How to Invest for Beginners
Let's say you want to get started with this investing thing, you might have a bit of money saved, it's probably not enough for a house, but you reckon i should probably invest this in something maybe you've heard on the news about Tesla or Netflix or Amazon. And how if you'd invested ten years ago in Tesla, then you'd be a millionaire by now or things like that. But if you're new to the game, this whole investment thing can seem like a really complicated black box. Like, how do you even buy a stock? What even is a stock? Do you just go on Tesla.com and buy some Tesla? Like how does it work? And if you try and look into this, you get all these acronyms being thrown around like Roth, IRAs and 401Ks in America or like ISAs and LISAs in the UK. And on top of that, there is the anxiety that we all have. That i know investing is risky, and i don't want to lose all of my money.
So in light of all of that, this is the ultimate guide on how to get started with investing, it is the article I wish I would have had five years ago when i first started investing in stocks and shares. And we're going to cover this by thinking about investing in ten different bite size steps. So follow the article with us to the end.
Investment Course For Beginners
What Happens To My Money Over Time?
So the first one is forgetting about investing completely and just thinking what happens to my money over time by default. And if you've studied economics, you will know that your money loses its value over time, thanks to something called inflation. Inflation is generally around about the 2%, 2.5% mark, and so that means that every year stuff costs about 2% more than it did the year before.
For example, in 1970 in America, a cup of coffee cost 25 cents, but in 2019 that same cup of coffee cost $1.59 cents, that is inflation in action. And so let's say, you've got one thousand pounds in your hand right now, and for the next ten years, you just stash it under your mattress and you never look at it again. In ten years time, your thousand pounds is not going to be worth one thousand pounds anymore because everything will have increased by two percent ish every year. So the value of your money will have fallen, and so if you put your one thousand pounds under your mattress for ten years, you will lose money over time, and this is obviously not good. Even if you put your money in a savings account like these days, a savings account will give you like 0.2% interest, which means your money goes up by 0.2% every year. But because inflation is up by 2%, you're still losing money over time. And again, this is not good.
How Do We Stop Our Money From Losing Value Over Time?
And the answer is that, if we had a hypothetical savings account, one that was, let's say, an interest rate of 2.5% that would match roughly the rate of inflation. So inflation means everything goes up by 2.5% in terms of price. But our money in our savings account also goes up by two point five percent each year, therefore, we're technically not losing money over time. Investment is not the same as interest, but we'll come back to that a bit later. But the point here is that we don't just want to not lose money, which is what happens at our 2.5% rate. We actually want to make money, and that brings us on to question number three.
How Do We Make Money?
Now, let's go back to our hypothetical savings account. If hypothetically, we could have a savings account that was giving us a 10% interest rate, this would never happen because that's just way too high. But hypothetically, if it did, that means that every year we'd be making 10% of the value of the money in our savings account. So, for example, if i were to put one hundred pounds in a savings account right now, then next year it would be worth one hundred ten. And then the year after, it'll be one hundred twenty one because it's 10% of then the one hundred ten and then it would be one hundred thirty something and this would very quickly compounding. So that in ten years time, my one hundred pounds will have become two hundred fifty nine pounds. And and if we adjust for inflation, then our money is still worth two hundred and six pounds in ten years time.
This is pretty good, we have more than doubled our money by just putting it in this hypothetical 10% interest savings account. And it really doesn't seem like it would do that because 10% feels like a small amount of money, but if you extrapolate 10% over ten years, you actually double your money, which is pretty awesome. Sadly, these hypothetical 10% saving accounts don't really exist because it's just way too high and real life is not that nice? These days, most savings accounts in the UK, and i imagine around the rest of the world as well offer less than a 1% savings rate, which means you're actually still losing money over time. But we do have other options to try and get us to this magical nirvana of like, you know, this 10% saving thingy, and that is where investments come in.
What Is An Investment?
And the answer is that an investment is something that puts money in your pocket. For example, let's say you buy a house for one hundred thousand pounds and you want to rent it out to people. There are two ways that's an investment, there are two ways you're making money from it. Firstly, let's say you're charging some rent to the people living in your house, let's say you're charging them eight hundred and thirty pounds a month. That becomes ten thousand pounds a year, and so every year you are making ten thousand pounds in rental income, which is 10% of what you originally paid for the house. That means that in ten years time you'll have paid off the one hundred thousand pounds that you put in because you're making ten k a year. And beyond that every year you're just making ten thousand pounds in pure profit. So that's pretty good.
