Like I said, I didn’t learn about investing until I was in my 20’s. So guess what? I was broke! Every dollar that came in went out.
It wasn’t until I saw a Kiplinger magazine on the boyfriends table and read it that I started to understand what it meant to manage money. Like a lot of folks I did not grow up learning about finances. It was not taught in school. And it was not talked about much at home.
Pretty much everywhere I went money was a taboo subject. I learned so much about money in that one article that I was hooked. I went to the library and checked out about five books on personal finance.
I know in the beginning it was a lot of Suze Orman and people I saw on television like celebrities whose books I read. Then I moved on to money experts like Peter Lynch, Warren Buffet and John Bogle. I also found books by money bloggers.
I remember over time going from $5,000 to $150,000. I increased my 401k contributions every year and eventually got to saving over 25% of my income! I knew that it was not enough to just open an investment account. I had to also invest that money.
A huge misconception is that if you open a brokerage account for Roth IRA then you are investing. Wrong. You have to tell the money where to go. If you don’t, its like putting popcorn in the microwave, shutting the door, and then saying to the microwave now pop without setting the timer telling it how long to actually cook the food.
I didn’t know this either. I just did what my 401k told me to do. Pick a fund. And that’s okay. You are just getting started.
What really helped me go from $0 saved to slowly making my way to over $250,000 in investments was watching a show on CNBC it was called…The Suze Orman show.
