What is Investing?

Investing. Isn’t that something only people wearing suits in Wall Street do? Isn’t that something that you need money to do? Isn’t that something you pay people to do for you? 

Yes, yes to all of the above. But it's not limited to just all of the above. 

What is investing?

Well, investing is simply allocating resources with the goal of achieving a certain outcome. This is usually done by allocating money to something such as a business, rental property or another form of asset to produce cashflow or a profit. It can also be interpreted by investing your time into learning a new skill, which will therefore enable you to gain a certain outcome.

But you’re not here to listen to someone preach, telling you that you have to go back to college, get a medical degree, become a surgeon so you can be on a comfortable salary of £80k+ per year. 

Let's cut the bullsh*t and get to the basics. 

Investing isn’t something that is overly difficult, in fact, it can’t be any easier these days, especially with the plethora of investing platforms on the market. I am in the UK and some the biggest investing platforms for us are: Hargreaves Lansdown, Trading 212, Vanguard, Interactive Investor and many more. 

Each platform offers different services ie. Vanguard only offers Vanguard funds, compared to Hargreaves Lansdown, which offers funds and individual stocks. 

There is also a new type of investment platform which is called a robo advisors. This is a platform which uses algorithms to invest in a certain way, dependant on your goals and risk tolerance. Some of these robo advisors are: Nutmeg, Moneyfarm, Moneybox and Wealthify

Personally I use Trading 212, purely because of their low fees. I was using a different company for a couple of years but noticed that I could personally save money by switching to Trading 212.

I am not going to get into what each of these different platforms do, what they don’t do or their fee structure. That is something you will have to go and find on your own, what I may suggest may not suit you.

I have my platform, now what?

Now that you have your designated tool for the job, it's time to get to work. You now need to decide what you want to invest in. Do you want to go the ETF route, the individual stocks route or the index fund route. You may even decide to have a mix. I know you may be thinking, what do all of these mean? That is what I will get into next.