Coming from a developing country (Philippines), I'm thankful and hopeful crypto will continue to grow because it gave me more than 1 month's worth of groceries and bills in a time when I didn't have money coming in

I literally would not have enough money to buy groceries, pay for electricity, internet, and everything else this past month without crypto.

I just wanted to share my experience because I read a lot of posts and comments about cryptocurrency that make it sound like it's a far-off technology that's years away from being usable by the common person.

But it's already real and concrete for me coming from a 3rd world country.

And there's more people than I expected in this sub who are in a similar situation. I made a post about how I save from crypto a few months ago and got a lot of questions from redditors here who:

• Live in a country with low wages and low cost of living (but this doesn't matter if your salary is low too)
• Not a lot of local opportunities to escape the cycle and improve their situation
• Get work abroad and paid in foreign currency
• Survive at the mercy of Paypal and its fees

It's been a rough few months for me because my income dropped massively when a couple projects ended.

I was forced to dip into my emergency savings for the year to cover bills for our household, and this emergency fund was 100% funded by crypto.

For context, I've been able to save around $150/month in the past half year because I started getting paid in crypto (XRP). Before that, a HUGE chunk of my income was reduced by Paypal transaction fees, conversion fees, and bank fees.

$150 here is worth around 3 weeks of groceries for a household of 5 people.

It was good timing too because I used some of it to cover a few emergencies that popped up this year (like roof repairs to fix my parent's house after a typhoon).

Now I avoid all that by paying for bills and groceries directly from the app wallet where I receive XRP. I still lose out on some because the app uses a spread for buying/selling XRP, but much less than if I stayed with Paypal.

As cyrptocurrencies continue to grow I imagine more wallet competitors will pop up and help reduce this spread to let people save even more money. Even better if the actual utility companies start accepting crypto so there will be no need to convert it.