The Only Investing Video You’ll Ever Need (Start With $0)

Okay, so let's say you want to get started with this investing thing.

You might have a bit of money saved. It's probably not enough for a

house, but you decide you should probably invest in something. You could

invest in stocks and shares, government bonds, corporate bonds, real estate,

foreign exchange, crypto, NFTs, futures, fine art, watches, or maybe you've got

that one friend who bought Bitcoin in 2013 or Nvidia in like 2015. And then

that person got super rich and you're like, "Whoa, like man, if only I'd done

that, I'd have been like mega rich without having to do any work." So

there's all these dreams, there's all this confusion, and then on top of all

of this, there is the very real fear that you might actually lose all of this

money that you've worked so hard to save. So in light of all of this, this

is my updated ultimate guide to investing for beginners. And so we're

going to split this video up into four parts, which are time-stamped so you can

skip around if you feel like it. In part one, we're going to talk about the

basics and the philosophy behind investing. Then we're going to talk

about why and how to invest your money and some nuances around that. Thirdly,

we're going to talk about common fears and questions and concerns like, "What

if I lose all my money?" And then in part four, we're going to talk about

fast lane investing, which is an alternative approach to building wealth.

So, with that said, let's dive in. Part one, the philosophy and the basics

of investing. Okay, so let's start with the basics and let's start by asking the

question, what's actually the point of investing in the first place? Now a lot

of people I speak to have the experience where they've managed to save up some

amount of money, maybe it's a few thousand pounds, a few thousand dollars,

and they're feeling pretty good about it because now they have a safety net and

they're being financially responsible. But if you're interested in investing,

then you probably know that if that money is just sitting there in your bank

account, it's actually losing value every single day. And that is thanks to

a wonderful thing called inflation, where essentially over time your money

loses its purchasing power. And so obviously a thousand dollars today buys

you less stuff than a thousand dollars did three years ago or a thousand

dollars did 20 years ago. The thousand dollars is theoretically the same. It's

just that everything else has gone more expensive and therefore you can buy less

stuff with the same amount of money. Now the whole point of investing is to be

able to put our money somewhere where it makes more money. Firstly, to counteract

the effects of inflation, and secondly, if we can beat inflation, then it means

like the more you invest, the more money you make, the more it compounds over

time, and then that is one of the the for building wealth. So if the point of

investing is to magically grow your money, you might be thinking, "Okay, but

like how does investing actually make you money?" And here we're going to

introduce the term asset. An asset is a thing that puts money in your pocket.

So, for example, if you think about buying a house and then putting it on

rent, you kind of make money in two separate ways from that particular

equation. Firstly, you buy the house and then you put it on rent, therefore you

get rental income coming in from your tenants every month, and that puts money

in your pocket. And secondly, hopefully the value of the house also goes up over

time. This is called capital appreciation. So, let's say you win a

million dollars in the lottery and you put all of it into buy a house in cash,

and you're able to rent out that house for, I don't know,

$2,000 a month. Every year you're making $24,000 in rental income from the house.

And maybe if you sell the house 10 years later, maybe it'll be worth 1.5 million.

And so, you've theoretically made an extra 500,000 from the capital

appreciation of the property. In reality, of course, you probably use a

mortgage, in reality there's property taxes, there's like inflation itself,

and all sorts of more complicated factors, but essentially in this context

you are earning money through rental income and through appreciation of the

asset itself. Now, houses are an interesting example because they're

quite easy to visualize. Like you can imagine theoretically owning a house and

then theoretically becoming a landlord and having someone pay you rent because

you probably pay rent to someone else. And so, most people when they think of

investing, they think, "I should get on the property ladder in some degree,

especially if your parents were into that sort of stuff many decades ago."

But for the most part, for most people, owning a house is actually a relatively

inaccessible thing if you are just getting started with investing. And so,

we want to be looking to alternative asset classes. Now, there is a long list

of assets that you could potentially choose to invest in. There is stocks,

shares, and equities, which is sort of the same thing. There are hedge funds,

there are index funds, there are government bonds, there are corporate

bonds, there are fancy watches, there's fine art, there is crypto, of course.

