All in One Investing to Get You Started
Two major things to know when investing: Buy and hold. Invest consistently. Knowing these two things will increase your wealth in the long run exponentially.
Invest as early as possible. Time is on your side when it comes to investing. If you start investing when your young, and do it consistently, by the time you retire you’ll have enough money so you’ll never have to work again. The later you start, the less you’ll end up with by the time you retire.
Don’t use an app or robo investor to invest. Just don’t. It will save you a headache when investing and you won’t be losing money. They charge you far more than traditional ways of investing.
If it’s the only way you figure you’ll invest because it is automatically done for you then it might be good for you, but I would not recommend it.
Use Charles Schwab or fidelity or vanguard when investing. They are the best out there. I use fidelity because Charles Schwab charges you a brokerage fee. Vanguard is good if you can put a lot of money into investing ($5,000 or more) but if you can’t fidelity is a much better option. For most college student’s fidelity would be a better option as they allow you to put very little into investing.
Market timing is where a person will move in and out of a financial market or asset based on predictive methods.
Market timing is another example of what not to do. While some people can make some money from timing the market it is best to buy and hold long term. The best and worst days of the market, as stated in the article below tend to cluster close together so if you time the market you might be pulling your money out at the best or the worse time and you won’t know until it is too late.
Also, as the article states, even if you lose money one day “the average one-year return after a historically bad day has been 24%” so you will be fine. Something you hear all the time when investing is “buy and hold”, “buy and hold” as I said at the beginning of the article. There is a reason for this, it works.
Investment Types:
The types of investments people usually hear are bonds, stocks and mutual funds. There are far more than that out there however and this website lists some.
When you are young you should buy stocks over bonds and when you get older you should switch to buying more bonds over stocks. The reasoning is simple. When you’re young you have your entire life to make any possible money you lose back but when you get older, your options are more limited. While no one likes to lose money, as long as you buy and hold when investing and don’t try to time the market you’ll do much better long run and lose far less otherwise.
I would not recommend buying CD’s. While they do perform better than saving’s you run the risk with inflation being an issue as well as not being able to access your money if you really need it. They have a low relative return and it would just be better to invest your money in stocks or bonds.
Cryptocurrency is very hot. I’m not sure why. It’s the riskiest thing you can do with your money and there is no backing unlike the dollar bill or stocks which are backed by gold and how the market is doing. This is something I would never recommend to anyone.
Analyzing stocks:
Now that you know the types of investment options and understand timing the market is the worst thing you can do when it comes to investing (other than using an app that costs you money and not investing), here are some factors you should look into when it comes to analyzing a stock.
Make sure especially to look at how well they do over the years. If they are brand new; as in 5 years, younger, or somewhere around there; I would not recommend investing with them. They may be doing really well when the economy does well; however, will they do well when a recession or depression hits? I wouldn’t want to be the one to find out and lose money when the economy has a hiccup.
Disclaimer: I don’t have a finance degree, however I am a person who is good with money and tries to think before making major money decisions.
