Broke Millennial Takes on Investing: A Beginner’s Guide to Leveling Up Your Money by Erin Lowry

Chapter 1
 But Are You Ready to Start Investing?
 THERE I SAT, staring at my phone, willing it to light up with a text
 message. It was fall 2011 and, shockingly, I wasn’t a young woman
 hoping a boy would follow up about setting another date. Oh, no. It felt
 much worse than that. I was a financially desperate twenty-three-year-
old trying to make ends meet in New York City, one who was hoping
 that, through sheer force of will, I could make one of the parents for
 whom I babysat respond to the feelers I’d just sent out.
 “Are you free on Friday or Saturday evening?” the mother of my
 favorite babysitting charge texted.
 “Yes, either one works for me,” I wrote back within a few seconds,
 suppressing the urge to end with the colon-plus-parenthesis smiley face.
 It would have added desperation.
 “Great, let’s do Friday at six p.m.,” she responded an agonizing
 twenty minutes later.
 Friday at six p.m. meant I’d probably earn $120. This mom paid $20
 an hour, and usually stayed out until at least midnight on her ladies’
 nights out.
 I logged in to my bank account and assessed the rather pitiful state of
 affairs. At the time, I worked three jobs. My main job was as a page for
 the Late Show with David Letterman. The job, while fun, certainly didn’t
 cover even my most basic living expenses: food, MetroCard, rent, cell
 phone bill. So, I had to subsidize it by babysitting and working as a
 barista. These three jobs usually resulted in me working from around
 5:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. six or seven days a week. All those hours, and I
 still barely grossed $23,000 my first year out of college.
 The brief story of how I made this work without sinking into debt
 involves finding ample free (or frugal) entertainment and living off of a
 lot of coffee shop leftovers (products that had passed their sell-by date
but weren’t expired), rice and vegetables, and the snacks fed to the little
 kids I babysat. That, and I’d stashed away a $10,000 buffer in college
 because of my obsessive pursuit to live in New York City after
 graduation. That buffer never ended up getting touched (after I raided it
 for the security deposit on my first apartment), but it was a significant
 emergency fund to have during a financially stressful time. I also knew I
 had the privilege of being able to call my parents if anything went truly,
 truly wrong. The parental safety net isn’t one I ever used, but even its
 existence enabled me to take more career risks than peers who were not
 in a similar situation.
 Worrying each month about making enough to be able to pay all my
 bills without dipping into my cash reserves didn’t exactly put me in a
 prime position to start investing. Even though I’d learned some basics
 about investing already from my dad, I knew it wouldn’t be wise to put
 anything in the market quite yet. Every penny I earned needed to go
 toward other, short-term financial goals. I needed to be able to put on my
 financial oxygen mask before taking any risks with my money.
 •   •   •
 GETTING YOUR FINANCIAL LIFE together is step one on the journey to
 becoming an investor. You also need to shake the common
 misconception that investing is just for the wealthy.
 INVESTING ISN’T JUST FOR WEALTHY PEOPLE
 “[T]here’s this misconception that you need to be in a certain place
 before you can start investing,” explains Jennifer Barrett, chief education
 officer for Acorns, the saving and investing app. “That was true when I
 was in my twenties, too. I sort of had this idea that investing was for the
 wealthy or investing was for the financially successful, which meant I
 had to get my stuff together before I could really go in big. I think a lot
 of people feel that way because it’s intimidating and, at least in the past,
 you had to have $500 to $5,000 to open an account, so you really did
 need to have some money set aside outside of savings that could be used
 for investing.”

Broke Millennial Takes on Investing: A Beginner’s Guide to Leveling Up Your Money by Erin Lowry