The day has finally come where I feel I need to start taking a monthly income from my ASEAN Hive Community work, so I hope you ASEAN Hivers are understanding and supportive of this move.

🧙‍♂️ First, A Little ASEAN Hive Lore 📜

From the very beginning of the ASEAN Hive Community I've focused on reinvesting the curation earnings into the community, both building up the @asean.hive curation account HP, and more recently powering down all HP over 10,000 to convert to HBD and put in a community HBD Savings account. The monthly dividends from the new HBD Savings account are dispensed to DIAMOND, PLATINUM and GOLD delegators, with the account now worth $2,700+ and generating more than $40 HBD per month for these delegators.

I spend (too) many hours each day manually curating posts, upvoting engagement, hosting weekly challenges, and raffles, creating curations to generate rewards for featured content creators, delegators, and myself, and much more. Luckily I have a cute kitty to keep me company while I work, and I'm glad to see my efforts over the last few years have helped ASEAN Hive to become and remain one of the top communities on Hive, all by grassroots methods.

🧑‍⚖️ What Is Fair? ⚖️

My days are now filled with ASEAN Hive work and house-husbanding, so much now that I have little time to earn a side income from my personal blog. I have also been looking to hire someone to help me with my ASEAN Hive duties, but the hours were too long and the profits far too little for anyone to be interested. Things are now a little different with our success though, and now @asean.hive generates nearly 1,300 HP each month.

I have decided that claiming 1,000 HIVE per month will both motivate me to keep ASEAN Hive thriving and make my family worry less about our financial situation. Additionally I won't have to stress about posting daily to earn a modest living from my personal blog, but rather post at least a few times a week to supplement my ASEAN Hive income, allowing me to focus on ASEAN Hive because it helps so many more families than my own.

💲 Salary Creates Sustainability ♻️

With a little information from the HiveStats.io site, I was able to determine this move is sustainable, and will still allow nearly 300 HP each month to help maintain our continued growth and expansion. This monthly income will allow me to assess whether or not running the ASEAN Hive Community can be considered a job that someone else would be interested in helping with and/or possibly taking over one day. I'd hate to think if something happened to me, that this community would have to shut down because nobody else wants run it as a labor of love.

Powering down at least 250 HP every 7 days will allow for this income to be withdrawn, and additionally I'll try to log the massive amount of hours it takes to run this community for one week/month. This year my wife and I plan to do a soft opening of our mini homestay project, and I will likely not have enough time to work full-time for this community like usual. I have a friend moving here from the UK in three months and he is interested to help with ASEAN Hive because he has medical conditions preventing physical work.

It would be really cool to share the load with someone else, because honestly I'd love to spend more time with my family, more time working outdoors, perhaps even start teaching English or Khmer again, and of course I will have more time for blogging and interacting with the posts in our little community. I realize this post has turned into a ramble of sorts, but I just want to provide some insight as to why I am making this move and also why I think it's actually good for ASEAN Hive's future.

NOTE - If you have any objections to this, or even just feedback, alternatives, anything at all, please use the comments section and tell me what you think. By the way, that's not me in the thumbnail, just an AI generation of what it feels like when I'm doing ASEAN Hive work at 2:00 AM.