18.7% of Americans own stocks. 88% of Americans making over one million dollars a year are invested in the stock market.
2/10 Americans own stock.
8/10 Wealthy Americans own stock.
The better group to be in is the investing group.
Investors know something the average, working American doesn’t know; you’ll never become rich trading your time for money; no matter how hard or long you work.
your money is limited to the time you invest in working and your time is of finite supply.
You’ll never be rich
You can work 12 hours a day. But for how long? One week? A max of two, before collapsing into a puddle of sweat, begging for a comfortable bed and a few days worth of Netflix Binging.
Hard work isn’t fun work, and it doesn’t make you wealthy either. Wealth comes from working smart. Or, not working at all and letting your money work for you.
Letting money work for you is what separates the rich from the poor. The poor trade their time for money. The rich invest their money and trade small amounts of money for larger amounts. The rich understand how powerful compound interest is: the rich understand capital is how you become powerful.
If you want to become rich, you cannot depend on trading your time for money. You need to learn how to leverage the money you have, and maintain your time for doing something else. Like starting a new business. or going on vacation.
Life doesn’t start in a womb and end in a cubicle.
Learning How to Invest
Learning how to invest is hard. Or easy, depending on how invested in… investing you want to be.
The more you know about investing, the safer and wealthier you’ll become. Like everything, the most knowledgeable wins. Knowledge and confidence gives you tools that you can use.
The uneducated investor has a 401k. He doesn’t know what his 401k does, he doesn’t know who manages it, all he knows is this is the retirement account and money goes in there.
5 Apps for learning how to Invest On Your phone
You can start investing and learning how to invest on your phone. One basic form of investing that works wonders, dollar cost averaging, involves buying a set dollar amount of a stock or etf, regardless of the market.
You can, and should, start dollar cost averaging now. You can do this even if you’re in high school.
Capital is how you get rich. By setting aside some small capital each week and investing it, you can be rich, too.
Trading is gambling, and investing is investing. Below are five apps to help you learn how to invest, and invest from your phone.
Robinhood
You can get a free stock to start off your investing journey using this link
Robinhood is a Sillicion-Valley investiment platform started in 2013, promising to democratize investing by removing constraints most mainstream brokerages apply. The biggest one, being trading fees.
Before Robinhood, brokerages charged a fee for making a trade. Usually around five bucks. If you buy a share of AMD for $30, you pay a broker $5.00 to broker the trade, or 16% of value.
Since Robinhood doesn’t have trading fees, you never lose money on paying fees, or in the case of buying AMD, you would retain 16% of your value by using Robinhood.
Why is Robinhood the first on the list?
It’s so easy to dollar cost average and make money. All you need to do is setup a budget with Mint–also on this list–and set an amount to invest each month.
Pick an ETF you like, and put money into it each month. An ETF is like a basket of stocks in a specified fund.
If you buy a share of SPY, you’re buying a sliver of the 500 companies contained in the S&P500 stock index. If you buy a share of XLK, which is the technology sector, you’re buying a sliver of technology companies.
Pick the funds you believe in, put your money in them, and don’t take the money out for ten years. That’s it. Your money grows like preteens taking growth hormone.
Mint
Mint is an all-in one budget tracking app that acts as a virtual personal accountant you can access on any device.
Mint takes your accounts like your brokerage, checking, and savings, and gives you a breakdown of how much you spend and how you can manage your money better. The service will also collect all of your bills and help you stay on track of them.
Beyond accounts, Mint provides many other features that make it an indispensable tool for any responsible person including a budget tracker, and a credit score monitoring feature.
Both the mobile and the desktop version of Mint have a supreme user experience. Every feature syncs across both versions.
With mint you can see your cashflow, set budgets, and even see your credit score. It’s an indefensible tool to learn about your own finances and manage them better too.
TD Ameritrade
TD Ameritrade is a classic brokerage like the ones judged for their fees above in the Robinhood section. However, TD Ameritrade does have a great application you can use to plot trades on the go.
Some people will use TD Ameritrade to research securities from their phone while at work, and place their trades with Robinhood.
TD Ameritrade has a good app for trading and playing the market. They even have a Paper Money option, which allows you to play on the stock market with fake money.
Beyond the app, the TD service also includes a desktop application for research and placing trades that you can use whether or not you trade through the platform.
What’s the Method for TD Ameritrade?
Create an account, download the app on your laptop and your phone, use papertrading to train in trading, use the research tools, and use the fantastic TD Ameritrade education center to learn how to invest and trade. All for free.
Acorns
You can get $5 to start investing in Acorns for free using our link
Acorns is a micro-investing tool that automatically invests your spare change from purchases into a range of different funds.
For example, let’s say you buy a drink for $5.50. Acorns will “round-up” the .50 remainder, making the total of the purchase $6.00. The extra .50 gets automatically deposited into a fund.
Acorns allows you to save and invest money without having to think about it. You can also contribute a weekly or monthly amount; another way to invest without thinking, but this money is better off invested in a ETF using the dollar cost averaging strategy.
Acorns is a good app to use to learn how to invest by seeing what happens to your money when you invest, without the overwhelming nature of picking what to invest in. Acorns let’s you pick your investments, but the picks are based of off your interests, as opposed to picking a specific security.
Learn: How to Invest in Stocks
Learn: How to invest in stocks is an app available on Google Play and the App store. The app’s entire purpose is to teach you how to trade stocks using a classroom format.
This is the only app from the list that doesn’t involve real investing. The best way to learn to invest is through doing it.
For those who want to know how finance, trading, and investing actually works, this is a good app for you.
You can finish all of the lessons in a weekend, but that isn’t the purpose of this app.
Use Learn: How to invest in stocks when you aren’t able to access your computer, where you can take more intuitive classes, or invest from your computer with full access to research tools.
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