Starting Your Investment Journey: a Beginner’s Guide to 2025

? There’s one New Year’s resolution that could radically transform your life if you stick with it. And that is finally beginning your investment journey in 2025. If you haven’t been channelling some of your income to assets that regularly generate returns, you’ve missed out on a lot of wealth-creating opportunities. But it’s not too late to start.

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We’re assuming that you’ll be coming into this with little or no prior knowledge of the investing landscape. This article exists to guide you through your investment journey; the steps to making your first investment, and (eventually) reaping the benefits. What follows is a walk through getting started with investing as a first-timer.

Decide What Your Goals Are

There are many possible reasons for investing. Perhaps the most frequently cited is having enough to live on after retirement. Other common goals are funding children’s education, building a house, creating wealth to pass on to one’s offspring, and even travel. Knowing why you’re investing will help you decide how much money you have to commit, how long you should stay invested, and what kinds of asset classes are best for your portfolio.

Learn What You Can

Do not foray into investing of any kind without learning what it is and how it works. Here’s a rule: do not put your money into any supposed investment opportunity if you don’t understand it well enough. Taking this approach will keep you from suffering preventable losses. It will also save you from falling prey to scams. There’s a lot of information about investing and asset classes on the internet. Seek out ebooks, blogs, podcasts, apps, and free courses (on YouTube, for example) that cover the sort of investments you’re considering.

Ascertain Your Risk Tolerance Levels

All investments come with risks attached—including the likelihood that you’ll lose your money. But some are riskier than others. Also, higher-risk investments usually have the potential to deliver greater returns than lower-risk ones. This means that, when choosing between alternative investments, you have to think about how much risk you’re willing to accept. Some people have a high risk appetite, and thus adopt a “go big or go home” approach to investing. Others settle for assets that have a very low probability of failing, even if those will yield minimal returns. Everyone is somewhere on the spectrum between these two ends.

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Choose Asset Types and Allocations

Your choices here will be determined by your investment goals, risk appetite, and the resources at your disposal. There’s a vast array of assets you can invest in—real estate, farmland, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), commodities, and Certificates of Deposit (CD) are examples. You can even acquire equity in a startup with high growth potential or lend to businesses at predetermined interest rates. It’s right to start with a single asset type. But if you can afford it, consider incorporating multiple assets in your portfolio. It’ll protect you from the effects of underperformance in one or a few assets.

Invest

After deciding on your preferred investments, it’ll be time to commit funds to them. This process will differ across various asset types. If you’re investing in real estate, you will have to purchase land that you can resell at some point, or build residential or commercial property for rent or sale. But if you intend to invest in stocks, you could either do so through a stock broker or on any one of several apps built for this purpose.

Update and Rebalance Your Portfolio

Over time, you may observe that some of your investments are performing quite well, while others haven’t yielded the results you hoped for. When you observe this, you’ll want to adjust the composition of your portfolio. This will involve winding down your stake in underperforming assets and replacing those with higher-quality investments. However, your decisions should be informed by a calm, logical analysis of the assets concerned and not a sense of panic.

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Final Words

Some investment opportunities are so accessible that you can start with them today if you have the funds to do so. And some of these don’t cost much at all. Others will require a bit more work and demand significant financial commitments upfront. Whatever you go with, make sure that it aligns with your goals, fits your budget, and has associated risks you can tolerate. With careful planning and sound execution, your investment journey will produce great rewards.