Personal Finance: Start Investing Today

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No matter what happens, you always have a sense of what you learned. Now, when I mean Education, I don’t mean going to college to get a degree rather, you have to invest in learning a skill that would become a side hustle in the long run.

Today, there are series of online courses and websites like skillshare. Using an affiliate link, you can get a free month to learn a skill and that's more than enough time. If you find value which you definitely would, you could go on with an annual subscription of $24 but if you can't afford that, you could simply cancel the plan before the month is over. By that time you should have been done learning the skill.

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_{Screenshot from [skillshare](skillshare.com)}

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There are loads of skill tutorials out there like photography, animation, design, writing, web design and a lot more. You just need to check out what you would be passionate about and hop into a lesson. Remember you have to actually like the skill since we are turning that into a side hustle.

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• Creating and Selling Digital Products

The next method will be investing your time in creating and selling digital products. With the skill you acquired and a lot of practice, you could go into making digital goods like design templates, e books, videos, plug-ins, voice overs or even stock photographs. Then sell them on platforms like story blocks, Etsy, amazon etc.

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_{Screenshot of web templates on sale from [etsy](skillshare.com)}

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You could also work for people on fiverr or upwork. The good thing about digital products is that they are infinite and can be sold again and again to customers around the world without having to deal with the possibility of running out of stock or having to deal with the process of making deliveries.

Another avenue is digital courses

After running the business for quite a while, if you feel like a pro at what you do, you can take this to the next level and produce quality courses just like the ones you learned from and even better and list them on skillshare.

This process will take a lot of time but if those guys can make a lot of money with that skill, then you can. You just have to put in work. There are lots and lots of opportunities out there in digital products marketing and it won’t be a bad idea to take a step into making the perfect income stream for yourself today.

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• Investing in the stock market

Now here’s the time we take the big step, investing in the stock market. Before we hop into the stock markets, it is best we ALWAYS do research on what we want to buy.

There’s are loads of securities out the with long confusing names which are grouped into like

• stocks, -( AAPL and Facebook)
• Index funds,
• ETFs

Well basically, I would recommend ETFs for so many reasons but let’s find out why. Stocks are units of ownership in a company, each stock has its definite value and all depends on the current financial state of that company.

Now if a company isn’t doing so well due to some reasons, all the individuals invested in the company’s stock will be affected and will lose loads of their investment. So basically investing in stocks is like putting all your eggs in one basket and a way to solve this problem is by sharing your investments around other stocks in the market.

_{[pixabay](https://pixabay.com/illustrations/crash-stock-exchange-loss-savings-6895201/)}

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That will work but that’s a lot of work and it isn’t so easy to keep track of how all these companies are doing. That’s why we have the Index funds which is an investment portfolio that tracks the market index of a collection of stocks on the stock market. An example is the S&P 500 which is a portfolio of all the top 500 companies in the US.

You, as a buyer, purchase a particular index fund which basically does the work of investing your money in a collection of good stocks. Your money is now invested in a ton of companies and risk is reduced. You don’t have to depend on the profits of one company to grow your investment.

Now, it’s obvious that index funds are safer and more strategic than just buying stocks but a con is the fact that unlike stocks which can be traded at any time of the day, index stocks are only traded at the end of the day and this is a HUGE restriction.

Although the point of investing is to be in it for the long run, it’s not bad having an option of trading your securities within the day. That’s why we have the ETFs, Exchange Traded Funds. Just like the index funds, ETFs are collections of hundreds to thousands of stocks of various companies all managed by experts. Difference is it can be traded at any time of the day and they often have lower minimum investment requirements than the index funds.

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_{screenshot from [vanguard](https://personal1.vanguard.com/mmx-move-money/funding-method)}

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It costs you $0 to open a Roth IRA account with brokers like vanguard, webull and m1 finance. For those who have no idea of what a Roth IRA is, a Roth IRA is an individual retirement account where taxes are paid while issuing money into the account so that there won’t be any taxes on future withdrawals. I know these terms can be confusing but please ask questions in the comment section.

You can invest $50 from our budget into this account.

_{screenshot from [vanguard](https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/voo)}

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Since we are on a low budget, we need to buy an ETF which has low cost , a low expense ratio and also has high assets under management like the VTI which has an expense ratio as low as 0.03% with more than 4000 stocks under management or VOO which also has an expense ratio of 0.03%

I’m sure you’re probably wondering what we will be doing with what’s left of our hundred dollars.

• Creating an Emergency Fund

What we want to do is invest what’s left of our money in a high interest savings account. Anyone one that will be good in your country. In the US, you can use the Sofi bank which has an apy of 2% with a minimum balance of $0. This is just to ensure you have that emergency fund but if you already have an emergency fund set up. Then you could consider saving up in physical gold or buy some gold backed cryptos.

Like the name, these are cryptocurrencies that are pegged to the equivalent value of an ounce of gold.

_{[Official website for PAX Gold](https://paxos.com/paxgold/)}

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Each of these coins are backed with physical forms of gold in treasuries and you can buy any of these from cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Coinbase or FTX. There are links in the description below.

This means buying a PAXG or XAUT is relative to having an ounce of gold and -difference is, it’s digital and lighter to move around.

But remember gold doesn’t just have a fixed Price. It tends to go up and go down as well. in the last 5 years, According to goldprice.org, the value of an oz of gold increased by 31.05% and 433.41% in the last 20.

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_{screenshot from [goldprice.org](https://goldprice.org/)}

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On the negative aspect, it also has the tendency to reduce in value the same way it did in the last 6 months. So you have to weigh your options and consider which is better for you, saving in dollars, which has Dropped 97% since inception or gold.

And I Would love to know what you chose in the comment section.

The point of this lesson is to make you create a habit of investing as low as $50 - $100 of your money every month into all these methods. It’s just a simple method of investing and would be profitable for you.

Thanks for reading to the end, this is a blog post for my upcoming YouTube channel "LearnMoney Whiteboard". I'll keep uploading on personal finance topics and once my channel is live, I'll let you guys know.

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