I am not a financial advisor and have no formal finance or economic education. I am just a regular guy who has struggled through my financial life; often blindly, with no financial goals and no plan.
In 2019 it started to occur to me that I wasn’t putting enough money away for my 4 boys education. I was setting them up for the same life I had created for myself: Starting adulthood off with a huge amount of debt in order to gain an education, which leads to car debt and then mortgage debt. And add to that, poor budgeting skills and the willingness to use credit instead of saving money to buy more expensive items. I had this conviction in my soul and knew I had to make a change. I developed a passion for the stock market and I began to study everything I could about it in order to start creating wealth.
But where do I start? There wasn’t one YouTube video that would give me a step by step process on how to invest my money and make it grow. There were a million. But who do I trust? Who were the legit investment advisors and who were the con-artists?
This website is to help people find their starting point. Perhaps it will help people who are feeling overwhelmed at the thought of navigating the infinite amount of information there is out there and get people on the road to achieving their financial goals. I will walk through my journey. Where I started. What I’ve learned and continue to learn. The people and websites I trust and use. The idea is if we can all start building wealth, we can all start to help each other get out of our financial struggles and use our wealth to lift others out of poverty. It’s not about charity. It’s about learning how to create wealth for yourself.
So what did I do? Here is what I did first:
Decide Your Investment Strategy
First thing I did was ask myself, what direction do I want to go in as far as building wealth. You have many options. Stock market, real estate, small business, online business, etc. There are pros and cons to all of these strategies, and you will find that people who have been successful in a particular field all believe their way is the best way. Decide which way is best for you based on what interests you the most, because you will need to research and study your field to some degree. Make sure you are interested in it. My choice was the stock market.
Turn Thought Into Action
(DISCLAIMER: This section contains an affiliate link which I stand to profit from if acted upon by the reader. As stated, this blog post is my journey and based on my own experiences, and it will be clearly stated when I use products myself, or when I have simply learned about them)
Many of you have probably been thinking about this for a while. It’s time to take action and actually do something. My first step was to sign up with an investing platform. Questrade had been recommended to me by a friend whose opinion I trusted, so I created an account and I continue to use Questrade to this day. Some of you may run into some trouble when it comes to the initial $1000 you need to fund the new account, so Wealthsimple is another option that doesn’t require a minimum funding amount. You can also find platforms through different banks, but the issue always becomes the fees you end up paying. I will analyze the different platforms more in-depth in future posts.
Get Money on Auto-Deposit
Set up a direct deposit and let it run. Pick a dollar amount and set it up to automatically be deposited into your Questrade account. I decided on $100 a week. I knew from past behaviour that if I tried to manually save money, I would always find a way to spend it if I had access to it. It doesn’t have to be $100 a week. It can be $50 a month. $20 a week. Whatever you want. You don’t need a fortune to get started, as there are plenty of great stocks you can get for under $20. The point: just get the money in there and start investing.
Get Educated
I became obsessed with the stock market and watched every video, listened to every podcast, and read every book I could on the subject of investing. I determined who were the most successful investors and learned about their strategies and how they were able to grow their wealth. My research led me to arguably the greatest investor of all-time: Warren Buffett. As I learned about Buffett’s investment strategies, it pointed me toward understanding how to value a stock; what all those lines on a financial statement meant; and which lines were more helpful than others. It became like a snowball effect. In learning about one subject; for example, Warren Buffett’s value investing strategy, it led me to read about what makes up a financial statement and what things like P/E Ratio and Free Cash Flow meant. All things we can talk about in future posts.
This is how I got started growing my money. My simplest advice: Think about your goal and get started. You will always be learning and getting better, but it’s all for nothing if you don’t GET STARTED.