5 Ways To Pennies Into An Investment Fund

I love my life. We have no debt and everything we want and money to spare!

Do you wish life was like that?

Then you need investments to start working for you, even when you sleep.

I know how intimidating it can feel when you want to invest but have no money to do it with, so here are 5 ways to turn a small amount of cash into an investment fund:

Automate Your Savings

I’ve recently discovered Digit.com and it’s awesome. It’s the digital equivalent of putting $10 a month under the mattress when you get paid.

The mattress trick is fine too, by the way, but it’s safer to keep your cash in an account, I find.

So sign up with Digit.co and automate a little saving every month. Even $10 a week turns into $520 after just one year.

$520 is more than enough to start investing with. Sign up with Digit to start investing easily.

Get In On Your Employer’s Retirement Plan

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. The best investment in history is a retirement plan from your employer. Most will double your contribution (an effective immediate interest rate of 100%!) and then you earn interest on it again over time.

You cannot beat this level of return.

Not even property will give you a similar guaranteed rate. If you don’t do this, you are effectively throwing your money in the garbage.

Grab A Low Initial Investment Mutual Fund

Warren Buffet says that if you don’t know anything about investing; everything you need to know is “invest in a mutual fund.”

While it’s true that many of these funds do require $500+ to open an account (something that you could save in a year at $10 a week), there are a bunch of mutual funds that allow you to start based on a promise of $50+ per month as a deposit instead.

That means you can invest like Warren Buffet without being a billionaire. (He famously won $1 million in a public bet that this kind of fund would outperform the best hedge fund on Wall Street, he was right).

Consider Treasury Securities

Savings bonds. Unless you’re all doom and gloom, you have to know that the US government is still going to be around in a few year’s time. They pay good interest too.

The downside of these bonds is your money is locked in until they mature. You can sell them prior to that but usually for less than they are worth.

Check out Treasury Direct for your options.

Use Betterment As A Robot Investor

Betterment has a very reasonable program to invest your money for you. There’s no minimum deposit. A minimum $10 contribution level (very low for a broker) and fees (up to $2 million by which point you won’t care about fees) are a very reasonable 0.25 percent.

Anyone can invest in stocks and shares if they use a platform like Betterment.

Check out Betterment here.