Assuming I have a time horizon >10 years.
Edit: thanks for all the replies!!
Yes. So much yes.
It would be worth it with even $10. Do it.
Yes. I started with 50/month using Autopilot to get in on the Pelosi investment portfolio. I am up 18% for the year.
S&P is like 23% this year, chasing Pelosi has apparently underperformed.
I just put extra money in a 5% high yield savings account. It’s not exciting, but there’s no risk and it will pay off over time
There’s also hardly any reward (comparatively speaking). Yields are crazy high right now on savings accounts, but they’re going to continue to drop, vs investing in the stock market (over the long term) is much more likely to maintain a much higher rate of return. Even at 5%, you’re really only getting about 2% growth since inflation is stuck at 3% right now. That compares to a long term average in the stock market of 7-9% after inflation.
Not to say that OP should do that, necessarily. Especially if they haven’t built their emergency fund which is far more important than investing, until you have a safe amount.
You’re probably right, as I’m not an expert, so thanks for your input. I am still worried of how the stock market will change with the upcoming trainwreck
You gotta remember the time horizon, even with historically bad presidents in office, if you smooth the line of the stock market returns over 10, 20, or 30 years, it ends up looking like a really, really good as an investment opportunity. Especially if you’re into dollar cost averaging.
Basically, if Trump tanks the stock market by going way overboard with things like tariffs, that would (at least looking at historical trends, I’m no financial expert or anything) make for a killer time to buy into the stock market because you’re getting stocks at a “discount.” Then when a different president / legislature comes into office, and if they turn around the economy, your investment would rise faster than otherwise expected.
Again, you gotta do what’s right for you, this isn’t me saying you should absolutely invest or anything, especially if your basic needs aren’t met or your emergency savings aren’t at a good enough level to last 6–12 months unemployed. This is just how it has been for the last ~100 years.
It’s worth saving - investing (I assume you mean in the stock market/index/mutual fund) probably wouldn’t yield very significant growth but it is worth saving what you can.
Why would the absolute amount of money matter for investing vs. saving cash? Assuming he finds a broker for which absolute transaction fees are negligible, the only important factors should be time window and risk tolerance, both of which are independent of the absolute saving rate.
Investing accidently helped me save. If I have money in an account, and I need to use it, I will, but by buying stocks and bitcoin, I don’t have that money, I have things that will increase in value that I can sell for money. And there have been a few desperate times that I had to do that, but my brain is far more unlikely to take a hypothetical future loss, than spend all my money today.
That’s what bitcoin really is: a commodity, not a currency.
I remember back s decade ago and using it to buy a coffee. It was slow back then. Can’t think of the time it takes now.
Truth. Lots of money to be made in crypto but it’s basically gambling outside of eth and BTC. I make decent returns playing with memecoins but you have to watch it for awhile and know when to sell/buy etc… for example, now it’s a good time to throw money into Shiba Inu coin. It’s down a lot, which is normal, but it’ll go back to higher numbers soon, as it always does. Once you get a feel for what a normal low and high are you can just set auto buy/sell at those points and make decent profits.
Of course, when it comes to crypto, Bitcoin and eth are more like commodities and are generally safe. Shit coins are high risk but but $50 in a shit coin could be $150 overnight if you know what to look for.
Edit - don’t fuck with big money in crypto unless you’re willing to lose it, but $10 here and there can be fun and often profitable.
I am gonna take that as financial advice and dump my life savings in shiba inu, thanks.
Awesome. I’ll take the the standard 10% unless/until, you lose your ass. Then I’ll just pretend I don’t know you.
If you bought bitcoin for $50 every month in the past 10 years, do you know how much you’d have today?
They said investing, not gambling
Someone didn’t do the math
100% anything you can do is great.
My girlfriend and I have each been putting $50/month into an investment account instead of paying for insurance for my dog, that way if she ever needs a big procedure I can pull money from there if I don’t have the savings for it. We’ve been doing this for 3.5 years and have now built up a good amount! I’ll divide the numbers roughly in 2 so you can see what you could be looking at:
Total $2750.
Deposits $2200.
Gains $550.That $550 will cover two vet visits if you’re lucky
Still better than pet insurance though, which is a scam (I mean all insurance is but especially pet insurance)
I don’t know about that. Both of my cats would be dead if not for pet insurance. One needed a $10k surgery this summer that I was able to afford because of my pet insurance. The other had $4k of surgeries the year before. Both instances my insurance covered 70%. Neither of my cats are much more than 5 years old, just bad luck with their health.
Right that’s about all they cover, the freak stuff that costs thousands. But for routine visits, vaccinations, and even small conditions that aren’t life threatening, they’re useless.
Correct, but thankfully that won’t be a surprise since it is evident when you are enrolling. It’s up to each pet owner to decide if that’s worth it.
In our case, a few hundred dollars per year to make ER visits financially bearable is a good value.
Absolutely 100% yes yes yes.
Compounding is your friend. You can play with the values all you want, but this calculator showed me that if you deposited $50/month at 5%/year compounded annually, you’d end up making >$1800 in profit over ten years. Realistically, you should be able to get a better rate and shorter compounding periods once you’ve passed the threshold amount for a mutual fund or GIC.
And that’s assuming you never increase your deposits.
Realistically, whenever you get a raise you should assign some of it to increasing your monthly payments. Your goal should be to increase your payments faster than inflation. Get a $2/hr raise? That’ll probably add $250/month to your paycheque after taxes. You should be able to squirrel away $25/month from that at least.
Here’s a great piece of advice from The Wealthy Barber (Canadian financial dude): Pay yourself first. See if you can get your investment amount taken directly off your pay, and then you’ll never see it, thus be tempted to spend it.
