Here are the 6 steps to get you started learning how to invest money. Follow these steps to get started investing. Once you are started and get the hang of it, continue learning about investing and tweaking your portfolio. Investing is a proactive activity; you can’t just ’set it and forget it’. Keep up with it and your money will begin to grow exponentially!
Step 1: Get Money
In order to make money through investing and before you learn how to invest money, you need money to start. You can’t buy a stock or bond without money. While you’re at it, get a significant amount of money. If you invested $10, it probably will grow, but $1,000 will grow much faster.
Start budgeting your money so that you can put some aside every month for investing.You could set aside $100 or $1,000, just remember, the more you invest, the more you’ll make.
Step 2: Practice While you Wait
If you don’t have any savings to start, it will take some time to get some seed money to start your investments. Hopefully it won’t take you more than a couple of months to get enough money to get started, but in the mean time, you can still start practicing your investments.
Read everything you can about investing so that you know what you are getting into and you know what to expect. Stay up with financial news with the WSJ or other financial news sources. If you are going to invest in the stock market and you want to give it a try without the risk, sign up with an online simulator. These simulation games are absolutely free, that you can use to invest imaginary money but use real companies to get experience investing without losing money.
Step 3: Choose your Investments
Are you going to invest in stocks, bonds, mutual funds, real estate, derivatives, or something else? Diversify your portfolio and choose investments that you feel you can manage best and will make you the most money.
Step 4: Find a Broker
In order to buy stocks, you will need a broker because you can’t go down to Wall Street and buy them yourself even if you wanted to. A brokerage firm will place the trades you tell them to and follow your orders. You used to have to call up your broker whenever you wanted to buy or sell, but now you can do it online.
If you buy and hold stocks for the long term, this is perfect.
Step 5: Set up your Investment Plan
You can invest without a plan, but you might find yourself leaving a lot of money on the table. Make up a plan. When will you invest and how often? How much will you invest? How much do you want to have in the future? Make a plan and stay on track.
Step 6: Keep Investing
A lot of people try things and give up. Investing can’t be one of them. Just because you have a bad year or even a bad decade doesn’t mean you should give up, you just need to keep at it and keep trying to improve it. Now that you know how to invest money, you must keep on investing.
Keep saving your money and investing it and keep learning all you can about building your wealth. If you want to become rich or even just financially secure in your future, investing is key!