Right, so let's say you want to get started
with this investing thing.
You might have a bit of money saved.
It's probably not enough for a house,
but you reckon I should probably invest this in something.
Maybe you've heard on the news about
Tesla or Netflix or Amazon and how,
if you'd invested 10 years ago in Tesla
then you'd be a millionaire by now or things like that.
But if you're new to the game,
this whole investment thing
can seem like a really complicated black box.
Like, how do you even buy a stock?
What even is a stock?
Do you just go on tesla.com and buy some Tesla,
like, how does it work? (chuckles)
And if you try and look into this,
you get all these acronyms being thrown around
like Roth IRAs and 401Ks in America
or like ISAs or LISAs in the UK.
And on top of that, there is the anxiety
that we all have that I know investing is risky
and I don't want to lose all that my money.
So in light of all of that, this is the ultimate guide
on how to get started with investing.
It is the video I wish I would have had
five years ago when I first started investing
in stocks and shares.
And we're gonna cover this
by thinking about investing in 10 different bite size steps.
So the first one is forgetting about investing completely
and just thinking
what happens to my money over time by default.
And if you've studied economics,
you will know that your money loses its value over time.
Thanks to something called inflation. (bubble pops)
Inflation is generally around about the 2%-2.5% mark.
And so that means that every year stuff costs about 2% more
than it did the year before.
For example, in 1970, in America
a cup of coffee cost of 25 cents.
But in 2019, that same cup of coffee costs a $1 59.
That is inflation in action.
And so let's say you've got a thousand pounds
in your hand right now.
And for the next 10 years,
you just stash it under your mattress.
And you never look at it again,
in 10 years time your thousand pounds
is not gonna be worth a thousand pounds anymore
because everything would have increased
by 2%ish every year.
So the value of your money will have fallen.
And so if you put your thousand pounds under your mattress
for 10 years, you will lose money over time.
And this is obviously not good.
Even if you put your money in a savings account,
like these days,
a savings account will give you like 0.2% interest
which means your money goes up by 0.2% every year.
But because inflation is up by 2%
you're still losing money over time.
And again, this is not good.
Okay, so that begs the question
which is key point number two
which is how do we stop our money
from losing value over time?
And the answer is that
if we had a hypothetical savings account
one that was let's say an interest rate of 2.5%
that would match roughly the rate of inflation.
So inflation means everything goes up by 2.5%
in terms of price.
But our money in our savings account
also goes up by 2.5% each year.
Therefore we're technically not losing money over time.
If you're watching this and you have an issue
with the word interest, don't worry stick to it for now,
investment is not the same as interest
but we'll come back to that a bit later.
But the point here is that
we don't just want to not lose money
which is what happens at our 2.5% rate.
We actually want to make money.
And that brings us on to question number three
which is, well, how do we actually make money?
Now, let's go back to our hypothetical savings account.
If hypothetically, we could have a savings account
that was giving us a 10% interest rate
this will never happen because that's just way too high.
But hypothetically if it did,
that means that every year we'd be making 10%
of the value of the money in our savings account.
So for example, if I were to put a hundred pounds
in a savings account right now
the next year it would be worth 110.
And then the year after it will be 121
because it's 10% of then the 110,
and then it would be 130 something.
And this would very quickly compound so that
in 10 years time, my 100 pounds will have become 259 pounds.
And if we adjust for inflation
that our money is still worth 206 pounds in 10 years time,
this is pretty good.
We have more than doubled our money,
by just putting it
in this hypothetical 10% interest savings account.
And it really doesn't seem like it would do that
because 10% feels like a small amount of money.
But if you extrapolate 10% over 10 years
you actually double your money, which is pretty awesome.
Sadly these hypothetical 10% saving accounts
don't really exist, because it's just way too high
and real life is not that nice.
These days, most savings accounts in the UK
and I imagine around the rest of the world as well,
offer less than a 1% savings rate,
which means you're actually still losing money over time.
But we do have other options to try
and get us to this magical Nirvana of like, you know,
this 10% saving thingy.
And that is where investments come in.
So point number four is what is an investment?
And the answer is that an investment
is something that puts money in your pocket.
For example, let's say you buy a house
for a hundred 1000 pounds
and you want to rent it out to people.
There are two ways, that's an investment.
There are two ways you're making money from it.
Firstly, let's say you're charging some rent
to the people living in your house.
Let's say you're charging them 830 pounds a month.
