How To Invest $1,000 in 2026 (STEP-BY-STEP)

hi guys it's mark so today i've got a family friend named laura coming around to help me film what she thinks is a normal how to invest for beginners video however i'm gonna be gifting her a thousand dollars as well as armin her with the knowledge she needs to take the plunge as a complete beginner investor so she can start her journey to becoming rich and financially free there's an old saying be the person you needed when you were younger and that got me thinking sometimes with investing the hardest part is just making a start so if you're thinking about investing but find the whole process a bit daunting or have started and want to find out some more then this is the video for you we're going to be going through everything step by step from personal finances and taxes to investment strategies and actually setting up the core account so make sure to watch to the end so you don't miss out on some great investment knowledge we'll get started as soon as you hit that like button for the altu bugarithm

bugarithm so laura what do you think when i say the word investing i get a little bit scared i know it's the way to go i'd love to learn a bit more about it and put my money in the best place but if i'm honest i don't really know much at all well it's normal to be a little bit scared that's for sure judging by our analytics not many girls are that into investing why do you think that is i'm not really sure why that is but i'd like to learn a bit about it and show that it's possible for anyone to do and use it as a way to get rich well it's not all about getting rich it's more about building your long-term wealth but we'll get into that later what i was here to get rich i'll tell you what i can do how about this i'm gonna give you a thousand dollars to invest in anything you like that sounds really good thank you let's get going i think we should let's dive

in people always say to me that they'll get good at managing their finances when they earn more money but the truth is anyone can go broke even celebrities you know take michael jackson for example he was the king of pop with an estimated estate value of over 236 million dollars when he died but he left debts of over 400 million dollars so laura how would you say your finances are at the moment i'd say they're okay i don't look into them too much if i want to go out for a meal my friends i'll spend the money but i do try to save about half of what i earn i just don't really tend to track it okay well tracking is a really good idea and it's really easy nowadays to track your money using some of the apps that are available and by tracking it you'll tend to spend less so that's always good but do you have any credit card debt or anything like that i don't i spend my money on my credit card but then i do pay it off every month that's great you've been watching the videos haven't you yes it's always best if you use your credit card because it'll help you build your credit score and if you pay it off at the end of every month you're going to pay no interest whatsoever and it's a win-win okay so why is building your credit score so important well at some point in the future you're going to probably want to borrow be that for a house or for a business you never know what you want to borrow for and if you've got a good credit score it's going to cost you a lot less in interest fees and you're going to find it easier to borrow in the first place so that's why it's so important to build a good credit score

okay taxes are something we should all care about as at the end of the day why would you want to give away more of your hard earned money than you absolutely need to when it comes to investing in most cases you are required to pay taxes on the profits that you make this is called capital gains tax and it's between 10 and 20 depending on your income it's really important to minimize the tax you pay in these areas so you're able to invest more for your future and there are two really simple ways that you can take action now the first is to open up a tax advantaged account and the second is to start some sort of side hustle or business so you can write off all your expenses why is side hustle a good thing to have well it's all about when you pay your tax if you get paid a hundred dollars for example from work and you want to go out for a nice meal well it's all well and good but you've already paid your tax haven't you so if that's 20 20 has already gone now with a side hustle you get your 100 and you want to go out for a meal you can and you can then write that off so when you come to pay your tax you've got less money on so you get taxed less is that like bad no it's 100 allowed because you're having a business dinner you're talking business and that business needs to be done over a dinner so that is an allowed thing yeah that sounds really good i have been thinking about doing a side hustle for a while now i think that's always something i wanted to do in the back of my mind but i haven't actually got around to it it's just deciding what i want to do i've been thinking about a lot of things like i love how seeing how people can do like gymshark modelling on the side and being a bit of an influencer that sounds amazing to me it's extremely important to research any investment before throwing all your money in so laura have you heard of any before and is there anything you've invested in i haven't invested in anything obviously i hear a lot about like cryptocurrency and stocks and shares but it's all like a completely different world to me and i don't know anything about it but i know that my money isn't very good sitting in my bank account i want to do something with it well your money sitting in your bank account is actually losing you money because you're probably earning about 0. 1 interest per year and that literally is nothing with inflation at more than that around about two to three percent a year that's actually losing value year on year i think the thing that i was looking at doing is buying a vitalet or something okay well we can discuss that and run through the main investments which are good for beginners in order of least to most risky so you can then decide what you want to do with that thousand dollars i gave you oh wow okay so the less risky is generally the less reward okay but the higher risk the better the reward

now an index fund simply put is a basket of stocks so instead of buying hundreds of different stocks separately and having to manage them all at once you can buy into a simple low-cost index fund do you get to choose what stocks they are no you don't but you can choose from a lot of different index funds okay and does it matter what country you invest in back when i was younger i might have gone for an index fund based in the uk but of course nowadays with the invention of the internet of course these companies in america they are absolutely global so they're always looking for more growth be it in china australia wherever it happens to be so by investing in these american companies you've got a global player there haven't you and they're passively managed as well so there's not a manager there it's all done automatically that's why the costs are so low if i invest all my money in like a risky one could i then lose it all and it sounds like a silly question but could i lose more could i go in debt or something well when you invest your capital is always at risk you have to remember that but hopefully over the long term it would be good now unless you leverage your money you can't actually lose more than you invest so if you invested for example a hundred dollars the most you can lose is a hundred dollars however if you leverage your money and bought things on margin then of course you could lose more than you actually invested okay what does leveraging your money mean well levering you leveraging your money is when you borrow money against your investment or it's also known as margin so for example if you invested in a share say you wanted to buy a hundred dollars worth of shares but they were offering you two and a half margin you could actually have another 250 dollars to go with yours so you'd actually have an investment of 350 dollars of course then you could lose that whole 350

