The Beginner’s Guide to Buying Stocks and Investing in the Stock Market

I will say the best benefit of investing in the stock market invisibility to let your money make you some more money. in short, you can do this in two ways:

1. by waiting until the stock value increases and selling it at a profit 

or 

2. by choosing dividend paying stocks, which pay you for holding stock in a company.

Twine Investment App

while being easy to use, the twine investment app does all of the Investing For You at a cost of $0.25 / $1,000 invested (double check). this is the simplest method I have found to get your feet wet and stock market investing. signing up for an account is made easy and you do not have to choose any of the Investments yourself. You simply decide.

Stash Investment App

The Stash Banking and Investment App allows the average day-to-day person to start building an investment portfolio as a second, passive-income. Though I am not one to extoll the virtues of things I am still a bit new at, but as someone who has been casually investing for a couple years now, I've tried a few things, including the Twine Investment App which, while perfect for beginners and for those who prefer a hands-off approach to investing, there are other ways for people who are becoming more advanced at investing or who just want to be more involved from day one. 

When I discovered Stash and fell into the gamification of investing, I closed all of my goals with the Twine investment app and switched those investments over to the Stash Banking and Investment app. 

I also closed my banking account with Regions (the most terrible bank in all of America, I'm sure) and now use Stash as my main banking account. 

Why would I sell all of my investments?

I say this because you want to know who is handling your money. What kind of products do they sell. Or maybe they offer services to the public. They could be in the private sector selling vaccines to hospitals. no matter what the company is, you want to have some sort of idea of what it is they do so that you can better decide whether you want to risk your money by buying stock in that company.

I'll give an example: Clorox sells bleach. everyone knows that. Everyone has heard of Clorox bleach. What we could not have known just one year ago in 2019 was that a worldwide pandemic with sweep across the Earth causing a global panic. tableware bulk buying tissue, soap, and non-perishable goods. people were also buying cleaning products in bulk, including bleach. Clorox among other companies who sell cleaning products and disinfecting products saw an unexpected rise in their stock values. People who owns a lot of stock in these companies made a lot of money.

I say all of this to underline the point that some companies have more longevity than others and some like Clorox, will see very good sales when the unexpected happens and millions of billions of people start bulk-buying their products during a global pandemic.

Using the rule of thumb I've come up with of an average of 3% return on your portfolio (by focusing on investing in companies that pay quarterly dividends), 7 years is your lucky number. At that point (a rolling point, remember!), your original investment is all income and you've made back your original investment money.  

Of course, this equation is only for dividends that pay 3%. like I said, it's an easy equation to figure out as long as you know with the dividend payout is for whichever stocks you purchase.

The rule of thumb is: the more companies you invest in, the more stable your investment portfolio becomes. To elaborate, if you put all your eggs in one basket, and then someone drops that basket, you lose all of your eggs, but if you spread your eggs out into ten baskets, when one basket drops or goes down for a while, you still have nine other baskets that are holding steady (or that is the hope!).

Plus, it's a lot harder to budget for one large lump sum, versus having a bunch of dividend pay days every month. I only have a small portfolio at the moment and am investing more and more every month, but I wake up to more money in my account every few days as different companies have different dates for their dividend payouts. in order to find out when you will be getting your dividend payout, you can look up each company and its investment stock payout dates to save to your calendar. 

this is something that you might want to look into after getting your feet wet in the stock market or even before you decide you want to buy stocks and wait for dividends. because there are so many ways to invest your money to create a passive income or just to have some additional pocket money, that I would be remiss for not encouraging you to research other options. with that said, even if you do just want to jump into buying some stocks, you can always sell them later to invest into buying property or even starting a business. I will note here again that there is always a risk involved and investing, whether it be in the stock market or starting a new business, so this is something that you will definitely want to keep aware of when deciding on the best way to make your money work for you.