Well let’s talk investing resources and things.
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.
Acorns.com
If you are completely new to investing, and you want to just save some money for the long haul, the easiest way to do that by far is consider opening an account with Acorns. If you use this link we both get $5 https://www.acorns.com/invite/8EW55H or if you prefer, just go to https://www.acorns.com/
With Acorns, they round up my spare change and invest it aggressively in the market. That’s how I chose for them to do it, however if you want a more conservative approach, you can do that as well. They help you pick a strategy right for you.
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 having a TDAmeritrade 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. TDAmeritrade 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.
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.
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