Let’s Talk Investing
Resources and Things
(Update Dec 2024)
First thing is to consider the way that you want to invest. Will you invest for the long haul? Maybe you want to defer some money from taxes and consider a 401K for your retirement.
Maybe you want to just play around with the stock market and buy some shares of a big company like an Apple or something like that.
You might even be thinking about commodities and crypto currency. There are a lot of options out there, but where to begin.
To set the stage for all of this conversation, I recommend that you either listen to or read the transcript of the Freakonomics radio episode, “The Stupidest Thing You Can Do With Your Money”
Just remember, it’s never too late to start investing.
Vanguard
Where to begin with Vanguard. Well Vanguard is poised to help you if you are looking at setting up a long term investment retirement account or you want to wheel and deal trading stocks. Vanguard can provide a lot of one stop shopping for the causal investor or the person who simply doesn’t want to manage or look at their portfolio except once a quarter or once a year.
Investing here is pretty problem free as you will get market performance depending on the funds that you choose.
Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)
ETFs are something I spoke about before, but they are a great way to invest without having significant risk and not pay mutual fund management fees. These are funds that are listed on the stock exchanged and are purchased by the share. When we say funds, we are generally talking mutual funds or index funds. Index funds are just a type of mutual fund. Vanguard created the Index Fund, and here is more information from their site on it.
Robinhood.com
Robinhood.com or what we’ll call RH is an online only broker that gives you the ability to buy partial shares of stock and also buy cryptocurrency. Recently they were in the center of controversy as they slowed or stopped the trading of shares of GameStop, AMC and a few other funds while there was heavy volume happening in these companies. You can read all about that if you’d like. But RH is a decent place to trade and play. I think that this is a place where you play, and while you can invest in ETF Funds (Exchange traded funds) which we’ll get into in a bit, I like the RH account for getting to do more frequent buying and selling as there are no fees.
Other Brokerage Accounts
You can use a myriad of other brokerage accounts such as:
There are many others and it just takes a google search to find them.
I would recommend something like a Charles Schwab account or one of those larger companies accounts in addition to something like a Robinhood. You might wonder why? It’s about research and data. You are going to want as much information to make your decisions about your stock purchases as you can. CharlesSchwab.com has the data. They tell you what all the analysts think and break down each stock quite well. So while it may look good at one site, check out a few places and do your research.
Acorns.com
With Acorns, they round up spare change and invest it either aggressively or conservatively in the market based on your choice. They help pick a strategy that’s right for you.
I was recommending this service because they charge a fee. The service isn’t bad, but they basically are just investing your money in a Vanguard ETF which you can do yourself, so I no longer recommend them. However it still is a decent way to go for a set it and forget it type of thing.
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