But secondly it's an investment because the value of the house itself would probably rise over time. In general, there is a trend in most developed countries that house prices tend to rise over the long term. And so your house will probably be worth more than one hundred thousand pounds in ten years time. And in fact, in the UK, historically in the past, some people have said that house prices have doubled every ten years. So maybe your house is worth close to two hundred thousand pounds and so you've made money off of the rental income. But you've also made money off of the capital gains, which is what we call it when an asset increases in value over time.
But the problem is that buying a house is a little bit annoying, you need to have quite a large amount of money for a deposit, you need to get a mortgage, you need to actually have the house, you need to sort out the rental management, rent it out to people. All of that kind of stuff, if only there were a way of investing without a having a large amount of money to start with and b without having to put that much effort into managing the asset as well. And that brings us on to investing in shares. And for me, basically, one hundred percent of my investment portfolio is entirely shares. I have a tiny percentage in bitcoin and i own this house, but I don't consider this house an investment.
What Are Shares?
So buying shares is probably as close as we're ever going to get to this magical savings account that just returns some amount of money each year. And the idea is that when you buy a share, you are buying a part ownership of the company that you've got the share in. For example, let's say that Apple have a particularly profitable year because lots of people have bought iPads as per my recommendations. And because Apple are feeling kind, they are choosing to pay out a dividend to their shareholders.
So, for example, they might say that they're going to issue a dividend of a million pounds, and that's gonna be split evenly amongst whoever owns shares in apple based on how many shares they own. So, for example, if you happen to own 1% of apple, you would get 1% of that dividend that they've issued. So 1% of a million pounds, which is ten thousand pounds? Obviously no one watching this actually owns 1% of Apple, unless Tim Cook you're watching. I don't even know if you own that much, because that would make you an extremely rich person because Apple is a very valuable company. But that's basically how the dividend thing works, a company decides to issue a dividend as a way of returning some of its profit back to the people who have invested in the company. And therefore you make money through dividends.
The second way of making money from shares is sort of like with houses, in that you get the capital gains over time. So, for example, let's say you bought ten shares in apple in 2010 at the time, those shares were selling for $90 each. So you spent dollar ninety on buying 10 shares in apple, as of October 2020 apple shares sell for $115. So your 10 shares are now worth one thousand one hundred fifty dollars. Despite the fact that you only paid $90 for them 10 years ago. Okay, so we've talked about what a share is and how you make money from them? And at this point, you've probably got a few questions like how much money you need to get started or how risky is buying shares in a company? And i promise we're gonna get to that.
How Do You Buy A Share?
And this is where it can kind of get complicated, because it's not as simple as going on apple.com/buy and just buying a share in apple, it doesn't quite work like that. Instead, you have to go through what's called a broker, and back in the day, a stockbroker was a physical person, usually a dude, who you would call on the phone and say, hey, Bob, i want to place an order for some shares in apple, and then Bob would type some stuff into his computer or place, like a paper order, and then you would own shares in apple. Thankfully these days we don't really have to talk to Bob because there's loads and loads of online brokers instead.
And so you make an account on an online broker and then you can buy shares in a company through that a bit. Annoyingly, every different country has their own different brokers that operate in that country. Because to be an online broker in a country, you have to abide by, like a zillion different laws. And so in the UK, the system is different to the Us, which is different to Canada and Germany. And so on in the UK, for example, most banks do have their own online brokery type things.
So, with most bank accounts, you can also open an investment account with them and then invest online. But usually that interface is a bit clunky, It's a bit old fashioned. And so you're usually better off going with an online broker. In the UK, the two that I use are Charles Stanley direct and vanguard. But before we get ahead of ourselves and make an account on Vanguard or whatever, we need to understand a few more things.
How Do I Decide Which Shares To Buy?
And the easy answer to that is that you actually don't want to figure out which shares to buy, you do not want to buy individual shares. Why it's not a good idea generally speaking to invest in individual stocks? Essentially, the issue with investing in individual stocks is it's kind of risky, like, yes, if you invest in something like Apple, chances are it's gonna be around 10 years from now. But historically, there have been quite a few companies that people were like, Oh, my God, this is amazing. This is the thing to invest in and then that company went bust. So you're automatically exposing yourself to more risk, if you are investing in individual stock. Also in general, like, it's easy to say, hey, Amazon grew 10X in the last ten years. Therefore, it's gonna continue to do the same for the next 10 years, but that's trying to predict the future. And the past is no real indication of future performance.
