How To: Invest Your Money

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Disclaimer-Captain DIY and highly recommend exercising extreme caution when attempting DIY projects. Not everybody can do everything, and some things should only be done by professionals. Keep your digits attached, and keep the insurance company off of your back. Do it right or call the right people!

I’ve gone over some of the monetary aspects of DIY in relation to helping achieve Financial Independence, but today I’m going to get into a whole different aspect: DIY Investments. Although the standard disclaimer resides in its happy place at the top of this article, I’d like to add to it. I am not a financial advisor, nor am I a Certified Financial Anything. I’m just a guy who likes to figure out how to do things himself, and who has done a whole mess of reading and listening about investing.

According to a reputable news source whose name I can’t remember right now, somewhere in the neighborhood of 48% of Americans don’t have any money in the stock market. If those people are anything like I was not that long ago, they avoid the market for several reasons: the idea of learning how to invest seems incredibly daunting, they have heard all kinds of horror stories about people losing everything to the market, and all of the jargon sounds like a different language that should only be spoken by Wall Street wolves and pyramid scheme creators.

As it turns out, there are a few people out there who have figured out a way to invest in the market without having a statistics degree, and they very likely won’t lose their shirts. They have found that low-cost index funds, continuously funded over a fairly long period of time (at least ten years), are nearly guaranteed to earn money.

As you know, good ol’ Captain tries really hard to not hire out whenever possible, but it wasn’t too long ago that a financial advisor was in the picture. This gentleman gave us what sounded to our virgin ears like sage advice. We shuffled our meager savings into his control, and we waited for the gains. Two years later, we were actually down money (this was while everyone else was making money in the market) and we were feeling pretty disillusioned about the whole idea of investing.

Through a fairly peculiar chain of events that may or may not come to light here, the idea of Financial Independence and Early Retirement was discovered by Mrs. DIY. She then spread the word around the Headquarters, and the Captain was hooked. Since I am far from an expert in the subject, I have decided to pass along a comprehensive list of resources that I have found to be both illuminating and entertaining. I highly recommend checking out the following links:

JL Collins

Mr. Money Mustache

Choose FI

Mad Fientist

Millennial Revolution

Early Retirement Now

There’s a whole boatload of info in those links, so get crackin’! DIY isn’t just about home renovations, it’s about optimizing your entire life!

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