His other advice is to set a goal of 10% of your income to invest for retirement. Seems like a lot, but it’s doable for most people who are talking about investing anything, like you.
Remember: The biggest factor in how much you make from investments over time is how early you invest. Invest now. Invest regularly.
Yes. Investing is always worth it unless you have credit card debit.
Set it up to automatically invest into the lowest fee index fund your broker offers.
The lowest fee ETHICAL index fund. Careless investing is how we got evil corporations.
The post didn’t ask for ethical requirements to be included in the advice.
Appending additional personal requirements turns the conversation towards one’s personal soapbox.
The post didn’t ask for ethical requirements to be included in the advice.
Right… everything does have ethical requirements though. As soon as a member of a society does make something that impacts themselves and others it has ethical requirements. Some examples :
- voting (obviously)
- buying a Xmas (avoiding slave labor)
- selecting toilet paper (limiting pollution)
- buying a coffee (fair trade)
- paying an electricity bill (source of the energy)
- posting on Lemmy (avoiding centralization)
Everything, literally everything we do, has ethical requirements. We don’t have to say it because it’s implied.
Now… if you are genuinely curious about the topic I can only recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_in_mathematics showing that even in the most abstract field, there are ALSO ethical requirements. Nobody can avoid that.
Not funding companies that destroy the planet and kill people is basic decency, not personal taste.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many ethics in the world when it comes to money.
Several funds in my bank have ESG in the name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental,_social,_and_governance
Other terms in their fund names: fossil-free, climate, forest, sustainable agriculture.Their claims about them:
in Finnish:
https://www.s-pankki.fi/fi/private-banking-ja-varainhoito/vastuullisuus-ja-vaikuttavuus/vastuullisuus-sijoittamisessa/
in Swedish:
https://www.s-pankki.fi/sv/private-banking-och-kapitalforvaltning/ansvarsfullhet-och-paverkan/ansvarsfulla-investeringar/
For machine translation, probably better use Swedish as the source because it shares the Indo-European language family with many of you readers’ target languages, and has more speakers so maybe better translation engine training too.These are pretty cool and I didn’t know about them! I’m pretty me to investing, do you just look up ESGs or something?
ESG in the name
Place to start but once you dig into it, it’s not great either. A lot of the evaluations basically boil down to negative externalities, namely making sure that somehow whatever is problematic is NOT accounted for. That’s how plenty of ESGs end up with … other banks as stocks. They “abstracted themselves away” from problems whereas in reality they are funding the problems.
I wasn’t trying to say that ethical funds don’t exist, I’m well aware of them. I was saying that when money is on the line, loyalty and ethics often end up second place.
I’m in the sidelines and I didn’t know they existed and wanted to know more so I’m glad they posted it anyway
Can you recommend a single ethical index fund? I’ve been searching for the past decade
Every time I find one, I look at their holdings and see companies like Google, Meta, Tesla, and for profit banks.
The others have made great points about how any amount adds up. Especially with compounding.
But the most important reason me just be making it a habit. If you are saving $50/month you have a place to put your savings and an investment strategy for that money. The next time you get a pay raise or get rid of some recurring spend it will be natural to start saving $60/month, then $100 and more and more. It is much easier to improve an existing habit than starting a new one. So as soon as you have the chance start that got habit.
As much as I hate to send you to Reddit, the r/personalfinance flowchart is hard to beat for most people. I’d recommend you start there to make sure you’re not overlooking something like your emergency fund.
Link is broken for me over on infosec.pub.
Link is broken for me when I try opening it in a new tab. Something is up with imgur.
Is there a reason to focus on 401k (beyond the employer match) before HSA? Isn’t HSA more tax savings advantageous, even if just limited to health care expenses?
Can’t retire on it I guess
Not really if you exclude the employer match from consideration.
I’m not certain why they have HSA after 401k and IRA, but some possible things I can think of:
- HSAs can be harder to take advantage of of the triple tax benefit if you’re retiring early (that is, still younger and healthier)
- HSAs probably have worse investment options than an IRA
- Allowing the user to optimize their Roth vs Traditional mix
Again, I don’t really know because you’re right about the HSA triple tax advantage making it seem better than IRA or 401k, but I’m sure there was a reason given if you care to trawl the subreddit.
This is awesome! Would love to see a version for EU too!
For the most part you can follow it. Pay down debts, save what you can, make a budget but it gets wonky when you hit 401K, IRA and healthcare
Problem is each country in the EU is different. What works for Germany may not work for the Netherlands or Denmark.
As an Aussie I substituted it’s and 401K with our pension equivalent called Superannuation. The healthcare is different in AU. Here in Europe it isn’t too different to AU, replace 401K and IRA are private pension or one offered through an employer.
I looked around a bit, and while I couldn’t find a drawn flowchart for the EU, r/EUpersonalfinance has a page on their wiki inspired by(links to it too) the US flowchart and accompanying text. I hate to plug reddit as well, but here is the link.
(I’m not near a desktop, so can’t really copy and paste the info here with functional hyperlinks.)
hard to beat for most people.
*Utterly irrelevant for most people
Sorted that for you. What the hell is 401k, Roth, medical debt?
Financial advice will always be intrinsically linked to fiscal advice, and that will vary with jurisdiction. Where I live we have no 401k or medical debt, but we have other debt and investment instruments with preferential tax treatment.
The main line of the flow chart is sound.
Specifically if for retirement, time is your best friend. Anything you can put aside will be multiplied down the years and be much more when you need it most
Nah, just piss it away.
Yes, saving is like a muscle you need to do it to get better with it. It’s far easier to turn 50/months into 200/month as your income grows, than starting at 200/month.
