Investing Doesn’t Have To Be Intimidating

When Katie and I were first started out, I resisted getting into the investing side of personal finance. 

When we graduated college, we were in the midst of a super bad hiring environment. The education budget was making it really hard for school districts to be able to hire teachers and in some districts, people were being let go.

It really freaked us out. That year, I got a huge shock. 

I didn’t get a job.

Thankfully, Katie got a great teaching job in Houston but I just hadn’t ever imagined a scenario where I wasn’t hired that first year out of college.

I was pretty freaked out. Looking back, we were totally fine. But rent was way higher in Houston than what you could get in Canyon, and I was really worried about how we were going to make it.

That first year was the year that I tried to learn everything I could about personal finance. We had a certain expectation for how the year was going to go, and now that it was different, I was obsessed with figuring out what our next move needed to be.

For a while, I was only interested in building a budget, paying off debt, and learning to live a little tighter than what we had anticipated.

Understandably, I wasn’t as interested in the subject of investing.

But I’m here to tell you, that the earlier you can start investing, the better.

Thank goodness you don’t have to be super sophisticated with your investing. In fact, it’s actually really simple and easy for you to do it on your own. 

If investing intimidates you or you’ve been holding off just because you aren’t sure what you need to do, you aren’t alone. 

But what do you need to know to get started investing in the market? How in the world would you know what stocks to pick?

You make investing easy with index funds. 

Have you ever heard of the S&P 500? That’s an index.

Jack Bogle(he was the founder of Vanguard), invented the index fund that would match what was in that index. That way, your money always matched the market, which is pretty cool because you never have to worry about your money doing worse than the market.

So if your money is always matching the market, you can invest it, basically set it and forget it. Pretty cool? Well at least I think it’s pretty cool but I’m nerdy about this stuff.

So you can get super fancy with your investing. The financial services industry is huge, but you can actually do this yourself.

If you’re just getting started, there’s one fund that you can get into for your entire portfolio. Yes, one fund. A one stop shop. You won’t even need to be invested in anything else.

It’s called a target date fund. That fund is sort of a super fund that has several index funds wrapped into one where it automatically adjusts for you. 

Now, if you start to get more advanced, you might start to invest in your own index funds yourself and as you got closer to retirement, you’d probably start to adjust what’s called your asset allocation. This fund just does that automatically for you.

So don’t be afraid to get into the game. It’s super easy to start investing today, and I’d suggest that unless you’re consciously staying out of the game for a particular reason, like trying to pay down debt super quick, you need to be investing.

So ask yourself this question. What would you need to know to be able to get started with your investing?

Then, I want you to let me know what that is.

Have a great weekend,

Jared