That becomes 10,000 pounds a year.
And so every year you're making 10,000 pounds
in rental income, which is 10%
of what you originally paid for the house.
That means that in 10 years time
you'll have paid off the a 100,000 pounds that you've put in
because you're making 10K a year.
And beyond that every year you're just making 10,000 pounds
in pure profit.
So that's pretty good.
But secondly, it's an investment
because the value of the house itself
would probably rise over time.
In general, there is a trend in most developed countries
that house prices tend to rise over the longterm.
And so your house will probably be worth
more than a hundred thousand pounds in 10 years time.
And in fact in the UK, historically in the past,
some people have said that house prices
have doubled every 10 years.
So maybe your house is worth close to 200,000 pounds.
And so you've made money off of the rental income
but you've also made money off of the capital gains
which is what we call it
when an asset increases in value over time.
But the problem is that
buying a house is a little bit annoying.
You need to have quite a large amount of money
for a deposit.
You need to get a mortgage.
You need to actually have the house.
You just sought out the rental management,
rent it out to people, all that kind of stuff.
If only there were a way of investing
without a, having a large amount of money to start with
and b, without having to put that much effort
into managing the assets as well.
And that brings us on to investing in shares.
And for me, basically, a hundred percent
of my investment portfolio is entirely shares.
I have a tiny percentage in Bitcoin and I own this house
but I don't consider this house an investment.
I'll talk about that in a different video.
Therefore number five is what are shares
and how do they work?
So buying shares probably as close
as we're ever gonna get
to this magical savings account
that just returns some amount of money each year.
And the idea is that when you buy a share,
you are buying a part ownership
of the company that you've got the share in.
For example, let's say the Apple
have a particularly profitable year
because lots of people have well iPads
as per my recommendations
and because Apple are feeling kind,
they are choosing to pay out a dividend
to their shareholders.
So for example they might say that
they're gonna issue a dividend of a million pounds,
and that's gonna be split evenly
amongst whoever owns shares in Apple,
based on how many shares they own.
So for example, if you happen to own 1% of Apple
you would get 1% of that dividend that they've issued.
So 1% of a million pounds, which is 10,000 pounds
obviously no one watching this actually owns 1% of Apple,
unless Tim Cook, you're watching,
I don't even know if you own that much
because that would make you an extremely rich person
because Apple is a very valuable company
but that's basically how the dividend thing works.
A company decides to issue a dividend
as a way of returning some of its profit back
to the people who have invested in the company.
And therefore you make money through dividends.
The second way of making money from shares
is sort of like with houses
in that you get the capital gains over time.
So for example, let's say you bought 10 shares in Apple
in 2010, at the time those shares were selling for $9 each.
So yoU.S.pent $90 on buying 10 shares in Apple.
As of October, 2020, Apple shares sell for $115.
So your 10 shares are now worth $1,150 just by the fact
that you only paid $90 for them 10 years ago.
Okay, so we've talked about what a share is
and how you make money from them.
And at this point you've probably got a few questions
like how much money you need to get started
or how risky is buying shares in a company.
And I promise we're gonna get to that.
But point number six is how the hell do you buy a share
in the first place?
And this is where it can kind of get complicated
because it's not as simple as going on apple.com/buy
and just buying a share in Apple.
It doesn't quite work like that.
Instead you have to go through, what's called a broker.
And back in the day, a stockbroker was a physical person
usually a dude who you would call on the phone
and say "Hey, Bob, I want to place an order
for some shares in Apple."
And then Bob would types and stuff into his computer
or a place like a paper order.
And then you would own shares in Apple.
Thankfully these days we don't really have to talk to Bob
because there's loads and loads of online brokers instead.
And so you make an account on an online broker
and then you can buy shares in a company through that.
A bit annoyingly, every different country
has their own different brokers
that operate in that country.
Because to be an online broker in a country
you have to abide by like a zillion different laws.
And so in the UK the system is different to the U.S.
which is different to Canada and Germany and so on.
And the UK, for example, most banks
do have their own online brokerage type things.
So with most bank accounts
you can also open an investment account
with them and then invest online.
But usually the interface is a bit clunky.
It's a bit old fashioned.
And so you're usually better off going
with an online broker.
In the UK, the two that I use are Charles Stanley Direct
and Vanguard, but before we get ahead of ourselves
and make an account on Vanguard or whatever,
we need to understand a few more things.
