If you haven’t already started, today is the best time to start your journey to financial freedom. In order to start, you need to be investing your money. This allows your money to grow without lifting a finger! Pretty cool right?

In today’s newsletter I’ll show you how to get started investing with only a dollar in 3 steps:

1. Open a brokerage account

2. Deposit your first dollar (or more)

3. Invest the money

Some important reminders:

• You don’t need to already have a lot of money to get started. You just need a dollar. It may not seem like much but that one dollar has the potential to turn into $10 in 25 years. Imagine if you are able to invest $100 or $1,000 monthly. No matter the amount, the important thing is you have to start.

• When I was just out of college, I had a Fidelity credit card and was only able to invest using the points generated from using the credit card. This may be a great option if you’re not able to put anything away at the moment. Just be sure to pay off the entire balance before interest kicks in. We’ll talk more about this in a future post. For now, lets talk about how to start investing.

Open a brokerage account.

• A brokerage account is an investment account that allows you to buy and sell a variety of investments, such as stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs).

• You can an open a brokerage account with one of the big companies (Fidelity, Vanguard, and many others) for free. There is no minimum deposit requirement.

• This will require you to enter your social security number and other personal information so the brokerage company can put together any tax forms you need.

Deposit your money. 

• You will need to connect your brokerage account to your bank account.

• Chose how much you want to invest. It does not matter how much.

• If you would like, you can set up an automatic withdrawal on a recurring basis so you don’t need to remember to invest every month

Invest the money.

• This is an important step people forget. They will deposit the money and assume it is invested. This is not true!

• You have to select what you want your money to be invested in. To start, just keep it simple by investing the money you have into a S&P 500 index fund.

• An S&P 500 index fund is a type of mutual fund or ETF (electronic exchange fund) that essentially invests your money into the 500 biggest publicly traded companies in the U.S. This includes companies like Apple, Amazon Google, etc. This offers broad market exposure and diversification so if one of these companies fails, your whole investment doesn’t go to zero.

• Both $VOO and $FXAIX are good S&P 500 index fund options. These are the symbols you have to enter in order to invest in the fund. Both of the funds represent the same companies and they have historically produced an annual return of around 10%.. The only difference is they are offered by different companies (Vanguard and Fidelity). See image below for other broad market index fund options offered by both Vanguard and Fidelity.

• Similar to deposits, you can set it up to automatically invest a certain amount each month if you don’t want to remember to do it manually every month.

Wrap Up

Boom, that’s it! You are now an investor. Congratulations!

Take a moment to pat yourself on the back for a job well done. You’ve taken the first step to achieving financial independence. The next step is to develop the habit of contributing to your investments consistently every month.

Thank you for taking the time to read! Be sure you are subscribed so you don’t miss next weeks edition. If you know anyone who’s interest in retiring early or could use a weekly newsletter about personal finance, share the link below!

Thanks for reading and I will see you next week!

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