And a lot of this stuff can get very complicated very quickly, so we are

going to simplify things, and we're going to be focusing on stocks and

shares. The reason we're going to be talking about stocks and shares, and

this is most sensible people's recommendation when it comes to

investing your money. Firstly, because it is very accessible to normal people

like you and me. Secondly, you don't need a huge amount of money to get

started, unlike buying a property. Thirdly, you don't need to take on huge

amounts of risk, unlike something like crypto. And fourthly, you don't need to

be an accredited investor of any kind. Like, for the most part, normal people

can just buy stocks and shares. Part two, why and how to invest in

stocks and shares. So, what does it actually mean to buy a stock or a share?

Well, when you're investing in stocks and shares, you're basically buying a

small percentage ownership in the company that you're investing in. So,

let's say I wanted to buy shares in Apple. But first, let's answer the

question of what even is the point of owning, for example, Apple stock. And

the point is that there are two ways to make money from stock. The first way you

make money from investing in stocks is that the value of the company increases

over time, and therefore the value of your stocks or shares increases over

time. Secondly, certain companies pay what they call dividends. For example,

in the UK there is a company called BT, British Telecom, that pays dividends.

And so, if you own a piece of BT, even if it's just like a tiny percentage,

you're not just hoping that the price increases over time, they are also

literally paying out some of their profits to their shareholders. So, we've

established that there are two ways to make money from stocks and shares. The

next question we have to get to is, how do you choose which companies you want

to invest in? Maybe you have an iPhone and you're like, "Man, Apple seems

pretty good." Maybe you're like, "AI stuff seems interesting. I should invest

in Nvidia." Maybe you're an Elon fanboy and you're like, "Man, I should invest

in Tesla." Maybe you watch loads of Netflix and you're like, "Man, I should

invest in Netflix." Now, here the advice from most sensible people who give

advice about this stuff, not me, I'm not a financial advisor, but sensible people

who are, basically say you should not try and pick stocks. This is a wonderful

book by chap called JL Collins. This was is like how I got started with investing

like 10-plus years ago. He says, "You should not try and stock pick." Warren

Buffett himself says, "You should not try and actively pick stocks." In

general, there is a better and safer approach to investing, and that is to

buy an index fund. So, what is an index fund? Well, an index fund can be divided

into two words, index and fund. So, a fund is basically just like a

group of stocks and shares. And then the index component means that the fund

tracks a particular stock market index. So, for example, in the US there is a

very famous stock market index called the S&P 500, which is basically the top

500 biggest companies in the US. For example, at the time that I'm recording

this video, Nvidia makes up 7.18% of the S&P 500. Apple makes up 6 and a

bit percent. Microsoft makes up 4 and a bit percent. Other companies that you

have heard of are Amazon, Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google,

Meta, which is the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. And

interestingly, company number 498 out of 500 is Match Group, which is the company

that owns the dating apps Tinder and Hinge, which also makes up around 0.01%

of the index. Now, the point of the S&P 500 index is that it gives you a single

number that you can track over time to see how valuable as a whole the US stock

market is. And the vast majority of the value in the US stock market is in these

500 companies. Now, if you look at a graph of the S&P 500 over time, you'll

see that for the most part, it goes up and to the right, which is what we like

to see, but you'll see these moments of decline. And this is where you are in a

recession or you've got like the 2008 financial crisis or you've got COVID

that's just hitting or you've got like tariffs. So, the market as a whole, i.e.

the sum of the value of all the different companies, goes up over time,

but sometimes goes down and then generally kind of continues going back

up slowly. So, that is what the S&P 500 index is. Now, if you invest in an index

fund, what basically happens is that the money you put into the fund gets

distributed amongst the companies in the index. And crucially, this is split

based on their weighting in the index. So, for example, if I invested $1,000

into the S&P 500 today, in reality, what's happening behind the scenes is

I've got $71.80 of Nvidia. I've invested $65 in Apple.