And so question number seven is
how the hell do I decide which shares to buy?
And the easy answer to that
is that you actually don't want to figure out
which shares to buy.
You do not want to buy individual shares.
And I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about that
once I've had a haircut, so see you shortly.
All right?
So new hair, I've got my Invisalign braces on.
So I'm gonna sound a little bit different
but where were we?
Oh yeah, we were talking about why it's not a good idea
generally speaking to invest in individual stocks.
And I'm gonna do a video about this some other time,
but essentially the issue with investing
in individual stocks is it's kind of risky.
Like, yes, if you invest in something like Apple,
chances are it's gonna be around 10 years from now.
But historically there've been quite a few companies
that people were like, "Oh my God, this is amazing.
This is the thing to invest in."
And then that company went bust.
So you're automatically exposing yourself to more risk
if you're investing in individual stock,
also in general, like it's easy to say,
hey, Amazon grew 10X in the last 10 years.
Therefore it's gonna continue to do the same
for the next 10 years.
But that's trying to predict the future.
And the past is no real indication of future performance.
And so the advice
that most people would give for beginners
is that you should not invest in individual stocks.
You should invest in index funds.
And this is what Graham Stephan,
one of my favorite YouTubers also says as well.
He says, "The index funds are the best, safest,
and easiest longterm investment strategy for most people."
Which begs the question point number eight,
what the hell is an index fund?
So there's basically two bits to understand here
there's the index bit and the fund bit,
let's start with the fund bit.
And a fund is basically where
investors will pool their money,
so multiple investors would invest in the same fund.
And then that fund would have a fund manager.
And the fund manager decides which companies
the fund is gonna invest in.
For example, let's say I were managing a fund
and I called it Gringotts and let's say a hundred people
from my audience decided to invest in my Gringotts fund.
I as the fund manager can say, okay, the Gringotts fund
now that we have a hundred people's money
let's say it's a 100 million.
So everyone's invested 1 million each
I've now got a 100 million.
I'm gonna put 20% of that in Apple, 10% in Facebook,
10% in Amazon, 10% in Tesla, 10% of Netflix
10% in Johnson and Johnson, all of that sort of stuff.
And so you, the investor don't have to worry about this
because you trust me and my fund Gringotts
to manage your money.
And as you know, the fund performs well,
because the prices of these stocks and shares increases
you get the returns and I take a 1% or 2% management fee.
So I make a load of money
because I'm earning 1% or 2% off of this a 100 million
that I'm managing and you're not worrying
about having to pick stocks yourself.
You trust me as a seasoned professional to do that for you.
So that's what a fund is.
Now, the index bit refers to a stock market index.
And so a stock market index
would for example, be the FTSE 100
which is the a hundred biggest companies in the UK
or the S&P 500, which is the 500 biggest companies
in the U.S. or the NASDAQ or the Dow.
And these are all different indices of the stock market.
And if we use the S&P 500, for example,
these are the components of the S&P 500.
So we said, it's the 500 biggest companies in the U.S.
So number one is Apple and Apple makes up 6.5% of the S&P,
Microsoft makes up 5.5, Amazon makes it 4.7,
Facebook has 2.2, Alphabet, which is a Google makes 1.5
and 1.5 is about 3% of the total S&P 500.
And essentially we've got these 500 companies
if you go all the way down...
Oh, Ralph Lauren is 496,
but chances are, you've not really heard
of many of the other ones at the bottom of the list
but chances are, you've heard of most of the companies
towards the top of the list.
So the S&P 500 is an index of the U.S. stock market.
And if you look at the performance
as a whole of the S&P 500, you get a general idea
of how the U.S. economy is going as a whole.
So this is currently what the S&P 500 looks like
and if we do a five year time horizon,
in fact, let's go max.
So you can see the S&P 500 started in 1980.
And since that time
this is what the us stock market has been doing.
So as you can see, there is a general trend upwards
but for example in 2000, there was a bit of a crash,
in 2008 famously there was a bit of a crash.
And earlier this year, when Corona was first starting
to be a thing there was a bit of a crash
but then the market basically
immediately recovered after that.
Okay, so we know what a fund is,
i.e. a way of pooling money.
And we know what the index is, something like the S&P 500,
when you combine those, you get an index fund
which is a fund that automatically invests
in all of the companies in the index.
