| (My apologies for any america-specific advice here) 1. If your company has a 401(k) retirement account match it's worth using the program, match = free money. They often have target-date retirement funds, just do 100% to those. Otherwise an S&P500 index fund. This isn't likely for part-time work but worth remembering for the future. Also probably not called a 401(k) outside of the US, but if you ask the HR person at your job they'll likely know what I'm talking about. 2. Save up six months of expenses in a savings account. Check around for the highest interest rate you can find. When you've done that, calculate what local market rent is, pretend you had to pay that, and save six months of expenses with that amount. 3. Open up an account at a low-fee brokerage. Ally, TD Ameritrade, etrade...it doesn't really matter just check out their websites and pick the one which you like the best. 4. With any extra money, dollar cost average into a broad market index fund (SPY, VEU, VTI are all popular choices). People will probably weigh in on which one is best, honestly the broad market funds are all correlated >0.95, just pick the one with the lowest fees.
DCA: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dollarcostaveraging.asp. It's best if you can set this up automatically somehow. 5. Generally speaking, any money you put into the stock market you should avoid touching for at least 5 years. Which is why I harped on the 6-months savings above. Also the people that do best in the stock market are often people that check their accounts the least often. Buy-and-hold ftw. Which is why I mentioned making the DCA plan automatic. 6. If you feel like taking some risk (individual stocks, options, crypto), it's best to have a separate account for that stuff and it shouldn't be more than 10% of your main account. |
One quibble, the 401k match offered by some employers is not "free money", it is part of your compensation, just like employer-provided group health insurance, etc. If your employer does not offer a match while similar employers do, then you should expect more direct pay to offset the lack of match. And on that topic, don't invest your 401k money into your employer's stock, too much risk from lack of diversification.