And so the advice that most people would give for beginners is that you should not invest in individual stocks, you should invest in index funds. And this is what Graham Stephan, one of my favorite youtubers, also says as Well, he says that index funds are the best safest and easiest long term investment strategy for most people.
What's An Index Fund?
So there's basically two bits to understand here, there's the index bit and the fund bit. Let's start with the fund bit, and a fund is basically where investors will pool their money. So multiple investors would invest in the same fund, and then that fund would have a fund manager, and the fund manager decides which companies the fund is going to invest in. For example, let's say, I were managing a fund and i called it Gringotts. And let's say, One hundred people from my audience decided to invest in my Gringotts Fund. I, as the fund manager, can say, Okay, the Gringotts Fund, now that we have one hundred people's money, let's say, Is one hundred million. So everyone's invested one million each. I've now got one hundred million. I'm going to put 20% of that in Apple, 10% in Facebook, 10% in Amazon, 10% in Tesla, 10% in Netflix, 10% in Johnson and Johnson, all of that sort of stuff. And so you, the investor, don't have to worry about this because you trust me and my fund gringotts to manage your money. And as you know, the fund performs well because the prices of these these stocks and shares increases you get the returns, and i take a 1 or 2% management fee. So i make a load of money because I'm you know, earning 1 or 2% off of this one hundred million that I'm managing, and you're not worrying about having to pick stocks yourself. You trust me as a seasoned professional to do to do that for you, so that's what a fund is.
Now, the index bit refers to a stock market index, and so a stock market index would for example, be the FTSE 100, which is the 100 biggest companies in the uk or the S&P 500, which is the 500 biggest companies in the US or the NASDAQ or the dow. These are all different indices of the stock market, and if we use the S&P 500 for example, these are the components of the S&P 500. So we said it's the 500 biggest companies in the U.S. So, number one is Apple, and Apple makes up 6.5% of the S&P, Microsoft makes up 5.5, Amazon makes up 4.7, Facebook is 2.2, Alphabet, which is Google, makes 1.5 and 1.5, is about 3% of the total S&P 500.
So, the S&P 500 is an index of the US stock market. And if you look at the performance as a whole of the S&P 500, you get a general idea of how the US economy is going as a whole. So this is currently what the S&P 500 looks like, and if we do a five year time horizon in fact, so you can see, you know, the S&P 500 started in 1980, and since that time, this is what the US stock market has been doing. So you know, as you can see, there is a general trend upwards. But for example, in 2000, there was a bit of a crash. In 2008 famously, there was a bit of a crash. And earlier this year, when Corona was first starting to be a thing that was a bit of a crash, but then the market basically immediately recovered after that.
Okay, so we know what a fund is, that is a way of pooling money. And we know what an index is like something like the S&P 500. When you combine those, you get an index fund, which is a fund that automatically invests in all of the companies in the index. And so, with me, for example, basically all of my investments, all of my money is in the S&P 500, which effectively means that 6.5% of my investments are in Apple, 5.5% in Microsoft, 4.7% in Amazon, 2.2% in Facebook, 3% in Google, 1.5% in Berkshire Hathaway, and so on.
Firstly, index funds are really, really easy to invest in a big problem that beginners have to investing. It's like, how the hell do I know which company to invest in? How do i read a balance sheet? How do i do any of this stuff? If you invest in an index fund, you actually don't have to worry about any of that.
Secondly, index funds, give you a decent amount of diversification, there are all sorts of companies in the S&P 500. So you're not entirely reliant on the tech sector or the oil sector or the clothing sector or anything to make the bulk of your money. You are very nicely diversified, across all these us companies.
Thirdly, index funds have very low fees, so because it's not a real person who is deciding, you know, what to invest in and doing all this research and trying to make loads of money is essentially a computer algorithm that automatically allocates your money. You know, based on the components of the index fund, the fees for those are really low. And one of the main things about investing for the long term is that even a slight increase in your fees is going to massively impact your financial upside. And so, for example, an index fund with a 0.1% fee is so much better for you than an actively managed fund where a fund manager is charging you even 1%, because the long term difference between 0.1% fees and 1% fees is sort of absolutely astronomical over the long term.
And finally, if you look historically, and you know, technically, historical performance is not the same thing as future performance. But if you look historically, very few funds have managed to actually, consistently beat the market that is outperform the index.
