Six steps to become an investor

Learning to invest is a skill that can serve you, and your family, well if you’re prepared to do the work to learn it. While it may seem intimidating at first, here are six basic steps to launch your journey.

1. Find credible investing resources: There is no formal education to become an investor, which means anyone can do it – but there’s also a lot of misinformation out there, especially on the internet, that you don’t want to mislead you. So, you need to sort the good from the bad to help you find the most credible investing resources. Ask your advisor what he or she would recommend that you study. Ask your friends and family what they find most helpful.  And, be prepared to start your learning journey since part of becoming an investor is always learning what’s happening in your field as it evolves.  
2. Learn investing basics: Once you’ve got your hands on the right resources, you need to figure out what kind of investing that you want to do and then start learning some of the basics about that corner of the investing world.  Your advisor can also help you identify the terms that you may most need to know, but the more you read, the more you will find the basics and begin to lay a foundation that you can build on over time. Take the time, exercise patience, and this new world will soon open for you. 
3. Develop an investment plan: Work with your advisor to develop an investment plan that meets your goals, both financially and in other ways. By this time, you’ll also need to know what kinds of areas you might be interested in – such as socially responsible investing or alternative investments, such as real estate, farmland, or cryptocurrency, to name just a few. You’ll also want to balance them with other things, such as bonds or different kinds of equity. But your advisor can guide you in developing the best plan for your age and stage as well as financial goals. You’ll want a plan that interests you, so you want to keep investing, but you’ll also want to make the best return to meet your short, medium, and long-term goals.
4. Always be willing to learn more: If you want to succeed in this field, you’ll also need to continue to read and research to keep up with how the field evolves, so you can continue to make the best investments in it. Stay abreast of current events and companies you’re interested in buying into, and read about whatever you’re passionate about that can feed your investment knowledge. It’s helpful to read about successful investors and what they’re doing, so follow them. You can also sign up for e-newsletters – like Wealth Professional’s – to keep abreast of what’s happening in the fields that you’re interested in starting in or eventually developing into.
5. Commit to investing and make it part of your schedule: If you’re going to become an investor, you need to make a commitment to yourself to take it seriously and invest the time you need to do it well, so you can keep benefitting from it. So, beyond the time you spend on doing the additional learning in step 4 above, you also need to set up a schedule and commit to putting time into your investment work each week. This isn’t something you can just dabble in if you want to succeed. So, once you set up the basics, allocate 15 or 30 minutes a week to staying on top of your investments. Of course, the more time you in, the more that you will benefit.
6. Be patient: Markets go up and markets go down, often because of fear or greed. So, if you want to succeed, you need to learn to control your emotions and also have patience. Conventional wisdom is to establish your investment plan, set your portfolio, and then stay on target with how you want to handle it, making wise adjustments on a regular basis as you proceed. You don’t want to do any panic buying or selling or you probably won’t meet your investment goals in the long-time as history has shown that doesn’t work. But you may also need to exercise patience to wait for the companies that you’ve decided to invest in to go ‘on sale’. That may mean you have to wait for the market to drop or some other event to trigger a change. But set your plan and stay the course. You won’t get rich overnight, but you will meet your financial goals.