Stock Market Investing for Beginners: Essentials to Start Investing Successfully by Tycho Press

1

WHY INVEST?
Everybody invests. From the savvy stockbroker on Wall Street to
the assembly line worker who skips breakfast every Friday
because he runs out of money before his next paycheck, everyone
invests their time, effort, and attention in what they find important.
If you spend your Saturdays training for a marathon or tackling 50-
mile bike rides, you’re investing in your health. If you pack your
weekends with family activities, taking the kids to swimming practice
or attending Little League games or visiting museums, you’re investing
in your children. And if you attend classes in hopes that a college
degree will help you land a better job, you’re investing in your career.
While each of these forms of investing appears to support a
different goal, all of them—and dozens more—share a common
purpose: to provide for the future. Investing in good health now
increases your chances of a happier, more productive retirement.
Investing in your family now can build relationships that will sustain in
times when you may require more from others yet have less to give in
return. Investing in your career now can open professional and
financial doors currently out of reach.
Most people reap the richest rewards from their investments after
retirement, but the sooner you start planning, the better off you will be
in the future. Making even a small commitment to a different kind of
investing—the financial strategies presented in this book—can put you
well on your way to a longer and stronger retirement.
Common Motivations
Motivations behind financial investing are nearly as numerous as
investors themselves. Of course, your priorities may differ from your
neighbor’s, but for the most part, motivations for investing tend to fall
into three categories:

Investing to build wealth.
Investing to support a family.
Investing to prepare for retirement.
Investors focused on building wealth tend to concentrate more on
the near future than do other investors. Wealth allows you to establish
and maintain a comfortable lifestyle. For some, that comfort might
mean a nice-sized house, a couple of reliable cars, and a trip to
somewhere warm for a week every January. Many investors are happy
with such a lifestyle, while others set loftier goals. By building wealth
slowly over time—the safest and surest way to do it—you can improve
your lifestyle along with your net worth.
Investors who prioritize supporting a family often seek to
accumulate enough wealth now to afford a home in a neighborhood
with good schools, the occasional vacation, and things like ballet
slippers, algebra tutoring, and summer camp. At the same time, these
investors must look ahead to college, which never seems to get any
cheaper. All of this is to say that family-oriented investors must be
flexible.
Retirement-oriented investors take a longer view than both the
wealth builders and the family oriented. You know the type—the type
that work hard for 40 years, climbing the corporate ladder. Like most
of us, they earn a respectable living without quite reaching the top
rungs. Yet they live below their means and always keep one eye on the
horizon. The ultimate goal for these investors is a smooth transition to
retirement, where even without a paycheck they can maintain the
standard of living they spent all those years earning.
Whether you seek to support a robust lifestyle, provide a happy
home for your children, or just store enough away so you won’t have to
work until you turn 80, you can improve the odds of reaching your
goals by putting your money to work. Whether you’re 20, 40, or 60,
you’ll enjoy more choices decades from now if you invest wisely—
starting today.
And it needs to be today. Not tomorrow, not next week, and
certainly not on that mythical day when you suddenly start bringing in
more than you spend and can conveniently spare a few hundred a
month. People who put off investing until it’s convenient spend their
golden years eating ramen noodles. You’ve got to start today.
Not sure how to proceed? Don’t panic. By the end of this book,
you’ll have a clear understanding of your financial goals as well as a

Stock Market Investing for Beginners: Essentials to Start Investing Successfully by Tycho Press