And in fact, someone like Warren Buffett famously says that if you gave him one hundred thousand pounds and asked him to invest it right now, he would just invest in an index fund like the S&P 500. And in fact, in 2008, Warren Buffett challenged the Hedge Fund industry to try and beat the market. He said that Hedge Funds are a bit pointless because they charge way too high fees and they don't actually get the sort of returns they claim. And so he set up this 10 year bet which this company called Protege Partners LLC, accepted where Buffett said that he was going to bet the Index Fund outperformed the actively managed fund, and he ended up winning that bet and sort of gave lots of money to charity or something like that.
But that just sort of goes to show that it's really hard to beat the market with an actively managed fund. Basically, no one can predict what the market is going to do in the future. And therefore, if you hitch a ride on an index, that is you're gambling on the entire market rather than thinking. You know what? I've got some kind of amazing insight that i'll know exactly which ten stocks to pick that are going to beat the market. You might as well hit your ride with the whole market rather than individual stocks.
Okay, so we've sorted out the problem of which stocks to invest in by completely circumventing the problem and instead just investing in index funds. The next big question people usually have about investing in stocks and shares is the amount of risk. And that brings us to point number nine.
Isn't Investing In The Stock Market Risky?
And the argument usually goes as follows that, hey, okay, cool. This investing in stocks and shares stuff sounds kind of interesting, but my uncle Tom Cobley invested lots of money in the stock market, and he lost a load of money. And my parents have told me that investing in the stock market is a really risky thing. And i shouldn't do it, and i should instead invest in real estate because real estate is safe. That is usually the sort of thing, the sort of idea that people have about investing in stocks. And naturally, there is the anxiety of what if i lose all my money, so let's talk about that now.
So if we take a step back, the only way to lose money in anything is if you buy a thing, and then you sell it for less than you actually bought it like, let's say, you bought a house for three hundred thousand pounds, and then Brexit happens the next day and house prices plummet. And now your house is only worth two hundred fifty thousand. At that point, if you decide to sell your house, then yes, you are losing money and you've lost fifty thousand pounds. Equally, the only way to really lose money in stocks is if you buy a stock at a certain price and then you sell it for less than that price.
So, for example, let's say you bought shares in apple on the 18th of February, 2020. And let's say you bought one share, which at the time was $79 and 75 cents. And because this is your first time investing, you keep on looking at the price of the apple stock. Because every day you're thinking, oh, Have I made money? You see that over the next kind of few days, a few weeks, Apple stock is actually going down. And then on the 18th of March, 2020, you decide screw it. I'm going to sell my my one share on Apple because i don't want to lose all my money. And you sell it for a measly price of $61 and 67 cents, And so you technically lost $18 because you bought it at $79 in February and you've sold it for $61 in March. Then you think, damn, i've lost 20% of my investment. This stock market thing is BS i'm never going to invest in the stock market again, and you call it a day. And this would be a very bad thing to do.
For example, if we look at Apple stock price in march, it was $57 and 31 cents, but if you just held onto your one Apple share in that time, What is it today? It's the eighth of October. Apple is now trading at $114 and 96 cents, so if you just held on for a few months, you would have actually made a lot of money. You would have bought it at $79, and within, i don't know, eight months, it would now be worth $115, that's a pretty good gain.
And so the real lesson here is that when you're investing in stocks and shares, and also when you're investing in real estate, these are long term investments. Ideally, you shouldn't be putting any money into stocks and shares that you need to access within the next 5 years. And actually, a lot of people would extend that to 5 years. And it's exactly like that with house prices, it's like if you buy a house as an investment and then the house prices go down, it would be completely stupid of you to sell the house unless you are absolutely desperate for the money because something major has happened. And instead, if you just held onto the house, then you would have made more money in the long run. Because in the long term, house prices always go up, and in the long term, basically, the stock market always goes up. And that's a bit of a it can be a controversial statement. It is true, but I'm going to make a article at some other point explaining why it's true.
But for now, take my word for it, that over the long term, the stock market always goes up. But having said that again, this is a long term thing, and so, for example, if you if we look at the S&P 500 and look at how it was in 2008 at the financial crash, right in 2007, it's one thousand five hundred dollars per bit of the S&P 500. And then the crash happens, and then by what is it? January, February, 2009, It's down to $735. So basically, 50% of the value has been wiped off out of the S&P 500.