I've invested about $47 in Microsoft and so on across these 500 companies. And

this is exactly what people like Warren Buffett recommend in terms of how to get

started with investing. >> I think it's the same thing that makes

most sense practically all of the time. And And that is to consistently

buy an S&P 500 low-cost index fund. Keep buying it through thick and thin and

especially through thin. Now, the great thing here is that over time, your money

is going to track the market. So, the money you invest it grows at the same

rate as the stock market as a whole if you invest in the S&P 500, which is the

US stock market as a whole. You're not trying to come up with like some crucial

like game-changing insight that like, you know, you weren't trying to predict

10 years ago that Nvidia was suddenly going to do well or anything like that.

You're not trying to do all of this research into all these companies to

figure out which companies are like, you know, mispriced and like what their

price-to-earnings ratio is and any of this sort of stuff. You're just saying,

you know what? I'm going to make a bet that as a whole, the US stock market in

this case is going to go up over time, and so I'm just going to distribute my

money across the top 500 companies. I'm not going to think about it too hard.

I'm just going to set it and forget it, and I'm going to do better things with

my time rather than comb through spreadsheets and try and research

companies. And if we take a historical average over the last like, I don't

know, 100 years or something, the S&P 500 grows roughly by somewhere between 7

and 9% on average every year. Now, at this point, whenever someone hears the

advice of index funds for the first time, and what I was thinking when I

first read this, I was like, "Okay, but like why would I invest in

like freaking Campbell Soup Company? Why would I invest in like Ralph Lauren?

Like, these companies clearly aren't going to be big. Obviously, I should

just invest in tech companies, or obviously I should invest in Nvidia, or

I should invest in Apple, or I should invest in Tesla, or obviously I should

invest in products that I actually use. Like, surely I have I have enough

insight that I can pick winning stocks that like outperform the market." Now,

this makes a lot of sense cuz you might be thinking that 7 to 9% like, that's

nothing. Like, that's not that interesting. I want to double my money.

I want to, you know, triple my money. And in general, when it comes to the

world of investing, you should not expect to double or triple your money

because that tends not to happen unless and except in very few circumstances,

which we're going to talk about at the end of this video. Having a 7 to 9%

return rate is actually considered really solid. The best private equity

firms in the world, I think, aim for like 20% returns, but normal people like

you and me generally can't access private equity anyway, and so most of us

normal people are content with 7 to 9% annual compounding returns. Now, I want

to talk a little bit more about why you should generally not try and pick

individual stocks. And the whole idea here is that unless you get really

lucky, chances are you are not actually going to beat the market. There have

been a bunch of studies and surveys where people have tried this over time.

Warren Buffett even did a challenge where he challenged like fund pickers

who were like like literally specialists at picking stocks and basically compared

the performance of these like professionals whose entire job it is to

pick stocks against the S&P 500 and basically found that the S&P 500

actually outperforms most funds most years if you take a long enough time

horizon. There is also a hidden cost of stock picking because even if you could

theoretically beat the market, the way you do that is by investing loads and

loads and loads and loads of time in actually doing the research to be able

to know what you're talking about. So like spending hours every week reading

financial reports and tracking the news and analyzing charts and worrying about

whether you should be buying or selling at each individual moment. Now that is

time that you probably have better things to do with. You could probably

spend it with your family or your hobbies or building a business. If you

invest in an index fund, it basically takes like 30 minutes or less to get

started and then you don't have to put any time into it thinking about it or

worrying about it whereas stock picking is quite different. For me personally, I

have a bunch of friends who have invested in individual stocks over time

rather than an index fund. Basically, all of them have made less money than

they would have done if they'd just invested in the index fund in the first

place. And some of them have even lost money overall because they were so

convinced that company X was going to do really well and then company X didn't do

well and they put too much money in company X. So that's like a scenario in

which you can actually lose money, but you're very unlikely to lose money if

you just spread it out amongst the top 500 companies in the US or amongst the

top 1,000 companies in the world. Now I do want to hammer home this point

because at this point, if you're still with us in the video, you might be

thinking, "But like surely stock picking is easy. I mean, man, 5 years ago I knew

