Hey @wakeupkitty.. first thank you for the nice words... And the payouts that are below 1.9 cents turn into dust (they don't get paid anything)... So the only way to be sure is to have a .03 vote on your post so that you know you get paid. Does that make sense?
And if you want me to help you with any other financial topic here, I will be glad to do the best I can to explain it to you! Just ask, I'm here to help :)
I am very gratefull if you can tell me how I know what the value of my vote is. I understand now it's useless to vote if it's worth nothing. Mostly I see it was zero. So how can I figure out about it and how/when will that change?
the way the vote values work is they round it... so if it shows 0.00 then that means it is 0.004999 or lower... once it hits 0.005 then it will show up as 0.01 because the system rounds... To find out exactly how you vote is calculated, you can go here and type in 1000 x your SP... and then divide it by 1000 to get the decimals.
https://steemnow.com/upvotecalc.html
so if you have 30 sp, then put in 30,000 and see the value (30,000 would give you $7.96) so if you divided that by 1000 you would get 0.00796 ... and that would be your vote value!