Now, if you bought it in 2007 and you saw it, you know, crashing and crashing and crashing and then you sold when it was $800. Now you've lost a lot of money because you've bought high and you've sold low, but if you just held on it took. So, you know, due June, 2007, It's at fifteen hundred, it takes about up until 2013. So it takes about five years for it to get back to its normal level. And even if you'd invested, like, just before the crash and then your investment plummeted by 50%, if you were just held on, you'd have bought in at the S&P 500, at fifteen hundred. And right now, it would be three thousand, four hundred, forty five. So since 2008, 2007, when you first invested over the last thirteen years, the S&P 500 has more than doubled. So you would have more than doubled your money provided, you did not panic sell when the market crashed.
Now, hypothetically, could the market crash down to zero? And therefore, you will actually lose all your money? Yes, it could. But if the US stock market crashed literally to zero, that is all top 500 companies, including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, like literally, every company in the top in the S&P 500, all of those got destroyed overnight and the stock market crashed to zero, the world would be in some sort of mega apocalypse. And you'd have a lot more serious problems to worry about rather than the value of your portfolio of stock market indices on vanguard. In that scenario, in that doomsday scenario, money would stop meaning anything and you'd be using money to wipe your bum. Because money has no value, because the stock market is completely crashed. It's basically unfathomable that the global economy could be so completely wrecked such that every single company goes down to zero.
In my opinion, and again, you know, I'm not a financial advisor, this is technically not financial advice, whatever that means. But in my opinion, it's unrealistic to think that if i put my money in stocks and shares, i could lose all of it. There's basically no way you're ever gonna lose all of it provided, you're diversified if you invested in MySpace in 2000 and whenever it was, and then MySpace crashes and then you've lost all your money because, you know, they have no money. But if you invest in the top 500 companies in the US, or, you know, the top 500 companies in the world or the top 100 companies in the UK, it is so vanishingly unlikely that you will ever lose your money that I don't think that is a risk that we should even be thinking about, realistic worst case scenario.
Yes, investing in the stock market is risky in the short term. But if you're investing in the long term, the market will always go up and you will always end up making more money in the long run provided you don't have to take money out at inopportune times.
Okay, so at this point, we've established that investing in stocks is very good and investing in index funds is a relatively safe way of doing this.
When Should Get Started?
When should you get started? Like, how old do you have to be? Is it ever too soon to start? Is it ever too late to start? And here the answer is pretty simple and basically all investment advice agrees with me on this front. There's a very good website called the motley fool and they have a nice article explaining this. Basically, you should start investing as soon as possible, it doesn't matter how old you are, it doesn't matter how young you are, the earlier you start investing the better.
Firstly, you want to make sure that all of your high interest, that is credit card debt, is paid off. Because when it comes to compounding, even though gains compound loss is compound as well. And so if you've got, like, a 6% credit card debt, that's eating into your bottom line every single month, you want to pay that off as soon as possible.
Point number two is that you want to make some sort of emergency fund. And people usually say that your emergency fund should have in cash, basically three to six months of living expenses. So that if you lose your job or if you if you're hit with some kind of incredible medical emergency and you're not in the UK where medical care is free or you're in the US or something like that, then you've got money to do that and you don't have to take money out of your investments.
And caveat number three is that you don't want to put any money into stocks that you think you might need to use in the next three to five years. So let's say you're 24 and you've just landed your first job and you're thinking of getting a mortgage and buying a house and you need money for the deposit. Do not put that money into the S&P 500 or into any kind of stocks and shares because no one can time the market and no one knows whether we might, you know, there might be a market crash tomorrow. All we know is that in the long term, the stock market goes up. But if you need to buy a house next year, there is absolutely no guarantee that that money will still be worth exactly the same or worth more this time next year.
So provided those two conditions are met like, firstly, you have no high interest credit card debt, and secondly, you've already got your emergency fund, and thirdly, you're not planning to have a major expense in the next few years. At that point, absolutely everyone should be investing something into the stock market. In my opinion, whether you're 12 or 20 or 21 or 22 or 50, it doesn't matter. And as they say on the motley fool, there is almost no way your future self will regret making the decision to invest. And as you'll know by this point, this is because of compounding. The more time you leave your money in the stock market, the more it compounds, and there is a huge difference. There's like lots of interesting numbers about this on the Internet that people have calculated that if you start investing at the age of 20 versus if you start investing at the age of 25 or 30, it makes such a huge difference to your bottom line.
