Well, the first thing that comes up for me is that until you feel more financially comfortable, the sooner you stop referring to yourself as "too poor", the quicker that & more easily abundance will flow to you in massive ways.
You are investing by creating content, especially if you're not powering down (which there's no reason to, the SP adding to your votes is more better right now with SBDs from $7-15 and STEEM from $3-3.75). Even just as you're cashing out, using LTC/ETH/DASH saves a lot of money, and you can always just leave little bits in things too. Dogecoin's $0.005, you can afford to hold a couple thousand Doge haha.
Create a CryptoKitties wallet/account and I'll send you a kitty :-) It's just a cute coin, no need to get into the gamification if you don't want to.
I've actually been looking at Gridcoin lately- seems right up my alley!
And I powered down a while back while I was super short on cash, but as soon as I was a little more financially stable I started powering the steem right back up. (Is there any way to cancel a power down entirely?)
Ya, if you click your STEEM Power, you can select "cancel power down"
Cool, thanks!