So You’re Curious About Investing

So you’re curious about investing. But you’re not sure where to start. You’re not even sure what investing means. And you can’t just simply ask someone who invests what they do because you don’t even know how to formulate a question to ask them! Let me set the scene: 

Me: “I hear that you invest.” 
Investor friend: “yep”
Me: “that’s cool”
Investor friend: “uh huh”
Me: *awkward silence while I avoid eye contact* “...so I hear it’s going to rain tomorrow”

Did you notice how smooth I was? I mean I can be awkward at the best of times and I’m okay with that but when something is so new to you and you know very little about the subject, it’s incredibly hard to come up with a question to help you be less lost. I’ve found this to be true in all aspects of my life. You need to learn some basic knowledge about a subject before you can start to ask questions.

I didn’t know the basics about investing. I can remember googling “what is a stock”, “how to buy a stock”, “how to know when to buy a stock”, “how many stocks do I need to buy at once”. To me, these basic questions about investing seemed so scary. So I also googled “what are my options for investing”. 

It all seemed overwhelming.

So now that I’ve laid all my cards out on the table about how little I actually knew about investing when I first started, I hope you feel some comfort in knowing that it’s okay to not know. We can’t know everything. And if you’re willing to dedicate some time into learning, then you can turn that curiosity about a subject into something pretty cool.

I had been holding myself back from learning about investing because it felt too hard to understand. The only person in my life who invested had a lot of stress associated with money and I did not want to bring on any undue stress. I have had stress take over my life and it’s something I work hard on preventing everyday. Burnout is a place I never want to go back to. If you want to read more about stress and how to eliminate burnout, check out my blogs on these topics here.

When it came to my attention that a friend was investing, I finally admitted in the conversation with them that I was curious about it. Because I was. I also said that I didn’t know where to begin and I asked them how they began. They recommended a podcast and lent me 3 books. I started listening to the podcast and reading the books.

One book was on real estate investing, one was on mindset, one book and the podcast were on investing strategies. 

I liked the idea of investing in real estate but I didn’t have the desire to be a property manager nor the large sum of money to buy a second property (yet). The book on an investing strategy called “Money for Nothing and Your Stocks for Free” by Derek Foster was awesome but I didn’t have enough basic investing knowledge to apply the principles of it. I look forward to re-reading this book in the future once I’ve established my baseline knowledge.

The third book on mindset was called “Secrets of the Millionaire Mind” by T. Harv Eker and I enjoyed it once I made one small alteration. It compares rich and poor people and I found that when I replaced those two words with successful and unsuccessful people I could apply the principles to any aspect of my life, financial or not.

This brings me to the podcast. It’s called InvestED with Phil Town and Danielle Town. I started listening to it during the summer when I was out in my vegetable garden or when I was walking around the block on my lunch break. This podcast is great. It’s about an investing strategy called Value Investing and it provides all the basic knowledge you need to know. It’s a conversation between a dad and his daughter where he shares all his knowledge from his 30 plus years of investing both personally and professionally.

After listening to just a couple episodes of the podcast, I decided to buy Danielle Town’s book called “Invested”. In this book she outlines how to start value investing when you don’t know anything. This book has given me the basic knowledge, the courage and the excitement to start investing. The principles I learnt in this book are what I will be sharing.

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