Invest. A one word toolkit for any person.

For Omar in Guatemala. And for each of you.

I met Omar by chance. I had requested a human call back from a customer support center chat bot on a web service I'm paying to help me bring this content to all of you. The chat bot signaled Omar.

Omar called me back personally, knowing only that I had a question about what features come included with my plan.

27 years before Omar rang, I had taught myself HTML using .txt files to instruct browsers how to display content (text I'd write and images I'd point to in other folder libraries). I'd even reverse engineer websites I liked, I'd copy code from those ones. I'd figure out roots by guessing directory extensions, and I would look into backend stuff I'm sure wasn't meant to be navigable to test where it goes and if it were accessible. If something displayed wrong or wasn't working, I could always read the code, follow the references, and troubleshoot why. People thought I was so smart. But this was when humans had merely blinked and in a flash they were no longer working with rudimentary two-tone fluorescent green characters on black screen interfaces anymore.

Once browsers and mice let us see colors and click on interactive pages on much larger paperwhite screens with brilliant pixels and pictures, it changed everything. We could go paperless. We could reach everyone! I was so fascinated. Making web pages was all I wanted to do! Apart from teaching others how to make them too.

Omar had no idea all we'd have in common so many decades apart.

When I was first learning, no fancy DIY web platforms or HTML editors were on the scene yet. Neither were programs that translated spoken languages in seconds, nor software you could download to learn languages in weeks. I learned Spanish like I learned HTML--immersing myself in it until I could do it. And I kept those skills ready while I needed to, while they served me well.

Hmmmm. I don't recognize this caller's number and there's no caller ID. Should I risk it? I asked myself. Remembering just then about having asked a bot to assign a human to call me back earlier that afternoon, I answered my phone.

"Hello?" Quietly and cautiously.

"This is Omar. I'm returning your request for a call back about your web site."

I'd ironically already led an amazing 23-year career in tech without having ever written one more line of HTML code by the time I answered Omar's call.

I had long since shifted into producing just the content for websites that were created and administered by other far-more-technical people on the teams I'd been supporting. While they kept up with the evolution of web design techniques, languages, and tools like forms, automations, animations, APIs, and targeted experiences decided by large language models, I had let my skills at coding web sites from scratch almost entirely wane.

Lacking confidence, I began asking Omar for help.

I suppose I had offboarded those skills (assets) in favor of others, so I could invest differently in myself and hone skills that would serve me differently these past couple decades.

I told Omar that I want to re-up my investment in my web skills. I asked him to help me understand the plan I purchased to bring this site to the web, to you. I wasn't understanding a few things (a lot) about how it all worked. I'd like to get web design savvy again.

Because of that goal, I am re-evaluating the skills I want to bring back into my took kit, my portfolio of self investment. My objective is to reach more people with easy to sponge up content to help them bolster their money muscles too.

To do that, I will have to design this little website, its functionality, its events, its everything--including write its content and pick its pictures.

Omar made me realize, I'm not climbing that mountain alone. I will need help to do it. In fact, none of us are alone in our goals. It starts with sharing your goals with others and asking them for help. Omar was happy to answer the call.

I've been fortunate with helpers. One helper has been helping me get this site created since March, the domain registered, the pages designed, the forms on the backend working. All things I used to know how to do or troubleshoot, but which I haven't been able to re-learn until now. Thank you, Gunnar. You're getting me back on the web and are so patient as I learn about all the changes that have happened out here since the 1990s.

My subscribers and friends are helping too, with input, feedback, coaching, and even by spreading the word. Several Club friends are also helping me to prepare to port Club archives here to extend their readership and reach!

And yesterday, when I asked a chat bot for a human to call me to help me with questions I had about my web site services plan, that lil bot sent me one more helper. Thank you, Omar.

"Omar," I began, "am I taking too much of, or wasting, your time? I'm sorry for my lack of knowledge about all of this stuff today!" I excused myself.

I am not sure why I'm always apologizing when explaining my goals and the help I need. He signaled me to stop doing that. He said to me that helping me is his job. He said he loves his job.

He said something close to, "I love my job, one minute I'm helping the creator of novel flavored popped corn sell more popped corn, and the next I'm talking to a major tech company exec about how she wants to help others get smarter about money."