And so with me, for example
basically all of my investments, all of my money
is in the S&P 500, which effectively means
that 6.5% of my investments are in Apple, 5.5 in Microsoft,
4.7 in Amazon, 2.2 in Facebook, 3% in Google,
1.5 in Berkshire Hathaway and so on.
So why is this good?
Well, it's good for a lot of reasons.
So firstly index funds are really, really easy to invest in.
A big problem that beginners have to investing,
it's like, well, how the hell
do I know which company to invest in?
How do I read a balance sheet?
How do I do any of this stuff?
If you invest in an index fund,
you actually don't have to worry about any of that.
Secondly, index funds give you
a decent amount of diversification.
There are all sorts of companies in the S&P 500.
So you're not entirely reliant
on the tech sector or the oil sector or the clothing sector
or anything to make the bulk of your money.
You are very nicely diversified
across all these U.S. companies.
Thirdly, index funds have very low fees.
So because it's not a real person who is deciding
what to invest in and doing all this research
and trying to make loads of money
is essentially a computer algorithm
that automatically allocate your money
based on the components of the index fund.
The fees for those are really low.
And one of the main things about investing for the longterm
is that even a slight increase in your fees
is gonna massively impact your financial upside.
And so for example, an index fund with a 0.1% fee
is so much better for you
than an actively managed fund
where a fund manager is charging you even 1%
because the longterm difference between 0.1% fees
and a 1% fee is sort of absolutely astronomical
over the long term.
And finally, if you look historically
and, you know technically historical performance
is not the same thing as future performance,
but if you look historically
very few funds have managed
to actually consistently beat the market
i.e. outperform the index.
And in fact, someone like Warren Buffet famously says
that if you gave him a hundred thousand pounds
and asked him to invest it right now
he would just invest in an index fund, like the S&P 500.
And in fact, in 2008 Warren Buffet
challenged the hedge fund industry
to try and beat the market.
He said that hedge funds are a bit pointless
because they charge way too high fees
and they don't actually get the sort of returns
they claim to get.
And so he set up this 10 year bet
which this company called Protege Partners LLC accepted,
where Buffett said that he was gonna bet
that the index fund outperformed the actively managed fund.
And he ended up winning that bet
and sort of gave lots of money for charity
or something like that.
But that just sort of goes to show that
it's really hard to beat the market
with an actively managed fund.
Basically, no one can predict
what the market is gonna do in the future.
And therefore if you hit your ride on index,
i.e. you're gambling on the entire market,
rather than thinking, you know what
I've got some amazing insight
that I'll know exactly which 10 stocks to pick
that are gonna beat the market.
You might as well hit your ride with the whole market
rather than individual stocks.
Okay, so we've sorted out the problem
of which stocks to invest in
by completely circumventing the problem
and instead, just investing in index funds.
The next big question people usually have
about investing in stocks and shares is the amount of risk.
And that brings us to point number nine.
And the argument usually goes as follows that,
"Hey, okay cool.
This investing in stocks and shares stuff.
It sounds kind of interesting,
but my uncle Tom Cobley,
invested lots of money in the stock market.
And he lost a lot of money.
And my parents have told me
that investing in the stock market is a really risky thing
and I shouldn't do it.
And I should instead invest in real estate
because real estate is safe."
That is usually the sort of thing,
the sort of idea that people have about investing in stocks.
And naturally there is the anxiety
of what if I lose all my money.
So let's talk about that now.
So if we take a step back,
the only way to lose money in anything
is if you buy a thing and then you sell it
for less than you actually bought it.
Like, let's say you bought a house for 300,000 pounds,
and then Brexit happens the next day
and the house prices plummet.
And now your house is only worth 250,000.
At that point, if you decide to sell your house,
then yes you are losing money
and you've lost 50,000 pounds.
Equally, the only way to really lose money in stocks
is if you buy a stock at a certain price
and then you sell it for less than that price.
So for example, let's say you bought shares in Apple
on the 18th of February, 2020.
And let's say you bought one share
which time was $79 and 75 cents.
And because this is your first time in investing
you keep on looking at the price of the Apple stock
because every time are you thinking,
oh, have I made money, have I made money?
And really annoyingly for you,
you see that over the next kind of few days
a few weeks, Apple stock is actually going down.
And then on the 18th of March, 2020, you decide screw it.
I'm gonna sell my one share on Apple,
because I don't want to lose all my money.
And you sell it for a measly price of $61.67.
And so you technically lost $18
because you bought it at $79 in February,
and you've sold it for $61 in March.