That basically, as soon as you read this article and hear about investing, you should start investing provided those three conditions that we talked about are met. Okay, you sold me on this idea of investing in index funds. All of these three conditions are met. Don't have a high interest credit card debt. I've got my emergency fund, or i'm a student, and therefore, my parents are in my emergency fund, and i'm not planning to buy a house or a big thing in the next three years.
How Much Money Do I Need To Get started?
And the answer here is again quite easy basically start with whatever you can. So some of these websites and some of these apps that you can use to invest in stock market indices. You can start with as little as $5 or 10 pounds. Depending on the website you might need to start with 100 pounds or 1000 pounds. You can research this and it kind of depends on which country you're in. But basically you want to start investing as soon as possible and it doesn't matter if it's a tiny amount of money to begin with.
Firstly it's useful to invest small amounts of money because compounding is always good. But secondly and more importantly, the sooner you start investing, the sooner it becomes a habit. And so for me, for example, i started investing in 2015. I knew absolutely nothing about it before then, but I really wish I'd started investing in, like 2009 when i first had my first part time job, because a that would have encouraged good financial habits within me. I would have kept aside maybe 10% or 20% from the top line to put into my investments.
Secondly, it would have meant that investing became a habit. And so i would have known about the fact that stock market indices exist. I would have done the research, I would have readed articles like this, although these weren't really a thing in 2009. And what I'm really annoyed about with myself is I started making actual money in, like, 2012 when my first business started to do very well. And between 2012 and 2015, i did not invest any money just because I didn't know that you could and i didn't know how, and i always kind of thought that, huh? I'm making money now. It's just sort of silly sitting in my bank account, and i know that inflation's a thing. So i know my money's losing value, but i just didn't think about investing and didn't realize how easy it is and that it's a thing. And so I really wish I'd started investing my real money in 2012. But the only way I would have done that is if i had started investing from 2009 when i first started making I don't know, six pounds an hour during my part time job.
So again, and i can't state this emphatically enough like it doesn't matter if all you have is a small amount to invest, even if it's one pound, even if it's 10 P. The process of making the account and researching online stockbrokers in your country and figuring out how to actually do this stuff is like the most valuable thing that you could be doing with your time immediately after reading this article.
Ok, I'm Sold. HOW Do I Actually Do It?
I'm sold I've got one hundred pounds here and I want to put it inside a stock market index fund, How do I actually do that? And the answer here is, you want to find an online broker, so this will vary massively depending on which country you're in. Because these online brokers, as i said, have like zillions of laws. They have to comply with and financial regulations and all this stuff. In the US, most people that i know use vanguard as well. And my favorite blogger, Mister Money Mustache recommends that as well, although in the US there are also other services like betterment, which I've got a few friends who use that as well.
Again depending on which country you're in, like, literally, all you have to do is Google the phrase, best online broker Germany or Best online broker Pakistan or Best online broker India or whichever country you're in and you'll find something, read some reviews.
Basically, the thing you're looking for is you want to be able to invest in index funds and you want the fees to be as low as possible. I think Charles Stanley direct the fee is 0.25%, which was the lowest at the time when I made my account and I think is still pretty competitive. So you want the fee to be like a really, really, really small fraction of a percentage. Then once you've made your account and verified your identity and gone through all the hoops and stuff, which you sometimes take a few days and they send you a letter in the post to verify your address like depending on what the regulations are. Once you've done that, then you can start just putting money in here and there. And all the friends that i've spoken to about this stuff over the last, like, four years, since i first started knowing about investing in things, they've all started making accounts and sort of making these investment accounts for themselves. For the first few weeks, they all sort of compulsively check their phones to see what the stock market is doing. But then very quickly you realize that, actually, I'm investing for the long term here.
I actually don't give a toss what the stock market is doing in the short term. I'm going to check my like I check my portfolio once every six months, just because sometimes I'm curious, I don't even bother looking at it. This is very much a set it and forget it strategy you're investing for the long term. Your money will magically grow over time provided, you don't touch it and think, Oh, crap, the stock market's going down a bit. I'm gonna take my money because i can't handle these loses.
Conclusion
There's loads more to say about investing in finance, but hopefully this was a reasonably concise, not very concise. Hopefully this was a reasonable introduction on how to get started with investing in index funds. If you have more questions about exactly what to do or anything else about money, do a Leave a comment in the comments section below the article.
