I used to think that investing, along with traveling and skiing, was a rich man’s game. It was one of many things that had always been squarely out of reach for a younger me.
I still haven’t done much traveling, and I’ve never skied — but it turns out I was wrong. At least about investing.
Mutual funds, stocks, bonds, IRA’s: there’s certainly a bit of a learning curve. But this vocabulary lesson could make all the difference when you start thinking about retirement and realize you’d like to trade that job in for some time on a beach.
We’ll get more into the specifics in this episode, but here’s the takeaway: the most important thing you can do as far as investing is concerned is to start as soon as possible.
As soon as possible in this case means after higher-interest debts have been paid off and you have enough money to eat comfortably, but we want to start as soon as we can to grab that sweet, sweet compound interest.
After all, as Einstein himself once said:
Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.
And it turns out that there are a few investment options these days with a much lower barrier to entry than I expected. Not everyone requires $1,000 or more just to start — some companies will even let you start investing with no minimum.
Don’t procrastinate — finances, education, and health are three of the most important ingredients to real freedom, and they all take time to build.
If you’re anything like me, this episode will help bring your first investment one day closer.
Things mentioned in this episode:
This week’s episode is sponsored by FreshBooks. We talk a lot about traditional investments in this episode, but one of the best ways to put your money to work is to invest in yourself.
For both of us, that means that the money we put toward freelancing or entrepreneurship was an investment, and that investment got us where we are today — a return much, much higher than the average 7% we might have gotten elsewhere.
Both freelancing and entrepreneurship are made easier by FreshBooks. You can create professional-looking invoices in about 30 seconds, see when your clients have opened your invoices, set up online payments, and keep track of business expenses for tax time. If that sounds like a good investment for you, you can get a free, unrestricted 30-day trial of FreshBooks here.
- Listen Money Matters
- Betterment
- Why Dollar-Cost Averaging Is a Lousy Retirement Investing Strategy
- Does Dollar Cost Averaging Make Sense For Investors?
- How a 1% Fee Could Cost Millennials $590,000 in Retirement Savings
- This is how many fund managers actually beat index funds
- Compound Interest Calculator
Want more cool stuff? You can find all sorts of great tools at my Resources page.
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