He assured me that I could never be a waste of his time. That was his purpose and reason for being on the call: to help me produce my website. And he said that because this site is designed to help others do better with money, it made him even more invested in helping me be able to set the site up to help others. He wants to learn more about money too. He helped me connect our little site to Google and optimize its search engine to help people find our pages more easily.

So we spoke about money, Omar's goals, his hard work, and investing. He told me his primary goals are to learn English grammar and fluency very well and then speak natively. And he said he wants to invest in stocks. I told him 'son buenas metas!' And stumbled to explain in Spanish how my Spanish fluency, (like my web skills), had also waned. I told him in English that his English was impeccable. He reassured me my couple sentences in Spanish were well said too. And then he proceeded also reinforcing my confidence in regaining my web skills. Like a true coach, he told me I could learn it all again and the tools were designed to be usable, DIY easy, and learnable.

These happen to be the same goals I hold for this site's visitors: usable, easy, learnable lessons about money. Omar even inspired me to use the included feature of my plan that allows me to deliver a Spanish version of my site for mis hispanohablantes.

Omar's commitment to my success solidified my choice in web site service providers in those first few blips of phone time together. I told him I was grateful and hoped we would be able to stay in touch somehow.

He suggested my approach to helping people learn about money could be to start teaching Club members how to invest their money through a step-by-step series that takes learners through the exercise of investing. So I asked him the best way to hold events like that with his web services. He had me writing down a lot of ideas and methods. I can add them to the list Gunnar already started. Now I know more than ever. Thanks to Gunnar's ideas, and Omar's, and those who believe in the power of this Club's community, it really now feels doable.

Omar said he'd watch out for me and this site for when I offer future "lunch and learn" call-in meetings to Club members so he could attend. So I am excited to try to do that next! I feel if even it only helps Omar, it will have been well worth the effort. Though he's in Guatemala, he can still invest in the U.S. Stock Market. The local laws about money, investment, taxes, and wealth management may differ from U.S. rules, but the law of investing for compound growth is universal.

Whether he knows it or not--Omar's already one or two steps done on the path to investing and he's killing it.

There are just five steps I would describe to you, Omar!

Until we meet online again, here they are, in my own words:

Step 1 - Invest in yourself. Believe you can do it [where "it" is your goal(s)]. The rest will come. Once you invest in yourself, you will keep on building your investment portfolio for life, offboarding what isn't serving you well anymore, onboarding what you need to serve you better or differently in each phase of your life's journey and reassessing that mix for the rest of your life. In the same way you can view your life skills, you can view a portfolio of other types of assets.

Investing in yourself means being focused on how you can grow, compound your purpose, widen your aperture.

People are always at-the-ready with shoulds for you. You should do this. You should do that. You should shred your personal documents (and you should!) You should learn AI. You should invest in the stock market. You should buy this stock! You should dump that stock. You should get married. You should go to college... You should... you should... you should... [what shoulds are you hearing?]. Are they feeling right for you?

At first, you might not be entirely able to follow what your mind and heart want to do, but rather what you'll have to do to survive today. Just get the day done okay (have the okayest day you can have). When you can begin to see how you are getting days done okay, one after the next, you'll know what getting a day is done sufficiently takes. A pattern of how you can move to getting days done now more efficiently will emerge from that. Pretty soon, you'll be listening to your mind's heart about what you want to do to get days done, not just sufficiently and efficiently, but more effectively too. In this way, you'll move out of survive-the-day-mode and into a mode of thrive the day. It's freeing. Keep at it. This is the time a new goal that already resides in your heart's mind, can be made space for.

Step 2 - Write the goal down and tell someone what you wrote. About fifteen or so years ago I wrote a blog at work internal to our intranet that hundreds of people read. It was like a Jerry McGuire movie moment. In a streak of inspiration, I declared to my company that I'd be financially ready to retire by 52. Because that was the number, the math, a good age to get to where I'd be set up to live the rest of my years on the planet without having to sit in a cubicle again. Having told so many people at work that this was my goal set me up in a cannot-fail environment for holding myself accountable. I'm 52 and one month-ish old now as I write this. The math says I've met my financial goals, I'm waiting to see when exactly I'll grab the golden ring now because I can. Or I'll keep working some more, and grab it on another day because I can. A feeling of freedom to choose that best timing for oneself to stop working is priceless.

