Young Investors

I've always been a little motivated to start investing just pretty much my entire life since I've learned about it. I was fortunate enough to be able to learn about it early probably around like high school or so. But I wanted to wait to get into it until I actually had the money to be able to back up myself. As well as to prepare for any emergency. So say if I invested a certain portion of my money and I ended up losing out on that investment, I want to also make sure that I had my emergency savings already set aside before I started going into different investments. So I have a wide variety of investing bills. Currently, just learning more about the stock market. So actually, I was able to start investing in a stock market right around the time of the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was a great time to get in because the market was down at its lowest since probably the 2008 crash. And then on top of that, I also have the goal of investing in real estate. I think for me, my investment goals haven't necessarily changed from when I was a teenager. I still have a lot of room for risk in the sense that I'm young and I have a lot more time to withstand market cycles before I need money for retirement. So with that being said, I still invest my money in equities. My favorite stories investment story is one company that I purchased. It was in 2015. It's actually, I bought Tesla in 2014, and I believe it was like $250 a share. And I bought two shares so it was $500. And I sold that position or exited that position last August, August of 2020, and it was worth over $6000. And that was like one of the coolest investments that I made just from actually doing my research on the company itself back then. And understanding that Tesla was a leader in their electric vehicle technology. So it made sense for me. I recommend for you to set aside a budget. And so in your budget, you want to make sure that you're allocating a portion of your money to go towards emergency savings. And then also a portion of your money to go towards any short term goals that you have. And then if you start looking at your long-term goals, like retirement, then that would be the money that I would recommend for you to start using to invest. I was able to work on open up checking account and then with that I was able to open up the same account saving the percentage of my checks that I received I wanted to suggest that she was like, hey, you know, you just start saving some of your checks on this 1%. At least 10%. And so with that being said, I put in my signal account and then allowed me a little bit linear room to reinvest this forever. I wanted to do. Verification means that you are basically allocating different, I guess, risk factors to different portions of your investment investments. And so with that, basically, by diversifying your investment portfolio, you may have something say like a Tesla stock that is very volatile and one day could be up a $100 in the next day, be down $200, which I did experience. And so with that, you also want to have something else in your portfolio like a mutual fund where typically they have steady growth over time. And even if they are down at a certain point, they tend to go back up and continue to rise in the long term. So you always want to make sure that you're diversifying your portfolio on your investment. The other thing that I will say that has changed since high school is I'm also thinking about other asset classes. So for me, real estate is something that I am a personal fan of. And so I purchased a condo with my brother when I was 26 years old. And for me, it just made sense that they're not making any more land. In addition to the stock market, real estate is another asset class that I'm that I'm currently invested in. Coolest things about working at a corporation is the fact that employers sometimes offer a wealth of benefits and may even have employer matching programs toward retirement. So for me, the bank that I was working at offer a full they basically matched my contribution to my 401k up to a certain dollar amount. So I basically maxed out on that every year and the reason I did that was because it was free money. If let's hypothetically, let's say, if my employer could match up to $6000 of the money for every dollar, what match up to $6000 to the dollars that I contribute towards a retirement account, why wouldn't I do that? That's 6 more $1000 that I wouldn't have had or so it's like, it's just leaving money on the table. And the thing is, you don't know you have that money until you see it. So if they take that, if they make basically make that contribution early on or if they deduct your personal contribution towards your retirement plan early on, you don't even sweat it because you didn't even see that cash to begin with. And it's basically being managed for you for a later date. And it just makes sense because oftentimes this money can be access tax free at a later date because there are a lot of incentives to keep people preparing for retirement because of something that a lot of folks don't do. So another thing that I also did was I had like a Roth IRA account and basically I can contribute up to a certain dollar amount every year before I make a certain dollar amount and I can invest this money into a portfolio and I can withdraw it when I retire and not have to pay taxes on it. My company basically has a 401k that you can decide to enroll and you can also enroll in an IRA through the company, but most people tend to go with the 401k for our specific company. And with that they offer a match benefit. And so with that match, they match up to 5% of whatever your contributions are. And so of course, I was like, well, that's free money from like the first month that I started working. Of course, the only thing was just that you wouldn't be able to invest in the first month of working there, but after that first month and you've officially been in the system, a pretty much can just start with a match program. And that's just a way to be able to double your contributions over time. And so that was very enticing to me. And definitely helped me make that decision a lot easier. I'm going to definitely want to look for is that match program. A good chunk of employers now do at least try to do some type of contribution. But if that's something that's super important to you and you want to make sure that your employer is giving you as big of a match as possible, that's one thing that you can always ask inside of your job interviews. Typically most interviewers know that answer to it because they usually participate in those programs.