After I got my first job, it was a while before I felt like I had some extra money to invest.
Until then, I kept my money in a savings account in a bank, and let it sit there.
LEARNING ABOUT THE STOCK MARKET
When I was in high school I had a teacher that taught us about the stock market. I really enjoyed his class. He had me bring my copy of the Boston Globe into school each day. This was back when they printed stock tables in the newspaper. And yes, I walked to school every day, up a hill, both ways! ;-)
Each student picked a stock and we tracked it’s performance over time. I looked forward to tracking my stock’s performance each day.
GETTING ADVICE
When it came time to invest real money, I turned to online forums to help demystify the investing process. If I remember correctly, I dialed on to online services like Prodigy, and AOL, and joined finance discussions.
Image: Prodigy Online Service Login Page
One popular suggestion for investing was to invest in things that you knew about, that were to growing.
BUYING STOCKS ONLINE
I opened up an online brokerage account, and invested some money. It was a good way to learn about the stock market, and how to buy and sell stocks.
I ended up buying and selling a few stocks based on my online research and direct experience with the companies.
One stock that I ended up buying, after learning how, was Apple. That was a good stock to buy. ;-)
I bought Apple because I worked at a computer store, and was trained by Apple on the first Macintosh computer in 1984. I then became the local Macintosh expert, handling sales and doing demonstrations of the computer. I got to know it very well and decided that it would be a good investment.
Image: Apple Macintosh
There’s a cool website called InvestedInstead that shows you what your investment would be worth today, if you invested your money in a companies’ stock instead of their product.
As of 4/22/2017, if you had invested $2,495 in Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock on 1/24/1984, that investment would have grown 347 times to $866,800. [See Macintosh Results as of today]
This experience gave me the step-by-step knowledge of HOW TO BUY A STOCK.
Investing in individual stocks like this is more risky than spreading out the risk in a mutual fund made up of many stocks.
FUTURESMART APP
Image: FutureSmart App
An app that you can use to learn about investing and personal finance is the MassMutual #FutureSmart App.
One lesson from the #FutureSmart App confirms what I learned: “Investing your money in a mix of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds can help reduce your risk."
Get the FutureSmart App for free.
WHAT I LEARNED
Online brokerage accounts make it easy to buy and sell stocks.
You can never know when a stock will got up or down. You can’t worry about it either. I take the long term approach of buy and hold.
I’m a long way off from that day that I bought my first stock. I am still holding on to some of those early stocks, and buying some other individual stocks, where I have direct experience with the companies, like Disney and Facebook.
I now also work with a financial planner to help me spread out my risk with investments in some professional managed funds, where the only decision I have to make is how much money to put into the fund.
Good luck with your own personal investing journey.
Disclosure: This has been a sponsored post for MassMutual.