takes a considerable amount of effort to cash out early.

Conversely, I am sure there are those among us who are getting a bit older and can't help but think to ourselves "I wish Hive had been around when I was 21!"

Ostensible "experts" might say that long term savings takes primarily discipline, but "in real life" your sense of discipline can be helped a lot by placing the ostensible nest egg behind "a fence, of sorts." After all, life is filled with lots of "temptations" and if the means to grab such a temptation is easily accessible, it seems more likely that our long term investment plans become jeopardized.

Personally, I'd be one of the ones wishing that Hive had been "a thing," many many years earlier!

But how long can our goals really be?

Aside from a flip answer like "as long as we want them to be," typically our longest time horizon is precisely the one from before: College to retirement.

Assuming for a moment — which, I realize, is always dangerous! — that things stay the same, consider the following slightly mindblowing calculation: Let's say you were 22 years old and you were to put just 100 HBD into Hive Savings today (earning 20%) and then leave it completely alone till you're 62... you'd have 146,977 HBD!

Of course, there's no telling whether HBD will still be a thing in 2066, nor what that would be worth in 2066, and the entire idea is highly speculative... but it's still a pretty cool thing to consider!

Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!

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