Then you think, damn, I've lost 20% of my investment.
This stock market thing is BS.
I'm never gonna invest in the stock market again,
and you call it a day.
And this would be a very bad thing to do.
Because for example, if we look at Apple stock price
in March, it was $57.31
but if you just held onto your one Apple share
in that time, what is it today?
It's the 8th of October.
Apple is now trading at $114.96.
So if you just held on for a few months,
you would actually made a lot of money.
You would have bought it at $79 and within, I don't know
eight months, it would now be worth $115.
That's a pretty good game.
And so the real lesson here is that
when you're investing in stocks and shares,
and also when you're investing in real estate,
these are longterm investments.
Ideally, you shouldn't be putting any money
into stocks and shares
that you need to access within the next five years.
And actually a lot of people would extend that to 10 years.
And it's exactly like that with house prices,
it's like if you buy a house as an investment,
and then the houses house prices go down
it would be completely stupid of you
to sell the house unless you are absolutely desperate
for the money, because something major has happened.
And instead, if you just held onto the house
then you would have made more money in the long run
because in the longterm house prices always go up
and in the longterm basically
the stock market always goes up
and that's a bit of, it can be a controversial statement.
It is true, but I'm gonna make a video
at some other point explaining why it's true
but for now take my word for it that over the long term,
the stock market always goes up.
But having said that again, this is a longterm thing.
And so, for example, if we look at the S&P 500
and look at how it was in 2008 at the financial crash
right in 2007, it's $1,500 per bit of the S&P 500.
And then the crash happens and then by what is it?
February, 2009, it's down to 735.
So basically 50% of the value has been wiped off
of the S&P 500.
Now, if you bought it in 2007 and you saw it, you know,
get a crushing and crashing and crashing,
and then you sold when it was $800.
Now, you've lost a lot of money
because you bought high and you sold low.
But if you just held on,
it took let's see, to June 2007 it's at 1500s,
it takes about up until 2013.
So it takes about five years
for it to get back to its normal level.
And even if you'd invested, like just before the crash
and then your investment plummeted by 50%,
if you would just held on
you'd have bought in at the S&P 500 at 1500.
And right now it would be 3,445.
So since 2008, 2007,
when he first invested over the last 13 years
the S&P 500 has more than doubled.
So you would have more than doubled your money,
provided you did not panic sell when the market crashed.
Now, hypothetically could the market crashed down to zero
and therefore you will actually lose all your money.
Yes, it could, but if the us stock market
crashed literally to zero i.e. all top 500 companies,
including Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook,
like literally every company in the top, in the S&P 500,
all of those got destroyed overnight.
And the stock market crashed to zero.
The world would be in some sort of mega apocalypse
and you'd have a lot more serious problems to worry about
rather than the value of your portfolio,
of stock market indices on Vanguard.
In that scenario, in that doomsday scenario
money would stop meaning anything
and you'd be using money to wipe your bum
because money has no value
because the stock market is completely crashed.
It's basically unfathomable that the global economy
could be so completely wrecked,
such that every single company goes down to zero.
In my opinion, and again, you know,
I'm not a financial advisor.
This is technically not financial advice
whatever that means, but in my opinion
it's unrealistic to think that
if I put my money in stocks and shares,
I could lose all of it.
There's basically no way you're ever gonna lose all of it
provided you're diversified.
If you invested in, I don't know,
Myspace in 2000 and whatever it was,
and then Myspace crushes and then you've lost all your money
because, you know, they have no money,
but if you invest in the top 500 companies in the U.S.
or the top 500 companies in the world,
or the top 100 companies in the UK,
it is so vanishingly unlikely
that you will ever lose your money.
That I don't think that is a risk
that we should even be thinking about.
So realistic, worst case scenario,
yes, investing in the stock market is risky
in the short term,
but if you're investing in the longterm,
the market will always go up
and you will always end up making more money in the long run
provided you don't have to take money out
at inopportune times.
Okay, so at this point, we've established that
investing in stocks is very good
and investing in index funds
is a relatively safe way of doing this.
The next question is usually when should you get started?
Like how old do you have to be?
Is it ever too soon to start?
Is it ever too late to start?
And here the answer is pretty simple.
And basically all investment advice
agrees with me on this front.
There's a very good website called The Motley Fool
@fool.com. and they have a nice article explaining this.
Basically, you should start investing as soon as possible.
It doesn't matter how old you are.
