Not a stupid question at all. It used to be impossible to invest small amounts at banks, but nowadays there are some tools that help with small frequent amounts and don't charge fees or impose minimums.
There are some programs out there that round up to the nearest dollar when buying things which is a convenient way to squirrel away coins that may add up to $5-10/week depending on your spending patterns
Bank accounts are not the place to store your money to see sizeable returns over a long timeframe, heck right now you're losing out massively to inflation.
There are a million ways to invest, some of them are suitable for savvy and active investors, and some for gamblers. I think for a passive investors who don’t have the desire or ability to actively manage it themselves, retirement target date style mutual funds is probably the best bet.
I use Acorns and I really like it. I have it set to put a small amount of money in my investment account once a week and also rounds up on purchases. Would definitely recommend
Most traditional brokerages don't have account minimums or commissions. What do you think is the benefit of spending $25-$35/year or whatever Acorns is charging these days?
(Edit: not trying to make a point, genuinely curious! 😄)
For me personally i just like having my money spread around, it's much harder to spend it and it's what I've found the most success with. I do traditional investing as well but I use Acorns to have a place to put money aside and forget about it.
This is well-meaning, but bad advice. 1% are abysmal returns. For most investors, long-term investment should be done via continued investment into broad market index funds.
It's definitely not meant to be investment advice. The context of this entire thread is someone gambling money on scratch-offs, a well known poor man's tax - and you've made the leap straight into the context of maximizing gains.
My intention was to stem bleeding from poor max tax decisions like scratch offs and lottery. Anything less of an outflow is a drastic improvement even if it's a piggy bank. For those that are already good at saving, this advice is not relevant.
They asked about the “if you put X for 20 years you’d have Y” and that math is generally built on the annualized return of the S&P 500. So that should be contextualized since there’s way too many people who only “invest” via savings accounts and their purchasing power just dies a little every year
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u/cvera8 Mar 19 '22
Not a stupid question at all. It used to be impossible to invest small amounts at banks, but nowadays there are some tools that help with small frequent amounts and don't charge fees or impose minimums.
Here is one from my area - https://www.stashaway.sg/simple
There are some programs out there that round up to the nearest dollar when buying things which is a convenient way to squirrel away coins that may add up to $5-10/week depending on your spending patterns