When it comes to managing your money and investing, sometimes the hardest thing to do is get started. How to Invest can help.
We start with the basics of budgeting, saving, investing and goal setting. From there, we dig into understanding the markets, trading stocks and ETFs, and dealing with taxes. And finally, we explain how to analyze companies and make smart stock picks, and examine things like emerging markets, futures and options.
Get expert guidance on how to get started — and succeed — investing.
The most important thing to know about investing is that you’re already doing it. Every decision you make about how to spend your time and money is an investment.
Our education is an investment. So are our relationships and careers. Our passions and procrastinations, our workouts and our lazing-abouts, and the meals and media we binge, are all stocks and bonds in our portfolios, all just as important to our futures as anything in our 401(k)s.
It’s worth contemplating because we let so much time and money slip through our fingers. Much of this is out of our control. We blink about 14,000 times a day, which means, as author and humorist Bill Bryson notes, we spend a full 23 minutes of each waking day with our eyes shut.
But we also do this voluntarily. We shut our eyes to risks and opportunities. We indulge in fleeting pleasures (many of life’s greatest pleasures are fleeting, after all) at the expense of future happiness. Ben Franklin is right that time is money, but the relationship between the two is, well, complicated.
Money tends to be inflationary: Each dollar becomes less and less valuable over the course of our lives. Time runs in reverse: Each hour only grows more valuable as we age.
That is why we should all strive to become better investors of our money and time. And that is why Global Trade Alliance of America and MarketWatch is launching How to Invest, a newsletter and video series that will cover not just how to understand markets and finance, but how to invest your money and time to pursue a richer, happier, more meaningful life.