It doesn't matter how young you are.
The earlier you start investing the better.
There are three caveats though
for like sensible financial advice.
Firstly, you wanna make sure that
all of your high interest i.e. credit card debt
is paid off, because when it comes to compounding
even though gains compound, losses compound as well.
And so if you've got like a 6% credit card debt
that's eating into your bottom line every single month
you want to pay that off as soon as possible.
Point number two is that
you want to make some sort of emergency fund.
And people usually say that your emergency fund should have
in cash basically three to six months of living expenses
so that if you lose your job
or if you're hit with some kind of
incredible medical emergency,
and you're not in the UK where medical care is free,
or you're in the U.S. or something like that,
then you've got money to do that.
And you don't have to take money out of your investments.
And caveat number three is that
you don't want to put any money into stocks
that you think you might need to use
in the next three to five years.
So let's say you're 24
and you've just landed your first job.
And you're thinking of getting a mortgage
and buying a house and you need money for the deposit.
Do not put that money into the S&P 500
or into any kind of stocks and shares
because no one can time the market.
And no one knows whether we might
you know, there might be a market crash tomorrow.
All we know is that in the longterm,
the stock market goes up,
but if you need to buy a house next year
there is absolutely no guarantee
that that money will still be worth exactly the same
or worth more this time next year.
So it provided those two conditions are met.
Like firstly, you have no high interest credit card debt.
And secondly, you've already got your emergency fund.
And thirdly, you're not planning to gonna have
a major expense in the next few years.
At that point, absolutely everyone
should be investing something into the stock market.
In my opinion, whether you're 12 or 20 or 21 or 22 or 50,
it doesn't matter.
And as they say on the market floor
there is almost no way your future self
will regret making the decision to invest.
And as you know at this point,
this is because of compounding.
The more time you leave your money in the stock market,
the more it compounds.
And there is a huge difference.
There's like lots of interesting numbers
about this on the internet that people have calculated
that if you start investing at the age of 20,
versus if you start investing at the age of 25 or 30,
it makes such a huge difference to your bottom line.
That basically, as soon as you watch this video
and hear about investing, you should start investing
provided those three conditions
that we talked about are met.
All right, so we're nearly there.
Now, we're point 11 out of 12 where we said,
okay, you sold me on this idea of investing in index funds.
All of these three conditions are met.
I don't have a high interest credit card debt.
I've got my emergency fund, or I'm a student.
And therefore my parents are my emergency fund
and I'm not planning to buy a house
or a big thing in the next three years.
The next question is usually
how much money do I need to get started with investing?
And I know a lot of students watch my channel
and I had a lot of comments on Instagram saying,
"I'm 14 years old and I don't have any money.
How do I get started with investing?"
And the answer here is again, quite easy,
basically start with whatever you can.
For some of these websites and some of these apps
that you can use to invest in stock market indices.
You can start with as little as $5 or 10 pounds,
depending on the website.
You might need to start with a 100 pounds or a 1000 pounds.
You can research this
and it kind of depends on which country you're in,
but basically you want to start investing
as soon as possible.
And it doesn't matter
if it's a tiny amount of money to begin with.
Firstly, it's useful to invest small amounts of money
because compounding is always good.
But secondly and more importantly,
the sooner you start investing
the sooner it becomes a habit.
And so for me, for example, I started investing in 2015.
I knew absolutely nothing about it before then,
but I really wish I'd started investing in like 2009
when I first had my first part time job
because a, that would have encouraged
good financial habits within me.
I would have kept aside maybe 10% or 20%
from the top line to put into my investments.
Secondly, it would have meant that investing became a habit.
And so I would have known about the fact
that stock market indices exist.
I would have done the research.
I would have watched videos like this,
although these weren't really a thing in 2009.
And what I'm really annoyed about with myself
is I started making actual money in like 2012
when my first business started to do very well.
And between 2012 and 2015, I did not invest any money
just because I didn't know that you could.
And I didn't know how
and I always kinda thought that,
"Huh, I'm making money now."
It's just sort of sitting in my bank account.
And I know that inflation is a thing.
So I know my money's losing value
but I just didn't think about investing
and didn't realize how easy it is and that it's a thing.
And so I really wish I'd started investing
my real money in 2012,
but the only way I would've done that is
if I had started investing from 2009,
when I first started making, I don't know,
six pounds an hour during my part time job.
So again, and I can't state this emphatically enough.