that Apple would do well and if I just invested in Apple 5 years ago, I'd be

rich right now." Or like, "Man, you know, 10 years ago I had a good inkling

that Nvidia was going to get big. You know, I just didn't get round to putting

money in it, but man, had I put money into Nvidia, it would have gone to the

moon." And so what people do is that they get this sort of false sense of

like thinking of themselves as being very good investors because at one

point, maybe in 2013, you considered buying Bitcoin just like I did and never

actually did it. Or like, I don't know, when Disney Plus was announced in, I

don't know, 5 years ago, I was like, "Huh, maybe I should invest in Disney

stock." And I never did. And I'm like, "Oh man, Disney's stock is so up. Man,

if only I'd invested in Disney stock, I'd have been I'd have made so much

money, etc. etc." The thing to keep in mind is that unless you actually

invested in Bitcoin in 2013, you can't say that like man, I'm such a good

investor. I I knew Bitcoin was going to do well because like everyone's like I

knew it was going to do well and unless you put your money where your mouth is,

it really doesn't count. Secondly, if you did invest in Bitcoin in 2013 or

Nvidia in 2013, when would you have sold? Would you have sold when the price

5 X's or 10 X's or 100 X's? Like how would you have known to hold on for the

next like 15 years because like stuff was going to go up and down and

ultimately up. Let's say you own Nvidia stock right now. Nvidia is at an

all-time high in its stock price. Do you keep on holding? Or do you sell? Do you

think man this AI boom is a bubble? So do you sell Nvidia because you're like

this OpenAI and all these Microsoft and all these companies it's all it's all

just like a bubble and it's going to pop. Why didn't you sell 6 months ago

when everyone was like oh my god Nvidia's dying and the stock price is

going down? Like loads of people sold at that point. Like what is it about you

that would have kept you holding onto the stock? It is so easy to delude

ourselves into thinking that we are good investors just because we had a thought

a few years ago that like I should probably buy Nvidia and then and then

didn't actually do it. Or even if you did buy Nvidia a few years ago, you you

maybe just got lucky. And it has nothing to do with like your

quality as investor cuz there are literally full-time professionals whose

job it is to pick stocks. They do it for 60 to 80 hours a week and in general

over time index funds outperform even those people who are putting their

entire life's work into trying to pick stocks. Generally, the younger you are

the more prone you are to wanting to do individual stock picking because your

memory is just not long enough. For example, if you happen to be one of the

I don't know 20% of people who watch this channel who are over the age of 40,

you probably remember Kodak in the 1990s. They were absolutely huge. No one

could have imagined a world without Kodak because they were absolutely

massive. Like they actually invented digital cameras back in 1975, but they

didn't want to market the digital camera because it would cannibalize their like

film camera business. And now no one uses a Kodak anymore. It's kind of like

retro nostalgic tech because they filed for bankruptcy in like 2012. Or if you

have the memory of like 20 years ago, Blockbuster was like absolutely massive.

People would go to a Blockbuster store on a Friday night and like rent a movie.

Netflix literally went to Blockbuster and said, "Hey, do you want to buy us

for $50 million?" And Blockbuster CEO laughed in their face. And now there is

one Blockbuster left on the planet and Netflix is worth hundreds of billions of

dollars. If you speak to your parents or your grandparents, there is no way they

would have ever imagined that Lehman Brothers, the 158-year-old investment

bank, would never not be around because it was just too big to fail. It survived

the Civil War, it survived two World Wars, it survived the Great Depression

in the US. But then, in September 2008, it just collapses in a single weekend

and people who have worked there for decades, who have their entire

retirement savings in the bank, who have their entire like stock portfolio in

like the Lehman stock, those people lost everything overnight. Now, the point is

the more life experience you have, uh the more you know that these are things,

right? Like every single generation has examples of companies that were too big

to fail. Right now, I cannot imagine a world without Apple or without Tesla or

without Netflix. But neither could the chaps in 2008, they could not imagine a

world without Lehman Brothers. The point isn't that you don't want to invest in

Netflix and Apple and Nvidia, the point is you don't want to only invest in

Netflix and Apple and Nvidia, you want to try and diversify your holdings

across multiple different companies rather than betting your entire financial future on a single company. Okay, so at this point, if you are sold