I bet Omar's goal, if it's written down, probably reads something a little like: By the end of 2024 I will hold X shares or units of at least two securities (a stock, a fund, a bond, a [xyz]) and I will have spoken to X people in English for at least one hour each who I'll always ask for ways I can improve my English fluency, grammar, and pronunciation. And he's already told me about as much. His goal will now have as much chance as any to be reached.

Experts tend to agree, to write a specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timeboxed goal, and then also tell others about it, your chances of achieving it are golden. Golden is not a statistical measure but rather an inspiring way I'd describe something very attractive, reachable, and attainable.

I met my be-ready-to-retire-by-age-52 goal last month. I'm golden.

My new goal? Launch The Money Matters Club to people outside of my company and help all of The Club's members to do better with their hard earned dollars in easy to learn ways. I want to give back by helping hard working people invest in themselves and reach financial independence sooner than they dreamed possible.

Step 3 - Do your research to know when, what, and how you will invest. If your goal is to invest in financial investment opportunities like stocks, bonds, funds, and other securities, you likely already know the reasons why you want to invest in those. Like investing in your skillsets or education, you probably had an inner voice pushing you to those investment opportunities because you know the power of a diverse skillset or the power of compound growth, the power that comes when you can leverage your own assets to build more. When you have more skills, like more assets, more doors will open for you. When you can put your skills or your money to work for you, you now have the knowledge and power to stop your money from ever working against you.

But now that you know this, don't let yourself get paralyzed in the choosing of when to buy into such investments, what to buy, or how to do it. All you have to know is which one makes sense for you--start with one. Or two. Start small. Watch yourself do it once or twice. Then learn. Adjust. Do it again.

You also have to think about if the timing is right to pick this investment and start to buy a stake in it? And I do not mean market timing. If you are taking a longer term perspective, market timing is not as important as the timing of what is right for you. Have you taken care of all the other needs in the hierarchy of needs you have before you undertake this step? If not, do the planning to determine when is the best time for you to start investing this money of yours, assuring it's not needed more urgently for more basic needs first. Once you know the best time for your readiness, then you can buy a stake in something and watch it serve you.

Think of this investment example: if your goal is to invest in a college education, you need to be ready to make that investment. If you're not ready to make that investment, either because you haven't quite met all the entrance requirements, saved up enough for the cost of books, board, and tuition, designed a plan to pay for it, allocated the time needed to be successful at it, or even picked which college or degree program will be the right one to serve you best for your future occupation or dream job (if you know what that dream job or future even looks like yet), then you'll be at college unprepared, walking around that investment somewhat aimlessly, hoping it will magically come together. Hope is great. But, most know that hope is not a plan.

Go to college with all the intention, readiness, resources, and the time allocation it will take for that investment to pay off well right when you planned for it to. That's a solid plan.

Investing in the stock market or securities is not much different. You have to ready yourself to do that successfully. You have to pick the right program that will serve your goals best. The program (the asset, the investment) will always state its objective, (in other words, its mission, its purpose). You have to feel its aim is aligned with your own. Like a college for the arts should promise an education in the arts and deliver you a robust set of art skills and experience to ready you for and carry you forward into a career in the arts. A fund that says its objective is to deliver returns correlated to the S&P 500, for example, should deliver you a fund that is at least performing as well as the 500-ish companies that meet that fund's criteria. So you don't have to buy a share of each of those individual companies, just buy units of the one fund that states its objective is to deliver the performance of a combined slice of all of them put together. An investment will come with some kind of stated objective for what it aims to do and describe who might want to invest in it so you know if it's right for you. A company will describe its mission and produce a quarterly report on its progress against that mission too, so the market may decide if it wants to buy, hold, or sell shares in that company.

Another should. You should write an investment objective for yourself that way you'll know how to aim and align yourself and invest in what aligns. Maybe you'd write down a list of skills that you want to learn. Or maybe you'd write, "In search of home that will provide shelter for two years, and when I sell it, it will at least deliver me proceeds equating to my equity, and X% growth net of taxes or improvements made." You know then you won't be out looking for a commercial office building space, you'll be looking for a home, an asset that can provide you shelter, and a return on your investment in two years, and so on.

