Millennial at 30: What I Learned with my investments

I feel that Millennials have received a bad rap. If you need farther clarification please refer to the image. It seems like everyone thinks that we spend our money on coffee and avocado toast. Just as in any generalization this just is not the case. I think we can all agree in the end that Hasbro has gone to far with this version of monopoly. FORGET REAL ESTATE. YOU CANT AFFORD IT ANYWAY. I do not believe i am the exception to the rule on this. I want to educated people so they know that Millennials can be responsible.

It has been a little over 5 years since I got my first big boy job and ever since then I have been putting everything I can into investments. This is just what I learned along the way. I have been maxing out the employer match since the begging. If you skip out of this, it is like leaving free money on the table and burning it in front of your future self.

After I started working most of my money went to building an emergency fund. After building some savings, I started passively with the acorns app. I also started using the Robinhood app to actively invest around the same time. The lack of transactions fees was the selling point for me I had bought some stocks before this, but I hated paying $4.50 a trade.

I cannot say that I am doing great with active investing because all time my portfolio is down. This is due to wasting some money messing around with options. From what I could figure out, options are an effective way to make money without owning the stock you are trading. You are basically betting that a stock will go up or down in a specified time frame. Owning the option of purchasing or selling the stock at a certain price. This could be very effective if with a lot of research, but for me it was more of just gambling.

After a few months of investing with Acorns I decided to make a change due to the fee the dollar a month fee does not seem very high but when you are investing with spare change that really can cut into your investment. I ended up getting a bit more money together and using a robot investor called Wealthfront. This option appealed to me because Wealthfront can manage up to $10,000 for free. One can also invite friends and you get an extra $5000 managed for free once they make the initial deposit. There was also a reasonable initial minimum deposit of $500. I won’t get too detailed, but you can open IRA accounts as well as investment accounts. Wealthfront allows you to set your risk profile and base your investments off that. This way you can really just set it and forget it.

As far as cryptocurrency investments recently I have been dabbling with the StellarX platform. I have been real impressed with the speed and simplicity of the application. It has only been around for a few month and it already has the major crypto tethers for purchase. StellarX is peer to peer so completion of orders may not be instant. I try to use exchanges like Changelly and ShapeShift whenever i can. This way i do not have to put in any personal info or transfer funds to a centralized exchange. If what i want to purchase is not available to exchange I use Binance. I have no real issues with Binance I just prefer not to risk my funds being hacked at an exchange. If you follow crypto at all you can probably guess I am down so i wont get into that.

Below are a few referral links. If you enjoyed the post please use them... most will help both of us. If you are like me you are tired of all the negative things said about our generation. So lets do something about it and prove those old bastards wrong. If you have any questions please comment i would be glad to help in any way I can.

if you want each of us to get a free stock in Robinhood please link from here.
http://share.robinhood.com/justinl18

if you want us each to get $5,000 extra managed for free start and account with Weathfront here.
https://wlth.fr/29EL8US

Binance link here... The best part is seeing how fast you can place the puzzle piece. If you don't understand log in...
https://www.binance.com/?ref=11850655