Investing for Beginners – These Guides Don’t Work and Fail Beginners

Finding a Beginner’s Guide

When I wanted to start my investing journey, I was confident that searching “Investing for Beginners” on the internet would yield the results I needed. And results I got. I was inundated with articles, blogs, news stories, podcasts, and videos that made my head spin. Like this article here from Investopedia. The title of the article is “How to Start Investing in Stocks: A Beginner’s Guide”, which sounds great, it made me click the article, but as I read through it, I found it was a shotgun of every investing term out there. It was too much; I was not ready for all the details and strategies. I combed through other search results and found the same thing over and over again. As I read them now, 5 months since beginning my walk down the investing path, I understand them a lot more, but it begs the question: is this really a beginner’s guide?

“The start is what stops most people.”

Don Shula

What makes a good guide?

Ever hear of the KISS Principle, Keep it Simple Stupid? I was hoping to find simple answers for simple questions. Why should I start investing? My Credit Union pays 3% interest on my checking account (up to a certain balance), 3% is good…right? What is a good return on my investment? Where should I go to invest? Would I need to find a financial advisor who will talk in terms I know nothing about? Where I’ll sit there nodding my head like an idiot when I have no clue what he/she is talking about. There are online brokers. What’s an online broker? Robots? Don’t they charge fees? Minimum balance requirements? Fine print? What is a stock? What is the “Stock Market”? Bears? Bulls? Holy cow (pun intended), just so many questions.

And I was just starting to scratch the surface. This is enough to paralyze any beginning investor. So, when I go to the internet and read a “Beginner’s Guide” article like the one above, I found it harder to find exactly where to begin. Hence, I thought of; Level Zero. This is my idea of a good Beginners Guide, one that starts at level zero.

Goal of this Blog – Finding Level Zero

There is always a start to every journey. As I write today, I am only 5 months into my investing journey. By no means am I an expert (yet) but my goal is that I can document what I’ve learned, what I’ve read, and how I have progressed, and share with my readers. Each week I will add another post, diving a little deeper into each topic in the order I experienced it. Sharing what I’ve deemed as successes and failures, so readers can go from crawling, to walking, to running on their investing journey.

Thanks for reading, stay tuned for more great Level Zero content! Feel free to comment with your own searching for beginner guides stories or contact me here with any comments or questions.