on index funds, then you might be asking the practical question of like, how do I

actually buy them? Unfortunately, you cannot just go to S&P

500indexfund.com/buy, you have to go through a middleman and that middleman is generally referred to as a stock broker. Back in the day, it

was a real-life person that you would phone up to buy and sell stocks on your

behalf on the New York Stock Exchange or the London Stock Exchange or whatever.

Nowadays, it's not a real person, it's just online platforms. There are loads

of them depending on which country you're in, so you just Google like stock

platform and then insert your country name. Like Vanguard is one of the big

global ones, that's available in lots of different countries. They're also

available in the UK, so I have a lot of my holdings in Vanguard. Trading 212 is

another app that me and my wife have been using for years, so I mostly have

my holdings split across Vanguard and Trading 212. Speaking of, we should

reach out to Trading 212 to sponsor this video. So, if that deal goes through,

you will hear a sponsored message now. All right, so I'm going to tell you

about Trading 212 who are very kindly sponsoring this video. Trading 212 is a

fantastic online investment platform. Me and my wife Izzy were both using it

independently and have been for years, even way before they started sponsoring

the channel. The platform makes investing super easy, super straightforward. There are no commissions, you can sign up with as

little as like £10, you can sign up to fractional shares, and there's none of

that unnecessary friction that stops people from ever getting started.

If you're really scared of investing, they even let you get started

trading with practice money. So, it's not real money, but you're using

practice money on the real market, so you can see if you had invested £100 or

£1,000 or whatever the thing is, what would you have made or what would you

have lost? If you're super super scared about it. And so, it's a really nice

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So, the pies feature is essentially, you can basically just like browse other

people's like asset allocation portfolios, and you can copy and paste

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invest feature is also really good because then you can put your investing

on autopilot, like every month it can deposit a certain amount into whatever

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As a bonus, if you sign up to Trading 212 using my link, you will get

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this video, and let's get back to it. Oh, that worked well. It's pretty good.

Seamless integration. Fingers crossed. But anyway, even with all this information, there are probably some fears and concerns in the back of

your mind, so let's talk about those. Part three, common fears and concerns

and questions. Fear number one, what if I lose all my money by investing? This

is the big one, this is the thing that stops most people from ever getting

started with investing because like, "Oh my god, what if I lose all my money?

What if something like 2008 happens and like you had all your money in Lehman

Brothers and then it collapses and then suddenly you're bankrupt. Oh my god,

that would be terrible." Now, this actually is a totally legitimate

concern. I was worried about this until 2015 when I read The Simple Path to

Wealth by JL Collins for the first time and realized that I didn't need to worry

about it too much. So, let's put some numbers on this. The biggest crash in

recent memory was the crash of March 2020 when COVID was was happening.

You're probably old enough to remember that. Now, let's say you'd invested

$1,000 into the S&P 500 at exactly the wrong time, just before the crash, so

like early 2020. And then COVID hits, and then in a single month in March

2020, the market, the S&P 500 drops by 34%. So, your $1,000 is now worth $660.

You have lost $340. Oh my goodness. At this point, you're thinking, "Oh my god,

I knew I shouldn't have done this investing thing. I've lost I'm I'm

losing so much money. My money Oh my god, I've lost this $300. The world is

literally shutting down. Oh my god." Now, if at that point you decide, "Screw

it. I'm just going to sell. I don't want to I don't want to lose any more money."

