In this instructional YouTube video, award‑winning financial planner Dominique Broadway walks beginners through four concrete actions to begin investing. She opens by stressing the urgency of starting now, illustrating with a simple 7 % annual‑return scenario that shows how a 10‑year delay can halve a retirement nest‑egg. Next, she guides viewers on determining an affordable investment amount, emphasizing budgeting, the viability of tiny contributions, and the use of fractional shares to buy portions of high‑price stocks. The third step covers the importance of understanding the various asset classes—stocks, bonds, mutual funds, ETFs, options, futures, real estate, art, etc.—and encourages learners to study how each generates returns and how to exit positions. Finally, she explains how to open an investment account, comparing brokerage platforms, account structures (individual, joint, custodial, retirement) and cash versus margin accounts, and provides links to her recommended brokers. The video concludes with a recap of the four steps, a call to sign up for a free investing masterclass, and a reminder to like, subscribe, and enable notifications.
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Hey, it's Dominique Broadway, award-winning financial planner, personal finance expert, and the founder of Finances Demystified. So, I know a lot of you want to learn how to start investing. And it can seem super, super overwhelming of like where to begin? Where should I get information? How much do I start investing with? But I want to share with you the 4 steps that you can take right now to start investing. So, I started teaching myself how to invest when I was 16 years old. And these are literally the steps that I took to start investing. When I started, one of the things that had the most impact on my investing journey is by starting now. Well, I guess then, right? But starting and getting started One of the main reasons that people don't start investing, right? Is because they feel like they're not ready. Things are never going to be perfect enough for you to start investing. So, it's very important that you start investing right now. As you guys know, time is on your side. And the earlier you start saving or investing, the less you will have to save. So, example. Both of these individuals start investing the same amount and getting the same amount of return, right? So the first person, we'll call him Person A. Person A starts investing $200 a month and getting about a 7% return a year, right? So let's say they're putting this money into just a mutual fund. Fund, putting $200 a month every month into a mutual fund and not thinking about it, right? So this person who is 25 years old starts doing that, $200 a month, putting it to an investment account every single month. By the time that person gets to age 65, they will have a little over half a million dollars saved just by putting aside $200 a month. Now, Person B waits 10 years because they want the timing to be perfect. They want things to be perfect when they start investing. So they wait 10 years. Instead of starting at age 25, they start at age 35. They invest the same amount, $200 a month, every single month, averaging 7% return. By the age of 65, this person has less than a quarter of a million saved, literally because they waited 10 years. So that's why the first step is to get started right now. The earlier you start saving, the less you will have to save. So, even if you don't feel like you have enough money, please make sure you start now because time is on your side. The next step to start investing is to decide how much you want to start investing with. Now, it doesn't need to be a million bajillion dollars, okay? I know that's not a real number. But it doesn't need to be a lot of money. So, when you decide how much you want to start investing with, if you sit down and do your budget which you've done because you follow me, right? When you sit down and done your budget or your spending plan, you can determine how much you can afford to start investing either every single month or every 2 weeks. Even if it's a one-time lump sum, right? But you need to figure out how much you can afford to start investing with. That may literally be just $5, $10, $25. Maybe you can do $1,000 a month, $2,000, $3,000. Whatever that amount is, decide how much you want to start investing with. No amount is too little, no amount is too big. When I started investing and like I said teaching myself at the age of 16, I started with like $25, $50. And I would just take that small amount that I had and buy what they call fractional shares. So, fractional shares are literally giving you the ability to buy a fraction of a share. right? So example, let's say if Apple's trading around $150 a share, right? But you don't have $150. You could literally take your $50 or $75 or whatever you have and buy a piece of that Apple share. And this is called buying a fractional share. So it's very similar to when you like, well, back in the day, I guess it's still probably like this. But back in the day when you had to pay cash, you would go to the gas station and be like, I want to put $20 or $50 on pump. 5, right? It's the same thing. It's like, "Hey, I want to put $50 on Apple, $50 on Google." That is literally how you buy a fractional share. So, don't feel deterred if you don't have enough money to buy a whole share. Just buy what you can. I started building my investment portfolio by buying fractional shares. Buying what I could afford of these shares, okay? So, don't be deterred if you do your budget and you don't feel like you