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You can Learn to Invest in Four Easy Steps

Guest post by: Andrea Travillian

Article Overview: Four easy steps to get you headed to investing

You can Learn to Invest in Four Easy Steps

When you are new to investing all the terminology can seem hard to understand. Just looking at stocks alone you immediately see terms like domestic stock, international stock, large cap, growth stock, plus emerging markets. It is enough to make you want to run screaming as far away as possible. Please don't do that, taking the time to learn what those terms mean can be easier than you think. As with learning a foreign language you learn one word at a time, you do not expect to be immediately fluent at the start of learning a new language. Instead you start by learning the basics such as "hello" and "good-bye" and slowly learn more words and eventually complete sentences. Eventually after time and practice you learn how to speak another language.

As with a language you start with the basics in money.

You first need to start by making sure that you are living on less than you make. Why is this first step to learning about investing? When your budget is not in balance and you have the stress of living paycheck to paycheck your brain is not able to process and learn the investing information at an optimal level. The short science version is that when you are constantly stressed the chemicals in your brain are not balanced and causes the cells in your hippocampus to become either injured or destroyed. The hippocampus is the area of your brain needed for learning and memory. So when you are focused and stressed about meeting your basic needs it is much harder for you to process information. Not to mention it will stress you out by adding one more thing to the list of things you must accomplish with your money. So start with a budget or written spending plan if that sounds better, and start to figure out how to ensure you are not negative every month.

Once you have balanced your budget it is time to move on to learning the next step to investing fluency. The next step involves you building a strong support base to operate off of, that base is an emergency fund. When you don't have an emergency fund you run the risk of either running up debt when life happens or worse yet having to tap into your investments. Which defeats the purpose of investing, would you plant a garden and then pull it out just when the first green stem is coming through the dirt? When investing you want to be able to leave the money alone for at least five years. Having the emergency fund creates the space between life and your investments. You should work on establishing an emergency fund of three to six months of expenses, and put it in a plain money market or savings. The point of an emergency fund is that it is handy and you don't have to worry about getting out at the wrong time.

Congratulations you have now reached a point where you know the basics and can focus on creating complete sentences in learning your new language. This is where in money we come back to you running and screaming in order to escape the terminology of investing. So how do you begin to learn this process? Begin to read books and magazines; attend seminars, read articles on the internet anything you can get your hands on that teaches about investing. At first it might not make sense or you may feel like you are making no progress, but as with a foreign language it will eventually all start to come together. Set aside 15 minutes a day to read about money if that is as much as you can do now, eventually as it becomes easier you can read longer or try those seminars. As with learning a language if you don't work on it you will not learn it.

Now it is time to pull together all your money information and start working on that budget, before you know it you will be on to investing.

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Article Tags: budget, how to invest, investing 101, investing basics, investing for beginners, personal finance
Referred by: http://www.SohoMarketingGuru.com



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Re: e-Commerce and e-Payment providers - When I came back to Japan in 1999 I sometimes used to ask my students if they would buy anything on the Internet and at that time most thought it was too risky. I'd encourage them to try by using well known sites such as Amazon.co.jp and also pointed out that using a credit card on a reputable site was safer than using it at a restaurant. I can't remember the last time I had that discussion or when the "tipping point" occurred in Japan. To answer your other question, I use Paypal for several reasons: 1. Brand familiarity 2. Easy to use 3. Free to withdraw 50,000yen+ to my Japanese bank account - a huge benefit (but maybe other systems also offer that...?) 4. Easy to cancel subscriptions On the down side, their transaction fees are quite costly, they are difficult to contact and when disputes arise you can sometimes lose even when you can prove via your tracking service that the disputed item was "delivered" to the customer's address!
Go for both! - That's life Julie as a business owner. You never have enough resources. Invest the money in your patent if you really have something worth protecting and bootstrap your marketing efforts so that you get some clients and continue to grow.
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