Once you find an investment opportunity, you then have to have a plan to pay for the stake you want to have in it. What will your stake cost? How long will you need to, or have to, stay invested in it before you'll see the investment finally pay off? That's your investment time horizon. You also have to have everything else in your life ready for supporting that type of money move before you make your move. Meaning, if you have a lot of ugly debt to pay off, using any of your money to invest in a stock or fund before paying that ugly debt off first would not be the best order of things. In terms of how your hierarchy of needs goes, ugly debt is the last thing you need holding you back from your wealth building goal of investing in securities. [Note: I invested in my home ownership objective before having all my ugly student loans and credit card debts paid off but I had a plan to get them paid off, I had a long-term perspective, and I was able to pay down and off my ugly debt as I locked in my position and began to build equity in my home too].

Some debt is uglier than other debt. All your debt will compound in the negative just as investment growth will compound in the positive. The expression one step forward two steps backward is helpful here. Investing in a home or in equities is a long-term step forward. Letting ugly debt compound for far too long, that's taking two steps backward. If you're investing for upside growth potential but costing yourself heavily elsewhere in your portfolio, for too long, that overall plan needs revision.

Picking a stock or a fund or a bond [or a house, piece of rare art, precious metal, business, or any other type of appreciating investment you could think of] should not cause you fear. Start with one you know. It's always best to invest in what you know or what you know you can evaluate on its merits. If it has meaning and value to you, you'll be best suited to analyze it for its growth potential and its "promise" to pay off too. This is why I never invested in crypto currencies. I did not know them, I did not use them. I understand them more now. But I still don't own any. I invest in what I can understand.

When you invest in something you understand you can think more like an owner. You know what that means innately even if all you've ever owned is yourself, your integrity, your health, your mind and your own thoughts. You know what it took to nurture them, protect them and yourself, and invest in and achieve your stated purpose.

Or maybe you've owned a beloved pet before. An instinctive owner of anything cared about knows what to do to care for, and evaluate, the health of things, to keep things going strong, healthy, and on track to fulfill their purpose for the long term.

You can evaluate other things to own and invest in in this way too. You'll then evaluate your investment opportunities for their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You'll consider the cost, the overall cost, and the average cost you've achieved over all, the potential for more growth and whether the investment has been meeting its stated objectives. If it is costing you too much, it isn't growing, it isn't meeting it's stated objectives, then you'll be working to determine objectively if it's a temporary situation, or if a good plan to achieve a turn around is in place. You'll know if there's good trajectory, reputation, customer satisfaction, if management is good, the products are in demand, popular, and of high quality. Or if there are problems, unmitigated risks, threats, or other strange things afoot. Just like if you were to buy a house, you'd want to know was it built well? Does it have any structural problems? Termites? Is it in a desirable neighborhood? Would it resale well? Is it insurable? And while you're living it that house, you'd be thinking about, am I maintaining this asset so it will appreciate well, and deliver me upside returns? What's its worth today? Is the neighborhood falling apart? Am I overly investing in this house compared to the comparable value located all around its driveway?

The sophistication levels in how you evaluate your assets, investments for their long term potential, can keep evolving too. I may have covered the obvious, factors you may use instinctually already, but there is a lot more to it below the surface we just scratched.

Acquiring the knowledge to evaluate a stock for its fundamentals in even more sophisticated ways will come as a skill you gain in time, if you want to, and just when that skill will matter to your next move most. You'll start to care about a company's revenue, its earnings per share, its profit margins, its product roadmap, its management, board of directors, and its books, credit rating, outstanding shares, its debts, and even the health of the sector it sits in. Or maybe you'll care more about its workforce diversity, its pay equity, its sustainability quotient, who its customers are and how they're treated and what their brand loyalty is like. There's probably no end to a list of factors on which you could evaluate an investment. It is up to you to know if its a good investment for yourself based on the factors and indicators that are most important to you.

It'll be up to you to pick investments you understand and enjoy evaluating.

