Investing isn't actually that difficult. But almost nobody understands a few key things you have to know before you start.

Most people think you need a lot of money, or some kind of specialized knowledge, before you can even begin. When I started investing, I had almost nothing.

The line that changed how I thought about money

I was in college, working part time at Tractor Supply. A couple of days a week I drove about an hour and a half to class, then came back and worked my shift. I was basically broke, and I felt stuck.

I remember one cold evening. I was on a forklift, stacking pallets of dog food or hay, with a beanie on and one AirPod in. I was listening to an audiobook called The Richest Man in Babylon (a really good book, by the way), and one line stopped me:

"A part of all that you earn is yours to keep."

To keep means to put it to work, so your money starts working for you and starts building the life you want.

Right there in the cold, I understood that I had to start investing. And honestly, what I could do felt pitifully small. But I decided I would start where I was, no matter what.

So I made a plan that fit where I was. Every two weeks, when I got paid at Tractor Supply, I would invest $50. It was as much as I thought I could possibly afford. I started that day.

Fast forward a few years, and that account now pays me more every month than I could ever put in back then. It has become a financial cushion. It let me write myself a loan, like a bank, when I needed a car and didn't have the money in my checking account. It let me take trips. It let me take a job in college that didn't pay me for eight months. It even let me buy a motorcycle.

It worked because I followed a simple framework.

I've been learning about the stock market since I was 12 and investing since I was around 16. I spent four years in college and earned a finance degree. I worked at a bank as a teller and spent a little time working on loans. And after all of that studying, the funny thing is how simple investing actually is. There are really only three things you have to understand.

Three things almost nobody understands about investing

1. You don't invest because you're rich. You invest to build wealth.

Riches and wealth are different things.

Riches are about how much income you have today and how much money is available to you right now.

Wealth is about how much money you have, how much of it is working for you, and how long you could keep your current lifestyle without any more money coming in from active work.

That's a very different game. Investing is not about getting rich quick. You can build income with investing (I do), but investments buy you something different from what income buys you.

2. Time is your best asset, not money.

For a long time, I didn't start investing because I didn't think it was worth it until I had a lot of money. That was backwards, and it held me back for a few years when I knew I should be investing.

What I didn't understand back then was the power of becoming the person who invests consistently. The person who says, every two weeks when I get paid, I invest. And then invest again. And again.

Here's what happened when I left that part time job. I started working full time at a bank and got paid a little more, so I invested more. Then I got another job and invested more again. Then bonuses came, and I invested more again. Why? Because I had already built the habit of being an investor. As my income grew, my investments grew, which means my wealth grew.

That kind of consistency generally beats the person who drops in $5,000 once and walks away. There's nothing wrong with doing that. But being a consistent investor is probably more powerful, for two reasons.

First, it's doable for almost everyone. Almost everybody can scrounge up $50 every couple of weeks. Not everybody can come up with $5,000, $20,000, or $50,000 to put in all at once.

Second, it builds you into the type of person who invests. You get paid more, you invest more, because that's who you are now. Then time does its work, and the thing you've been building keeps growing.

3. The market is going to move up and down, and that's okay.

The stocks and investments you buy will go up, and you'll think, I'm making money. Then they'll go down, and you'll think, I don't have as much as I did. That's totally normal.

Here's where most people get it wrong. They see the market drop 10%, 20% or 30%, and they sell. But if you sell after a drop, you lock in the loss.

What most people don't understand is that, historically, the overall US stock market has generally recovered. The dot com bubble, 2008, COVID. Each one recovered, and the market has gone on to reach new all time highs a lot of the time since. That's why the long term is what you actually care about.

If you're building long term wealth, you don't need to worry much when the market moves down a little. When it drops, you can buy what you already wanted at a lower price the next time you invest. When it moves up, your investments are worth more, and you're becoming more wealthy. Either way works.

And once you have that foundation, you can learn how to create cash flow on top of it, which is a whole lot of fun.

What it actually looks like to start

Investing isn't that complicated. It just isn't explained in a way most people understand.

If you've never invested a dollar in your life and you want to see what it actually looks like, practically, I built something for that. The First Stock Challenge is a free three day challenge I created to teach people how to start investing in the stock market and get their first stock for themselves. It covers the things you need to know that you don't know yet, simply because you haven't done it yet.

You can learn about the First Stock Challenge here.

Start where you are. For me, that was $50 and a forklift.