I never had a lot of money growing up, but I didn’t mind because I had everything I needed; food, water, shelter, what more could I genuinely ask for? My parents gave me everything they could, which wasn’t much, but I appreciated what was given to me. As a child, you don’t particularly understand why there are differences in lifestyle and quality of life between people. It takes some serious reflection to understand how there comes to be such vast differences in people’s ability to get that shmoney.
Fast forward to 2020, I just finished running my business for the season; it was successful and for the first time in my life, I had more money than I needed for my bills. It was an odd feeling, but I definitely didn’t feel any different, I was just Josh, with a tiny weight off my shoulders. So I began to think, how do I stretch this money as far as I can? I’ve heard of many options in terms of saving your money but I never actually considered any sort of investments. I considered real estate but I needed to use all my money to even put a down payment on a house, so I wasn’t down. But in that same thought, I decided to look into the stock market and I can confidently say my life will never be the same.
Now, this is normally the part where I’d read that and I would be like ‘lol ok nerd’, and stop reading, but bare with me here and I swear on your life you won’t regret it.
So essentially, investing in the stock market is just buying portions of companies; and as people buy more of a certain stock, the price goes up. Let me give you some examples. Everyone knows Apple, and they are actually the largest company on the American stock exchange. And furthermore, if you were to leave your money in Apple last year, it would have returned 69%! That. Is. Ridiculous. It was at this moment that I started to realize how people were getting rich; and it wasn’t through saving every penny, it was through investing. Now, what if I told you if you essentially took ANY large company, put your money in for a year, you would be getting a minimum of a 30% return? Sounds too good to be true right? Yeah, no.
Here’s a list of what some of the largest companies returned last year, and how much money you would’ve made off 1000$ USD if kept in for 5 years.
Stock 1 Yr 1000$ over 5yrs
Microsoft 33% 3230$
Tesla 654% 26540$
Netflix 53% 4570$
Lululemon 45% 4670$
Amazon 67% 4460$
Twitter 40% 1860$
It’s when I saw numbers like these that I started to realize that the good life isn’t as far away as I might think. All these numbers are if you only put in 1000$, now imagine if that was 10,000$, now imagine if you take the profits you made in the market and reinvested it. The possibilities are endless and all of a sudden being a millionaire doesn’t seem so hard at all.
There are a thousand different options when it comes to the market and you can do all of this right with your phone. There are more risky options that might return 20000% on your money and there are completely safe options that will return 15% on the dot every single year. But if I can teach you anything, it takes the money out of a savings account that’s giving you .5% every single year because, in all honesty, that’s disrespectful to your money. Fun fact, the rate of inflation on a global scale is roughly 2%. Meaning, money in a saving’s account is actually losing you money every single year.
The market is a little more complex than this, and there are a million graphs, indicators, websites, and people that can help you better understand this. However, the best investment advice I’ve ever been given? What do you use every single day? What do you value in your life? What is going to change people’s lives in the future? Invest in those things, and you won’t be broke a day in your life.