next is investing in yourself with a side hustle or further education this is a low risk because the power is in your hands starting a side hustle has limitless potential returns which is exactly what you want when you're trying to build wealth so does this sound like an option to you yeah it sounds really good to me um i like the idea of investing in myself not just getting my nails done and eyelashes but um doing things like university and but it's kind of you don't see the return straight away so how have you found that coming from university into the workplace so i feel like just with my degree didn't get me a job you have to have other like employability skills as well and a lot of places often want a lot of experience and a lot of time in things that i haven't had time to do so i definitely see the value in investing in yourself and enhancing your skills to make you more employable you also thought about mention side hustles as well so of course you can invest into that i do love um photography bit of videography i've already that was um my mom's friend had a wedding and she didn't have a photographer so i hopped in last minute and managed to do that do a bit of video as well and did you do that as a paid job i did it for a bottle of gin so you're cheap then that's what you're saying aren't you no i did it for free well sometimes that can be a really good investment as well when you do a job for free you're building up a portfolio and again quite often you need to do three or four jobs to build that portfolio up so when you do want to charge people you can show them exactly how good you are

next up we've got individual stocks which are a medium risk an individual stock is investing into one specific company for example amazon would be considered an individual stock the returns can be higher as it brings more exposure to one investment but stocks can go either way so i only invest in individual stocks with high conviction so a stuck with high conviction does that mean that it's going to give you a big return and that's why you invest in those ones well what it means is that you've done your homework on the individual stock you've looked into the fundamental analysis of the company and you can see that it should give you a high return over the long term so fundamental analysis that sounds a little bit complicated well actually it's not complicated at all and you can find out all this information on yahoo finance and you pull up the company you're interested in and look at their balance sheets and things like that profit and loss and where the company is going and also it's important to look at the leadership of the company as well okay

okay next we come to real estate and i'm putting this as high risk for beginners as real estate often requires a mortgage which can mean taking on quite a substantial amount of debt however real estate is a great way to accelerate wealth and often performs really well during inflation i've always looked at airbnb and i'd love to do that kind of thing if you're looking to do airbnb you've really got to make sure that property can stand on its own without that platform because if that platform was to go overnight you need that property to still be paying you money to pay your mortgage for me buying a place to rent out whilst you're still living with your parents is almost a no-brainer isn't it because it could bring you in a lot of money that sounds really exciting actually every morning i wake up and i look on the right move and i think oh could i get

now cryptocurrency and bitcoin specifically has been the best performing asset over the last decade is that why cryptocurrency is very popular cryptocurrency at the moment is very popular because it's volatile and the returns potentially could be right up there but likewise they could be right down here as well so it's very exciting at the moment also very scary it is scary i like to invest in what i now like to call blue chip cryptos which are bitcoin and ethereum and a bit of cardano as well and i see those as being more stable than some of the others so is it good to keep track of what which ones are doing well or as you say it could go like through the roof or rock it down do you know how do you know which one is best well the problem with looking at how well a coin is doing particularly if it's one that's just been brought into the market that coin can be pumped and dumped and what i mean by that is you can get lots of influencers lots of people around the globe that go yeah this is the best coin to buy buy and they're all in on it when it gets to a certain point they'll dump that coin and they'll make their profit while you're left oh no my coin is not worth anything so why would someone actually buy a bitcoin and i understand it goes up in value but what is it used for well actually bitcoin is like a store of value once they're all mined there'll be 21 million as a maximum number of bitcoins available so yeah yeah a lot of people think that bitcoin miners are basically people that are rewarded for maintaining the network and that you do that by using powerful computers to solve all these complicated equations and that's the reward they get

okay so now it's time to make your decision you've got a thousand dollars where are you going to invest it what are your thoughts so what i'd like to do with it is have an index fund and then have individual stocks and also crypto that sounds like a solid start to your portfolio to me so let's get your account set up now if we were in the usa we could set that up with public. com who are offering a free share worth up to a thousand dollars at the moment but because we're in the uk we're going to do it via free trade and they're offering up to a 200 pound free stock at the moment we'll leave the links in the description if you're interested and you can pick those up anyway have you got your phone with you laura okay so i've worked out that a thousand dollars is 730 pounds so i'm going to send that right through to you now bosch how do we want to uh split that up so i was thinking 300 into the index fund and 200 into tesla i have quite a lot in the in tesla myself so in we go so we're going to go 200 pounds on a buy order for tesla all done so you're going to work tomorrow and you can say i own tesla how about that sounds really good so let's get your index fund sorted so you wanted to go into the s p 500 which again i'm a firm believer in as you know so let's go in and select that and we are there you go you've got an index fund set up all you need to decide now is how much you want to fund that paramount if you don't have to fund it but if you do that'll be really good okay so now we have to set up laura with a coinbase account so you can buy the cryptocurrency that you want so again we go to one of my videos and we can press the link in the description because that way we get ten dollars worth of free bitcoin there we go welcome to coinbase all up and running oh it has a minus number uh that's on the value of bitcoin at the minute today so today it's gone down a little bit you have to get used to that because if you're buying cryptocurrency the fluctuations are huge and some days you could have plus 10 and another day minus 10 you just never know where it's gonna go okay so we put the order in for ethereum we're going to go 230 pounds there you go i can't wait to see it how it works you're part of the crypto mania craze if you'd like laura to come back on the channel and share results then just let us know in the comments down below so i'm going to leave the next video right up there but don't click on it just yet make sure to subscribe to the channel if you want to grow your wealth and don't forget to pick up your free stocks and bitcoin with the links below okay i'll see you over there