Like it doesn't matter
if all you have is a small amount to invest
even if it's one pound, even if it's 10 P.
The process of making the account
and researching online stockbrokers in your country
and figuring out how to actually do this stuff
is like the most valuable thing
that you could be doing with your time
immediately after watching this video.
And finally, point number 12 is okay,
I'm sold, I've got a 100 pounds here
and I want to put it inside a stock market index fund.
How do I actually do that?
And the answer here is you want to find an online broker.
So this will vary massively
depending on which country you're in,
because these online brokers as I said,
have like zillions of laws they have to comply with
and financial regulations and all this stuff.
In the U.S. most people that I know
use the Vanguard as well.
And my favorite blogger Mr. Money Mustache
recommends that as well.
Although in the U.S.
there are also other services like Betterment,
which I'd bet a few friends who use that as well.
Again, depending on which country you're in,
like literally all you have to do is Google the phrase,
best online broker, Germany,
or best online broker, Pakistan,
or best online broker, India, whichever country you're in.
And you'll find something, read some reviews.
Basically the thing you're looking for
is you want to be able to invest in index funds
and you want the fees to be as low as possible.
I think Charles Stanley Direct the fee is 0.25%
which was the lowest at the time when I made my account
and I think is still pretty competitive.
So you want the fee to be like a really, really, really
small fraction of a percentage.
Then once you've made your account
and verified your identity
and gone through all the hoops and stuff
which sometimes takes a few days,
and they send you a letter to the post
to verify your address,
like depending on what the regulations are.
Once you've done that
then you can start just putting money in here and there.
And all the friends that I've spoken to about this stuff
over the last, like four years
since I first started knowing about investing in things,
they've all started making accounts
and sort of making these investment counts for themselves.
For the first few weeks they all sort of
compulsively check their phones
to see what the stock market is doing.
But then very quickly you realize
that actually I'm investing for the long term here.
I actually don't give a toss
what the stock market is doing in the short term.
I check my portfolio once every six months
just cause sometimes I'm curious.
I don't even bother looking at it.
This is very much a set it and forget it strategy,
you're investing for the longterm.
Your money will magically grow over time
provided you don't touch it and think,
"Oh crap, the stock market's going down a bit.
I'm gonna take my money,
because I can't handle these losses."
There's loads more to say about investing in finance,
but hopefully this was a reasonably concise,
not very concise.
This is gonna be a long video, but well,
hopefully this was a reasonable introduction
to how to get started with investing in index funds.
If you have more questions about exactly what to do
or anything else about money.
Do leave a comment in the video description area thing.
I'm still trying to think of a name for this series.
I was thinking I posted on Instagram.
There were a few options: Money talks,
was quite a popular one, but that's already a film.
One that I really liked was Penny Sitting.
I think I might call this series Penny Sitting,
that was kind of cool.
A lot of people said like, financeshially, financially.
'cause my name's Alica, financially,
a few different options.
I mean the way you think,
if you have any ideas for what this entire series
about money and stuff should be called...
And final piece of advice, if you're in the UK,
if you're in the UK
and you're just getting start with investing,
basically go on Hargreaves Lansdown
and make a Lifetime ISA.
A Lifetime ISA is a very good deal.
You can read more about it at moneysavingexpert.com
within the Lifetime ISA as of 2020,
you can put up to 4,000 pounds a year into it.
And then you can invest that in the S&P 500,
which is what I would do.
If you have more than 4,000 pounds a year to invest
you can then put another 16,000 into a stocks and shares ISA
which I'd recommend doing on a vanguardinvestor.co.uk
And if you have more than 20,000 pounds to invest in a year
and you're doing really well
then just open a general investment account with Vanguard.
This is what I do, I think it works great.
Loads more links in the video description
to other resources and bloggers and books and other videos
that I would recommend Graham Stephan,
has an amazing YouTube channel,
Andrei Jikh does a good job with YouTube channels as well,
and Mr. Money Mustache amazing, amazing blog
J L Collins' amazing blog with a Fantastic Stock series
that you should definitely read.
There's so much to explore in this area,
and it's a really fascinating topic
but thank you so much for watching this video.
Hit the video here if you want to learn about
how I make the money that I used to invest.
It's my video about how to make money online.
Thank you so much for watching.
Good luck with investing.
Make sure you invest in a stock market index fund.
Hopefully I'll see you in the next video.
Bye bye.
No comments:
Post a Comment