Investing

Investing can be a great tool to fight the effects of inflation and create wealth for events like retirement and having children. There are many excellent strategies and resources which will allow you to invest successfully regardless of how much money or free time you have.

There are many places you could invest in. One place is real assets, which include precious metals like gold and silver, real estate, collectibles, and more. They are called real assets due to their tangibility (you can actually touch a real asset, whereas you can't touch a stock). Another place is stocks, where you buy shares of a company. There are also a variety of investing options relating to stocks, including futures, options, mutual funds, ETFs, and index funds. ETFs, index funds, and mutual funds allow you to buy selected groups of stocks. Many of these allow the investor to take a more passive approach as the fund already invests in several stocks whereas without a fund the investor themselves would have to do that. Options and futures are more complicated and form part of a group known as derivatives. We won't get into that, but more information on derivatives can be found here. Finally (there are other investments as well, but we'll only talk about some here), bonds allow you to make money off of interest after loaning money to either the government or a private company. It is worth mentioning that some investment types may not be accessible to you depending on your income level. For example, real estate usually comes with hefty price tags in the hundreds of thousands all the way to the millions, whereas solid stocks will usually be in the hundreds of dollars.

It is important to make sure your overall investments stay on the lower-risk side. For example, if you decided to buy some DogeCoin, a popular cryptocurrency, you would want to make sure that you have significant amounts of low-risk investments. This strategy is called risk offsetting, and it makes it so that if you were to lose big on the DogeCoin, your overall loss would not be that bad as it would be offset by small gains in the low-risk area which you would own much more of. Diversification can occur across investment types, such as with stocks and bonds, or across subcategories within those investment types. An example of this is with stocks from the auto industry and stocks from the tech industry. To learn more about diversification and risk, click here.