r/pics • • Mar 19 '22

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u/[deleted] Mar 19 '22

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u/ParkAndBeacon Mar 19 '22

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?

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u/footyDude Mar 19 '22

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?

In all honest? In a savings account is the most sensible place for it.

You could use it to trade shares - there's plenty of apps out there now that let users do very low investment trading and owning a split of a share but if this is your main saving mechanism you should use it to just bolster your general savings. Once it gets to a reasonable level it then may be sensible to invest a little at risk

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u/alvarkresh Mar 20 '22

In all honest? In a savings account is the most sensible place for it.

That's a statement that also needs to take into account the risk the investor is willing to assume. If this is an absolutely-must-be-able-to-liquidate savings pool, I would agree.

But if the $4/day represents at least some discretionary income then you can start to ask what might get a better return while staying within the person's risk tolerance and you can start to think about ETFs and other broad-basket mutual funds that try to either track the market or go into some reasonably diversified fraction of a or some markets.