have you have tons to start investing. But remember, starting now is what's most important and starting with whatever you have is also equally as important. The next step to start investing is to actually understand what you're investing in, right? Understand what you're investing in. So, it's very important to understand the different types of investments. There are so many different types of financial instruments or ways that you can invest your money and make your money grow and work for you. So, I have another video that goes super deep into the difference between stocks, bonds, mutual funds, and all that good stuff. And you can use this link right here to access that video. But in the meantime, to keep it short for this one, make sure you understand the different types of investments. You can invest in stocks, you can invest in bonds, you can invest in mutual funds, you can invest in ETFs, you can invest in options, you You can invest in futures. You can invest in art. You can invest in real estate, right? So, there's so many different places that you can actually start investing in. So, it's going to be very important for you to have at least a general understanding of what you're investing in. Nobody's going to be just throwing their money or should not be throwing their money into something that you have no clue how it works, right? You want to at least understand how this investment makes money. When if you should or should not exit this investment. How do you get paid? How do you get out of the investment? I meet students all the time and we're like, "I bought this thing but I don't know how to get out of it." Or, "I invested into this thing but can you look at it and see if it's made me any money?" Like, why would you put your money into something that you don't understand? So, please make sure you understand how different types of investments work and which one is best for you. I love investing in stocks. But I also love trading options, right? But I understand how all these different types of investments work. So, make sure you have a clear understanding. And as I said, use my other— check out the other video where I go deeper into investment types so you can understand the ins and outs of these different types of investments. So, step 4, final step is to open an account. Open an investment account. So, this is another thing that people are always dragging their feet to do. You can't start investing if you don't have an account open. I have included links below to a few of my favorite different investment accounts that I personally use or personally recommend, such as Acorns or Robinhood and a few others that I love. And you can check out those links below. But essentially, you need to open an account. So you need to open an account, figure out which brokerage firm you are most comfortable with. And once you do that, figure out what what type of account you want to open. So there's a couple different types of accounts. You can open just an individual account, you can open a joint account. So maybe if you're married or have a significant other, or maybe sometimes even opening an account with a family or friend, what they call a joint account, which is usually like a joint with rights of survivorship account. Okay, you can also open accounts for your kids, custodian accounts, and then there's also retirement accounts. There's IRAs, there's Roth IRAs, there's 401(k)s, there's SEP IRAs, and all these different types of retirement accounts will vary based on where you are in life. And I do have another video right here that shows you— that tells you more about how these different accounts work and help you decide which one is best for you. But you need to figure out which one you should be opening right Now, one more thing when you're deciding your account type is you're going to see opening just what they call a cash account or a margin account. So, a cash account means you're just trading with your cash or investing with your cash. A margin account means that you're actually borrowing money from the brokerage firm to trade and invest with their money as well. And they will charge you a small fee for that. And that's more to me for advanced investors or traders. So kind of be leery with that and understand the ins and outs of margin accounts. But that's another option that you're going to have to decide. To recap the 4 steps of what you need to do. First thing you want to do is start now. Stop procrastinating. Start now. Time is on your side. As I always mentioned, the earlier you start investing, less you have to invest or save. The second step is decide how much you can afford to invest. Remember, don't invest money that you cannot afford to lose. Only invest money that you are comfortable with potentially losing. Step 3, make sure you understand what you are investing in. Get a clear understanding of the different types of investments and know how these investments work before you make investment decision. And the last step, step 4, make sure you open an account and actually start doing this. And also decide what type of account you want to start investing with. So, hopefully this was beneficial and hopefully you actually start investing today. For more information on how to start investing and how to actually start making ideal investment decisions and choices so that you start building your wealth, use the link below to sign up for my next free investing masterclass where we show you exactly how to do all those things. And please make sure you like, subscribe, and sign up for notifications when we drop more content. I will see you very soon.
