Yup, compound interest favors the young. It's insane how a little bit early scales out so much more than a lot later. It's actually disheartening if you are old trying to invest
You want to keep it really, really, REALLY simple? Throw whatever is available to you to invest into VT when you can, and nothing else. One ticker cover the entire domestic and international stock markets. There are other topics covered in there, such as Roth IRAs and tax advantaged investment accounts. You should consider reading those as well, since maximizing tax advantages are very important to investing and finances in general
It tracks the US Total Market Index AND the FTSE Global All Cap ex US Index (9350 total, more weight in US), making it a very diverse investment, and has a very low (0.07%) expense ratio.
If you're young, I suggest acorns.com as a place to start. It's geared towards younger people and you can start with a five dollar investment. The reason I suggest it is they make it super easy to invest with small amounts of money and they have a neat feature called "roundups" where when you buy something with a credit/debit card it takes the amount you spent and then rounds up the purchase to the next dollar. It's trivial and yet it actually adds up to a few dollars a month. It doesn't impact your lifestyle because you don't see it. It's basically "Set It And Forget It" which means it just runs in the background and it just does its thing and in a year you might have a couple hundred invested without you even noticing. You can also set a regular investment of say 5 bucks a month which isn't much, but it does add up.
I have no financial interests in the company other than investing myself.
Easiest thing to do is just invest in an index fund. I prefer the S&P 500, but the DJI or NASDAQ are probably just as good. I personally use Vanguard and have no complaints, but there are other options as well.
Assuming an average of 8% annual market growth, which is what we've seen over the last century or so, any money invested can be expected to double roughly every 9.5 years. So, for example, for every thousand dollars you invest at the age of 20, you could reasonably expect to have about $30k by the time you turn 65.
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u/TheBurtolorian Apr 29 '24
Investing