I would not trust anyone else with my investment decisions. I want you to be able to trust your ability to evaluate yours too against your own criteria. You can seek opinions, but at the end of the day, trust yourself. If you turn this responsibility over to a manager, then all you've done is put yourself in the seat of having to now manage your manager. They must have your best interests and objectives in mind at all times. Performance review them to that end because they'll be costing you a lot. If you have the skills to manage your manager, you might as well cut out the middle wo/man and review the investments and their performance yourself. This is just my opinion. I believe that you can do this for yourself better than anyone can. You've always trusted yourself to know yourself best, to acquire the skills you need to survive the day, to optimize your day, and to thrive the day. You know what it takes to protect yourself and your interests and your financial house like no one's business too.

Keep going.

Once all your hierarchy of needs are met, you have done your research, you have narrowed down your investment picks based on your evaluations and important relevant factors, you have the money ready to put into one or two picks, and you are ready to not need that money for a while/for indefinite timing, now all you need to know is how to do it. This is just a transaction and the final piece of Step 3.

Figure out how you will own that investment pick. It's an administration step. You'll be looking for help here to do the transaction. You'll need a broker of some kind. Be careful with this piece. Evaluate the broker for their reputation, longevity in business, their fees, their structure, read the fine print, the contract, know how they're insured, your rights, and again read the fine print. Read it until you have no questions or doubts. It could be you'll need a real estate broker, or a stock broker, or a brokerage house that gives you a platform and an account or a contract (depending on what you want to buy a stake in). There are so many of these helpers. Some better, cheaper, more reputable than others. Some are specialty or boutique. Some are large like wholesale warehouses. Start with your local bank. Can you trust them? Do you have a relationship already? Do they even have the type of account that lets you buy, hold, trade, mortgage, or own the types of investments you want to own? If they don't support you owning certain securities, where can you take your transaction that does? What do they charge? Do you like the fee structure and what they offer? Or start with an internet search for consumer reports on how these institutions compare to their competition. Set up the relationship, contract, account, escrow, or whatever you'll need, so right when you're ready to buy what you've picked to invest in, you can start to transact.

Buy the investment.

You're done with step 3.

Step 4 - Manage your investment. A lot of people will let inertia take over here. They're feeling victorious after steps 1 through 3. But your work is not done. You have to care about your investment now like no one else will. You should always be asking yourself is the investment still meeting the original stated objective (whether you wrote that objective for yourself or the fund manager wrote it of the fund, or the CEO of the company stock wrote it of the mission of the company) you picked that because you knew it aligned with your objectives. Now you have to always keep a mind for evaluating if that investment is still serving you as you planned, is it still one you want to stay invested in? From the moment you buy it, you want to know what investment horizon you have. You want to know under which conditions you'd let the asset go, for sale, trade, or even gift.

Knowing your criteria for buying, holding, and also selling an investment upfront helps you remove emotions and knee jerk reactions to momentary fluctuations in an investment's performance.

There are a lot of reasons for changing your mind about an investment as time goes by. To name a few: you may come to no longer believe in the strategy of the fund manager or the company. You believe in something else now more and you need to generate some cash or leverage that prior investment to buy the new one instead. You think it's grown enough, delivered enough value, has reached its full potential. Maybe you don't want an investment to lose anymore value for even one more day in your portfolio you've given ample chance to rebound and there's no valid reason it isn't, or maybe you need to harvest a loss somewhere in your portfolio and its looking like it could well serve that role of helping you offset too much income or gains elsewhere on your balance sheet. Maybe it has veered off course from its original stated objective. It's departed from your guardrails on what staying in your portfolio requires. Maybe you don't like the dividend anymore compared to others. Or maybe it pays no dividends. Or maybe because of your own continuous contributions or its own dividend reinvestments, it's become over weighted in your portfolio, it's grown into a too-many-eggs-in-one-basket scenario and now you want to scrape some of the cream off the top, reduce that exposure, diversify, or get out of it completely for any number of your own reasons that it no longer serves you.

