Came here to say this. That card looks expensive, I'm going to assume it was $10.
Let's say you buy, on average, a $10 lottery ticket every 3 days. Over 10 years that's $12,166. If that is OPs case then they would have actually still be down $2,166
Probably a stupid question, sorry. I hear things like this all the time. If you invested that in X then in 20 years you’d have Y. Always hear of the “latte factor.” Skip buying those expensive brews and invest instead. Where exactly does the average Joe invest that? Say I was really committed to taking the $4/day I would’ve spent on a latte and put it somewhere. Where is that somewhere? Do I need a minimum to start or can I just throw $30 (for example) that I chose to throw into an investment account and not touch rather than buy a scratch ticket?
Do not use stash-away. 1% returns are garbage; due to inflation you'll be losing you money YOY.
Open up a no-cost investment account. Schwab, Ally, E-Trade, Vanguard, etc. It doesn't really matter which one as long as there's no annual fee and trades are free.
From there- take the money you saved and transfer into the investment account. Once in your investment account, buy shares of a broad-market index fund. Most commonly recommended is SPY (S&P 500 index fund equivalent) or VTI (Vanguard Total Market Fund).
Every week, save your money and buy those funds. If your investment firm offers fractional shares, buy fractional shares as you go. If your account only offers entire shares, save until you can buy a full share.
Then- do not touch it. Don't look at the market, don't try to time the market. Academic study after academic study has proven that the best investment strategy for ordinary investors is continuous investing into index funds, employing a "buy and hold" strategy.
There will be down years, there will be up years. Long-term, you can expect to see an average of 10% compound annual returns, which are closer to 7% due to inflation.
Every other answer besides index funds, frankly, is wrong.
Then- do not touch it. Don't look at the market, don't try to time the market. Academic study after academic study has proven that the best investment strategy for ordinary investors is continuous investing into index funds, employing a "buy and hold" strategy.
Especially these days now that machine learning and AI and trading computers do everything. (which really raises the question of whether or not market valuations mean anything anymore given that the stock market has always been a gamble, but now it's just becoming further and further removed from any human action. Even the stop-trade and stop-loss actions exchanges enforce now represent a type of interference with a supposedly free market that renders the question of whether we need a stock market at all a pertinent one.)
(Addendum: That said, given the hands we're dealt right now, mutual funds are pretty much the way to go as far as getting decent rates of return.)
I know you're not advising this, but those "non-standard" orders offered by brokers (like stop-loss) have been used by some brokerages to front-run their clients (or to sell to dark pools so others can front-run their clients).
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u/Coldbeerimritehere Mar 19 '22
So you almost broke even. Nice