As most of you know, I’m a huge advocate that everyone should not only be saving money out of every income stream they receive, but they should also be investing that money instead of letting it sit in your savings allowing your bank to make money off it!
When I push for someone who isn’t currently investing to start, the number one response or concern is that they’ll lose money in the stock market.
That’s a definite possibility! In fact, it’s highly likely, especially if you have no idea what you’re doing!
That shouldn’t stop you, though! We all lose money in the stock market, heck…I thought GoPro would be a great stock to buy into in 2016…currently it’s down 70% from where I bought it… Ouch…
One thing I can tell you about that buy though is that I learned a lot and the couple hundred bucks I lost was well worth the education I received from it and has helped me make more than what I lost! While my GoPro stock tanked, I had plenty of other stocks that did extremely well in 2016 bringing the average of all my stocks to an increase of 16% across the board.
I’m a huge believer that the best way to learn is simply to do. This doesn’t mean that I don’t read books about investing or ask questions when I don’t understand something. Google is your friend! Instead, what happens is when I simply do, it encourages me to learn because I have something at stake…My money!
Too many times people get stuck in this learn mode where they are trying to digest as much information about investing as they can and in turn never actually start because of “information overload.” The issue I have with this method is that who can honestly remember that much information unless you are applying it to something?
If you start investing and learn while you do it, you’ll be applying the knowledge you to learn to specific things you are dealing with while investing and it will help you remember the information and store it much better. Also, it will keep YOU invested in forcing yourself to learn the ins and outs of investing since again you’ll have money on the line.
So if you’ve been thinking about investing and maybe even reading about investing and trying to learn as much as you can, my suggestion is simple…Just go do it. Take a hundred dollars and buy some stock. You’ll learn more from that moment forward then you have since you started reading about it!