Then you have realized the loss because you bought the index at $1,000, you sold

it at 660, so you have literally bought high and sold low, which is the opposite

of what you should do. And so you've lost $340. But if you had just held on,

if you'd been like, "You know what? I'm just going to hold on. You know, I knew

that investing in stocks and shares was like a little bit risky, but it gets a

lot less risky if you just like hang on and just leave your money in there for a

long time. The market literally recovered to its pre-crash levels by

August. So, it took five months to recover back to where it was before. So,

within five months, you'd have been back up to $1,000. And then it just kept

going up and up. And by the end of 2021, your $1,000 would have been worth

$1,400. And by the end of 2025, that same $1,000, if you just held on through

the crash, would have been worth over $2,100. So, in that five-year period

where we all lived through a pandemic, you would have more than doubled your

money if you had just held on, assuming you had invested at the worst possible

time. Now, yes, 2008, it took like a few years for the market to recover, but

recover it did. And even if you'd invested in the stock market at the

absolute worst possible time, just before the 2008 financial crisis, you

would have still made way more money in the long run if you had just held on.

And the key insight here that I learned from this book and a bunch of research

since is that for the most part, the stock market goes up over time, as long

as you have a long enough time horizon. It's sort of the same with house prices.

Like for the most part, in most countries, in most cities where people

actually want to live, if you buy a house today and try and sell it next

week, maybe the price has gone down. If you try and sell it next month, maybe

the price has gone down. But if you try and sell it 20 years from now, chances

are the price will have gone up quite significantly. So basically, the longer

you can leave your money in the index funds without touching it, the more it

compounds over time. And apparently, Albert Einstein had that quote of like

compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. Okay, but like seriously,

you know, this is my this is my hard-earned cash I'm investing here.

Like what would have to be true for me to lose all my money? So if you're

investing in the S&P 500, in order for you to lose all of your money, the value

of top 500 companies in the US suddenly has to drop to zero overnight. What are

the chances of that? Like if all of the top 500 companies in the US suddenly had

their entire value disappear overnight, we would probably be living through an

apocalypse. We'd probably have way worse problems than the value of your stock

market portfolio and the money that you invested in those stocks probably

wouldn't even be worth the paper it's printed on because like civilization has

collapsed or something like that. Now, I think it's a very reasonable bet

personally that the stock market is going to go up over time over a long

enough time horizon. And there's a few different reasons for that. So, firstly,

human productivity is a thing and human productivity compounds. So if we imagine

a company like Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Meta, like these companies that make up,

you know, the top the top few companies of the S&P 500, every day there are

thousand thousands of people that go to work where their job is to literally add

value to the company, right? Like they make stuff, they invent things, they

create a new iPhone, they make a new chip. All of that stuff creates real

value. Like one thing that I didn't quite appreciate before I started

getting into investing is that the value of a company is not just people gambling

on like I reckon Elon's going to be great, therefore Tesla price should go

up. I mean, in that context, it kind of is, but like the value of a company is a

real thing. And in general, the more revenue the company has, the more profit

the company has, the more products the company has, the greater that value is.

And so because people are continually doing work, you would expect the value

of companies where people are continually doing work to go up over

time because value is literally being created every day. The second reason is

that the world keeps on getting bigger. So like 20 years ago, we had like 6

billion people in the world. Now, we have like 8 billion people in the world.

More people means more customers and more transactions and more economic

activity. There's hundreds of millions of people in Asia and Africa and South

America who are like buying stuff, like entering the consumer economy for the

first time. More and more people are getting access to the internet every

single day. These people are buying iPhones. They are opening bank accounts.

