Five Dollar Investing

Stock market investing is one of the biggest tools people use to build wealth. Not surprisingly, stock investing is not a big thing in the hood. A lot of people don’t know what stock investing is about and others feel maybe they are not qualified to invest. Investing in the stock market is available to everyone and it is a great tool to build wealth for anyone. There is absolutely no excuse not to invest in the stock market. When I was coming up, there were barriers to investing. Let me tell you about these barriers, how things have changed and why today is a great day to get in the market.

Barrier number one a potential stock investor faced was a lack of information and education. You had to have a good broker, subscriptions to certain publications and read thick books full of terms you could barely understand to get in the investing game. Today, most people have a supercomputer in their pocket called a smart phone. With a smartphone you have access to unlimited information about any subject. To take the point a little further, if you don’t like to read, there are tons of sources of information in audio or video format. Lack of information and education is no longer an excuse. With your smart phone and tv, you have the tools to learn how to invest in the stock market and to help you decide which stocks to invest in.

The next thing that used to be a barrier to investing was fees. When I first got into investing, my broker used to charge me $14.99 for each transaction. That means, you would have to calculate if your trade made sense with the fees being part of the equation. That would mean you usually would have to be making a larger transaction to justify paying the fees. This would definitely be a problem if you only wanted to buy one share of stock for say $15. Fees definitely affected what I bought and how many. Today brokers are competing for your business. Fees no longer are a problem. Many brokers offer trades with no fees. If you want to buy $5 worth of stock, you don’t have to worry about a $14.99 fee being tacked on. That makes a lot more trades make sense.

The biggest barrier to people investing in the past was account minimums. In the past many brokers required investors to have minimum amounts of cash in their accounts in order to trade. A lot of these minimums were in the thousands of dollars, so in order to get started you first had to save a couple thousand dollars to open your account. Once again, due to competition and technology, lots of brokers have dropped account minimums. You literally can transfer $25 in your account and buy one share of stock for $5. Some platforms even offer fractional shares, so if the stock you want is too expensive you can buy a share of the share.

They have literally removed all the a barriers to stock investing. This leads back to the title of this blog, which is “Five Dollar Investing.” Just about everybody can come up with $5. Whether it be $5 a day, a week or a month, you can come up with $5. There are no more excuses why you aren’t in the stock market. You can start with $5 and get off the sidelines. Stock market investing is one of the biggest builders of wealth today. Get in the game now.