HOW TO: Power Down and Withdraw Your Steem Power In The Most Effective Way

Steem Power? Powering Down?

If you are new here, Steem Power is the store of money/value/power that is built up from part of the payout you get from posts on steemit. Currently, by default, half of your post earnings goes into Steem Power that you cannot spend immediately and half goes into Steem Backed Dollars which you can withdraw and use immediately.

Steem Power is what determines your capacity to make powerful votes on Steemit - the more Steem Power you hold, the more your votes are worth - plus the more you can earn through curation when you upvote posts from other people.. So it's good to have more Steem Power and you can earn more in the long term as a result of keeping it in the system.

Powering Down is the process of withdrawing your Steem Power so that you can spend it in the real world. In the past this process took 2 years and you would receive weekly payments over that 2 years that amounted to your total Steem Power in the system AT THE TIME THAT YOU ACTIVATED THE POWER DOWN PROCESS. Thankfully, now powering down only takes 13 weeks and not 2 years - so it becomes a more viable way of using steemit to get paid and live life.

The Best Way to Power Down

What I did not realise until yesterday is that when you activate the power down process (from within your wallet - click on the arrow next to 'Steem Power' and then choose 'Power Down'), the payouts are calculated based only on your current amount of steem power - they are not adjusted in subsequent payouts to take account of increases in SP that you may receive in the future. The net result is that if you activate the power down process you will always receive payouts that are equal to 1/13 of your SP value at the time you started the process and this will NOT result in you retrieving all of your SP. This is actually a good thing from the perspective that you probably won't ever remove ALL of your SP - so you will be able to continue using Steemit (you can't use Steemit if you have zero SP). However, if you are continually earning from posts on Steemit, you may notice that your SP value is going up at a rate that is higher than the rate you are receiving it in the power down process - so your overall SP is not actually going down at all! You might like that, but since I urgently need money I currently need to access as much of it as possible - so.. I found a nice 'trick'.

Restarting the Power Down Process After Each Payout

It is possible to cancel the power down process at any point and restart it, which will recalculate the payout value for the power down payouts. By canceling the power down process after you receive a payout and then restarting it, you will ensure you always receive the maximum possible power down payout - instead of receiving only a small fraction that does not reflect your growing level of SP. You can do this from your wallet easily and the wallet displays how many days you have left until the next payout.