Setting it and forgetting it (or "inertia") is not a healthy habit. Just like our bodies always need fine tuning, careful diet, planned care, feeding, watering, exercise, sun, and rest. An investment needs your attention regularly too. Routine check ups of your physical and financial health are key. If an asset has run its course, it's time to do something to disposition it. Now in terms of what I mean by disposition, picture what you'd do with software that's run its course. Run software for far too long without an upgrade, without a patch, without new configs, it becomes instable, insecure, maybe even just stops working with other apps or all together.

Run tires for too long and they'll need rebalancing or replacement. Keeping tabs on how your investments are performing, like you would your software, your tires, or a cake in the oven, helps you know when to make a change, when to rebalance, or when to take it out of your portfolio before it burns.

In your portfolio, you'll want to continually manage your assets' end of life, reinvestment, upgrades, acquisitions, trades, reductions, sales, and overall maintenance, accordingly. If not you, who? You otherwise could become lopsided, way off course from your objective, or flat out burnt.

Part of managing your investments and your wealth includes a plan for how you'll protect it. Wealth protection helps you insure against unforeseeable risks. You can achieve this in any number of ways and all these ways: From making sure the institutions you bank with are insured, to using unique passwords and multi-factor authentication on your accounts with those institutions. From making sure you have renters insurance, home owners insurance, auto insurance, umbrella insurance, to insuring your body, health, vision, and your income, and even your life. From completing beneficiary forms, to establishing a trust to transfer your wealth in tact. These types of steps are all critical to mitigating risks toward protecting your wealth. These steps are ones you take one at a time too, as you go, you will learn, identify what your financial plan needs, and you'll add these tools to your toolkit too.

Once you've achieved all these steps, and it may take you years, set steps 1-4 on continuous repeat while you start the final and best step.

Step 5 - Enjoy the pay off of all your hard work cultivating an investment portfolio. When you've been at steps 1-4 for a while you will start to see payoffs. "A while" will be different for everyone. Those disclaimers you've read along the way about 'outcomes will vary and history and past events are not predictors of future events,' were derived from reality and put into your investing fine print for good reason (to level set and protect you). Steps 1-4 were hard work. You deserve to enjoy the rewards of those steps, especially if they took a long while. You were hard at work putting your hard-earned money to work hard for you. Of course you will and should get to enjoy the payoff of all that hard work. You have a life now that is affording you more opportunity than you thought possible when you started.

When you started being a consumer, you may have been distracted by what credit can buy you, or what fun the cash in your pocket could be, and you probably loved what taking on a little debt could do for your short term gratification. I have been there.

But now, in Step 5, you're seeing yourself focused on what long term investment can do for you and you are realizing it is much more gratifying.

In Step 5, you're seeing your money and wealth as powerful tools that built you a strong foundation, a secure financial life, they'll give you a boost to your purchasing power from now on, open doors for you you never thought possible, and allow you to live with more choices, more freedoms, and more responsibility with the opportunity to leave a financial legacy to your loved ones, or be a benefactor to important causes you care about. Or all of the above.

Your money helps you fulfill your dreams, your purpose, and your stated objectives. What an amazing and unstoppable, hardworking team you and your money are!

You invest in yourself and you become an investor. Keep growing your investment portfolio, adding skills and assets, keep it balanced, remix as needed. You are always your number one asset. Enjoy the payoffs!

But wait, your work is still not done... Step 6 is simple though: now tell the others!

Because money matters,

el

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E.M.Powers ("el") is a regular person with no particular financial credentials or expertise who happens to be a money enthusiast and the founder of The Money Matters Club, a virtual watercooler for like minded individuals with a thirst for building their own financial health. Since 2006, she's helped thousands of co-workers build their financial literacy and wealth by participating in The Money Matters Club, a community she built on her employer's internal network. Since 2023, she's been attempting to scale The Club's reach through its second home on the World Wide Web. Her opinions--as well as the opinions of all participants--are just that: opinions, which are subject to flawed logic, math, typos and correction. She keeps a growth mindset and is also always learning something new or bolstering her own understanding after discussions at The Club. All information shared is done so with the best intent to inspire and empower others to learn more about money considerations toward building their own financial muscles. Nothing shared is meant as individualized advice that anyone should act on without doing their own curious research and personal decision making. There are no dumb questions at The Money Matters Club. Your financial health and literacy are what this Club cares about. All investing involves risk. All results can and will vary.