They're like subscribing to online software. So, the fact that like in

general the world's population is increasing is another reason as to why

you would expect the value of companies to go up cuz there are more consumers

who want the stuff that the companies make. Thirdly, I think that the

reasonably strong bet that the value of something like the S&P 500 index fund

will go up over time is because it is a self-healing index. So, it's not like a

list of 500 companies that never changes. It's a curated list of 500

companies. So, if a company starts failing, it gets kicked out of the index

and it gets replaced with a new company. Something like Blockbuster disappears

and something like Netflix takes its spot. So, you can kind of think of the

index as a sort of like best of Spotify playlist that's like constantly being

updated with whatever is most valuable at that given moment. And so, you're not

betting that any single company will survive forever. You're not even betting

that like these top 500 companies will survive forever. You're just betting

that the top 500 companies in the US in this example at any given time will

collectively grow because people are going to work and creating value within

these companies. At this point, you might be thinking, but like the S&P 500

is just American companies and, you know, America is going to collapse

because of Trump or because of Elon or because of the woke people or because of

the immigrants or because of insert whatever flavor you would want and that is like, you know, And to that, I would say, Yeah,

that's actually a fair point. That is why you don't have to invest in the S&P

500 index fund. There are things called global index funds. So, there's the

Vanguard FTSE All-World index fund, which is sort of like the S&P 500 in

that it is an index fund, but instead of investing in the just the top 500

companies in the US, instead this fund splits your money across the top 3,700

companies across 49 different countries. So, if you put a thousand dollars in

that, you're getting a little bit of Apple, you're getting a little bit of

Microsoft, but you are also getting some Samsung from South Korea. You're getting

some TSMC in Taiwan. You're getting a little bit of Toyota in Japan. You're

getting a little bit of LVMH in France. So, even if for whatever reason you

believe that the US economy is heading for decline, the global economy probably

isn't. And so, you can just spread your money when you're investing across like

global companies rather than just US companies. And the nice thing about the

Vanguard All World Index is that it automatically adjusts its weightings

based on where the value is. So, if the US suddenly shrinks, and let's say

India's economy suddenly booms, then your distribution of investments will

naturally shift to wherever the growth is happening. So, again, you're not

gambling that like a particular company or a particular country is going to win.

What you're basically saying is, I reckon humans across the world who are

working in companies will be creating more value over time, and there will be

continued demand for that value. Therefore, the price of everything is

going to go up over time. So, with all that said, you might be asking the

question of like, "Okay, cool. I'm sold. How do I get started? How much money do

I need to get started?" The answer to this question depends on the platform.

Most sensible platforms in most countries, you can get started with like

a dollar, or like $10, or like $100. Like, generally a small amount of money.

Again, I would do some Googling or ask ChatGPT or Claude to figure out like

what the best free platform is depending on what country you're in. You should be

able to find a platform that is completely free. You shouldn't have to

pay for it unless you're in a country that has weird regulations and stuff.

But, for the most part, you can do this for free with very little money to get

started. Oh, by the way, if you are enjoying this video so far, I would love

to hear from you in the comments what has been your biggest concern about

getting started with investing. And if you haven't yet, like what's the thing

that's holding you back? Okay, so at this point we've covered the traditional

approach to investing. But, there is a final thing we need to talk about

because, yes, of course, we all want to be rich in 30 to 40 years. But, it would

be nice if we could get rich in 5 to 10 years, 15 years, rather than having to

wait 30 to 40 years to build true wealth. And that is where we come to

part four of the video, which is fast lane investing, the alternative approach

to building wealth. Now, what we've talked about so far is what MJ DeMarco,

author of The Millionaire Fastlane, calls the slow lane approach to building

wealth. He's a bit disparaging about it, but basically it's like, "I've got some

money. I've got a day job. I'm going to save 10% of my income from my day job.

I'm going to put it into investments like stock market index funds or like

real estate or whatever. And then 50 years from now, that money's going to

compound and then I'll be a millionaire and stuff. Now, this is a very slow form

of investing. It's totally fine and I think it's very important to do as part

of a diversified balanced portfolio and balanced life and stuff, but there is

another approach. And that approach involves reframing what investing actually means. Now, when we hear investing, a lot of us default to

thinking that investing means taking our money and buying an asset with it like

uh stocks and shares or like buying a rental property. But if we really think

about it from first principles, what is the point of investing money? The point

of investing money is for your existing money to make more money further down

the line. The point isn't explicitly to invest in stocks and shares or like

watches or like, I don't know, fine art. The point is to grow your money and the

stocks and shares or the rental property or the watch, that's just a vehicle by

which you turn your money into more money. So, if we imagine something like,

you know, 7% returns in the S&P 500, let's say you've got a spare $10,000. If

you put the $10,000 in the S&P 500 today, on average it'll be worth, what,

$10,700 next year? So, then the question becomes, can I find a way to invest that $10,000 or whatever the thing might be

