Investing 101
If there’s one thing that all wealthy people have in common it’s this: They invest.
That’s because investing money is the smartest and most reliable way to grow it over the long term, after you have first built up your emergency savings (which never gets invested).
Investing in a Nutshell
Investing is putting your money in a financial vehicle that might enable it to grow more quickly than it would in a savings account.
While most of us think of “earning” as putting in hours of work and getting paid for that, investing essentially puts our money into a marketplace where companies and governments and other entities can use it to create a profit that will be returned to us. (At least that’s the hope—some investments do go bust, taking our money with them.)
Most commonly, people invest by buying financial assets like stocks, bonds, mutual funds and ETFs (and if you don’t know exactly what these are, don’t worry, we’ll describe them later). When we sell them, we hopefully make a profit by selling at a price higher than what we bought them for.