Taking control of your financial wellness is one of the best ways to ensure that you’ll be comfortable later in life, even though it is quite a way off. Millennials catch a lot of flak for their supposed inability to properly save for the future; however, this simply isn’t true. Millennials are quite good at saving, but when it comes to investing, they have a way to go.
Investing in the stock market can seem like a labyrinthine mess of a task that has no real guarantee to yield a profit, but with the right knowledge, you can make investing in the stock market less of a mystery.
Investing, depending on how you go about it, can be one of the safer ways to save money and improve your financial wellness.
Choosing the Right Stocks Matters
While you might think that investing won’t make that much of a difference or that keeping your money either on hand or in a savings account is good enough, there is actually a huge amount of money that you’ll be missing out on. Not participating in the stock market in your twenties or thirties might cost millennials $3.3 million by the time we reach retirement age.
However, it is important that you understand which stocks are the best for you to invest in before you start putting your life savings into the stock market. A stock forecasting software can help you with your decisions in investment. No single company or commodity has stocks that will remain highly valued forever, and there will always be some level of risk associated with trading stocks, whether you’re just starting out or have years of trading experience under your belt. However, you can find the best stocks for day trading in a few simple ways:
- Do your research: Look at pre-market values to determine what might be a good stock to trade in on that day. Look for high-volume stocks over $5.
- Only trade high-volume stocks: They tend to be more popular and make it easier for you to track trends.
- Focus on one or two stocks: Keeping things simple will be less stressful and allow you to learn the trading pattern.
It also helps to watch the stock of companies that you support, since millennials are the ones truly deciding which companies are successful or not. Beauty stocks like Coty, Ulta, Estee Lauder, and e.l.f. have been performing wonderfully in the stock market recently due to high consumer confidence. Keeping a close eye on stocks from companies you support could be your ticket to getting in on the ground level before a company really takes off and becomes the new hot stock.
Different Ways to Invest
Building good money practices should be a priority, as doing so allows you to be an active part of the most financially independent generation of women in history. The rise of the gig economy has allowed millennial women a more relaxed approach to work with the ability to set their own work schedules and not be tied down at any one particular company. However, the gig economy can leave you feeling a bit financially unstable, which is why it is so important that you flex your investing muscles as much as you can.
While investing in a 401k through a company you’re working for is one of the easiest ways to start investing, it is by no means the only way to do so. It can just feel as though breaking into investing can be difficult without a large amount of capital to start out with.
Though it is possible to buy stocks with a credit card, if you are in a position where getting a cash advance from your line of credit to invest is your only option, you might not be in the best position to be entering the stock market in the first place. If you don’t have a lot of money to begin investing in the stock market, one of the best ways to get started outside of trading penny stocks is to look into investing apps. Apps like Robinhood, WiseBanyan, Fundrise, and Acorns are all apps available on your phone that allow for small trades, often for free or next to nothing, allowing you to start investing without having to invest too much.
Embracing a Changing Stock Market
Another fascinating feature of new investing apps is that many of them allow you to trade in cryptocurrencies. While there is no shortage of cryptocurrencies out there today, by far the most widely used and well known is Bitcoin. While cryptocurrencies can seem like a volatile investment to many, it has made many millennials millionaires. Trading in blockchain technology like cryptocurrency is popular with millennials who may be skeptical of trading in the traditional market.
Blockchain technology is the future of business, and it’s being used to improve the healthcare industry, education, and even travel and hospitality. The most visible blockchain technology is definitely cryptocurrency, which has changed the way that e-commerce functions completely in the short time that it has existed. The currency’s radical effect on the way that we view money appeals to millennials that already have a changing view on the importance of the concept of ownership in general, making it an attractive investment opportunity to many.
Just as technology has untethered the world from desks, houses, and belongings through an unprecedented connectedness provided by nearly unfettered access to the internet, so too is it changing the way that we view money itself. Minimalism and a lifetime full of experiences attracts the millennials, and investing in cryptocurrencies is a seemingly perfect way to embrace the changing world by rejecting traditional money for something new and exciting. Just because millennials don’t care as much about physical things doesn’t mean that they have to completely give up on their financial security in the future.
Investing is important because it sets you up for financial security later in your life. It lets you stop worrying about living paycheck to paycheck. Choosing the right stocks based on trackable patterns, investing diversely both in your 401k and out of it, and embracing new technologies like cryptocurrencies are some of the best and easiest ways to ensure that your investments are sound ones.
Now, get out there and make your money work for you!
