Moved most assets (ie: keys) from Binance to Ledger last night, multiple wallets for altcoins, here's what I learned

Owning your own key means owning your own coin (truly). Like owning a car with and without a lien, either the bank (in this case Exchange; ie Binance) owns the title, or you truly own the title. That's nice, and more secure.

So I ordered a Nano X, got it set up with my PIN, passphrase and installed Ledger Live on phone and PC, installed all my coins (ie apps) and then went to set up accounts. Since I'm a n00b, I didn't realize that between Binance coin offers and Ledger Live, a lot of the alt coins aren't supported for accounts yet, which I find extremely dumb since they have an app for their private keys. Without going into any more of a rant, I appreciated Ledger taking the time to document for their customers how to setup wallets for my altcoins that Ledger Live didn't support account-wise (but again, has an app for).

Now very nervous, I go to transfer my first withdrawal from Binance (literally ever). I knew there would be a fee for it, but what I had read and forgotten was the network processing fee on the Ledger side. Thankfully, this was cheap as dirt for BCH, but some other coins cost more. I then turned around and bought some BNB thinking that it would give me 25% off on my withdrawal fees...well, it did not (and I'm sure there's something I was reading wrong about that, but I am curious if anyone else made the mistake).

Once that transaction was complete, and I saw my BCH now reporting good in my Ledger Live, I did the same with my LTC and ETH. Those complete, I then realized my BNB assumption wasn't going to pan out until midnight (EST) because Binance.US doesn't report it until then. Okay, dumb but fine...I'll watch a movie with the wife and chill until then.

Fast forward to a few minutes after midnight and go to transfer my DOGE (really high, IMO, fee of 50 DOGE), VTHO/VET (into VeChain Sync, which I had setup earlier) and my ADA into ADALite. Found a decent staking pool (EDEN) for ADA and also paid my fee for that as well. ADA was unlike any of the rest, web-based (Firefox worked btw, even though they say to use Chrome) wallet that has a way of ID'ing your wallet through the browser using public key export process. Anyways, I found it neat.

Now, at this point, I've left my unused BNB in the Exchange, along with my EOS and Ravencoin (which I didn't feel like dealing with and don't have much of anyway).

Through the whole process and even writing this I ask myself: Was this all worth it? Drop over $100 on a hardware wallet to pay all these fees to simply have my own keys? Do I have enough distrust for Binance.US to say Yes to that? Is this a rather elaborate money making scheme by those controlling the networks and exchanges? Maybe, but we're all making money right? That's a question I truly still don't have an answer to.

At this point, I've uninstalled Binance AND ledger live from my phone so I'm not always looking at it and thrown the Nano X into my safe. Now comes the long HODL.

TLDR (Things I learned);

1. Ledger is straight forward to use and setup

2. Just because an app is supported doesn't mean you're going to have all your assets in a nice single-pane view like on Binance

2b. Depending on what coins you have, you could have Ledger AND many many other wallets strode all over your computer and/or phone. This disorganization is annoying.

1. Buy fee + withdrawal fee + Network fee = real cost of moving a coin to the wallet

2. Your coins always live on their blockchain. A hardware wallet only holds your private keys

3. Still not convinced all this juice was worth the squeeze

4. Having BNB didn't save me on withdrawal fees at all