so that it can make more than $700 in the next 12 months? And generally to

that, the answer is usually a hell yes. So, there's a couple of different

options here. Option number one is if you invest in your own ability to make

money. So, let's say I have a job like I'm I'm a healthcare assistant in a

hospital and I could spend a thousand pounds to take a new course that gives

me a new certification and that certification, like being a

phlebotomist, allows me to increase my hourly rate. So, if I'm making, let's

say, $15 an hour as a healthcare assistant and this new thing lets me

suddenly make $30 an hour as a phlebotomist. I've invested in my own

skills and my own like credentials and as a result, I've literally doubled my

earning capacity. And so, with an additional four hours of work, well,

what's that? An extra $60? With 40 hours of work, so 40-hour work week, it's

$600. So, within week two of making this trade, I've already like made back my

investment and now it's just like pure profit from there based on like that

investment. And so, my return on this thousand dollars that I've invested in

this course or whatever is way higher than 7% because I've invested in my own

ability to make money. And this is generally why investing in your own

skills or your own education is very reasonable provided you can see a path

from like okay getting that credential or getting that qualification or

learning those skills provided you can see a path to like a sensible return on

that investment. I'm not saying you have to buy courses and stuff but you know

you can find stuff for free on YouTube. I'm just saying that there is often more

value in investing in your own ability to make money than there is in

investing in like 500 random companies in the US if you had to choose. Then we

have option number two which is to actually invest in your own business and

that is another form of fast lane investing. Now obviously this only

applies if you have a business or if you want to start your own business. If I

use my own business as example when I was 18 I started a business helping kids

get into med school. In year one it made about 8,000 pounds like 10,000

dollars. In year two it made about 80,000. In year three it made about

150,000. >> >> So we 8x revenue in year one and we 2x revenue in year two. And then I sort of

stayed at 150,000 for a few years and then a few years later in like 2020 boom

went up from 150k to like 1.2 million so we 10x in revenue again and then the

next year we 4x in revenue from 1.2 million to 4.6 million dollars pounds. I

can't remember the exact currency. If we consider the 12 year period of this

that's way more than 7% per year. Now if you were to put money in Apple it is

very unlikely that Apple will 10x its value in the next 12 months because

they're already absolutely huge and the bigger you are the harder it is to grow

at least in terms of percentages because you're already so huge right? But if for

example you took a thousand dollars and you used it to start your own business

it is totally reasonable for you to have made 10 grand by next year or even 100

grand. You know I've got this thing called the Lifestyle Business Academy

which is like an online business mentorship thing for beginners starting

businesses. We have some people who have started a business for the first time

and within like three months they made 10 grand and they're on track to make

100 grand within the first 12 months. And so if you think of the investment in

starting the business for example and maybe investing in an educational

program or a mentorship program or whatever like they're getting a way

better return on that particular investment compared to just investing in

the S&P 500. And if you're interested in this sort of approach to building your

own business where you could take some amount of money, it doesn't have to be a

huge amount, you could invest it, a small amount of it, like maybe even a

few hundred dollars, maybe even less, in starting your own business. That

business could be something like a lifestyle business that could quite

conceivably get you to a 100k revenue within about 12 months. If you're

interested in more details about that, I have a video over here somewhere that

breaks down that concept in more detail. In general, I think it is a good to

invest a good chunk of your time, energy, and money into starting your own

thing and improving your own ability to make money, and then investing the rest

into something like the S&P 500, which is what I've been doing for the

last like 10-plus years. So, yeah, you should totally check out this video over

here if you are interested in potentially starting your own business

to drastically increase your rate of return. Thank you for watching, and I

will hopefully see you there. Bye-bye.