# MILLIONAIRE EXPLAINS: If I Started Investing With $0, This Is Exactly What I'd Do

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Marko - WhiteBoard Finance
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msCh6TookM
- **Дата:** 21.04.2026
- **Длительность:** 22:52
- **Просмотры:** 28,258

## Описание

🚨 Flash Sale Live!!! InvestingPro - 55% + AN EXTRA 15% with my link 
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$10,000 invested in one fund in 2007 would be worth almost $96,000 today. No stock picking. No finance degree. No Wall Street connections. Just one decision made at the right time.
Most people never make that decision because nobody explains investing clearly enough. This is the video I wish existed when I was starting out. Whether you have $100 or $10,000, the framework is exactly the same and it is simpler than you think.

In this video I walk you through what to actually invest in, the two things to handle before you put a single dollar in the market, and the one mistake that quietly destroys most beginner portfolios.

📌 WHAT YOU'LL LEARN:
→ Why your money is already losing value sitting in a bank account right now
→ What index funds actually are and why Warren Buffett recommends them over individual stocks
→ The debt and emergency fund checkpoints to clear before you invest a dollar
→ How to literally buy your first stock using a live demo on a real brokerage account
→ The panic selling trap and what the data shows about timing the market
→ Three specific low-cost funds worth looking at as a starting point

MY FAVORITE TOOLS & RESOURCES
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MY OTHER SOCIALS:
📸  Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/whiteboardfinance/

📚 SOURCES:
Warren Buffett 2013 Letter: https://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/2013ltr.pdf
JP Morgan Guide to the Markets: https://am.jpmorgan.com/us/en/asset-management/institutional/insights/market-insights/guide-to-the-markets/
VTI: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/vti
VUG: https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/etfs/profile/vug
SCHD: https://www.schwabassetmanagement.com/products/schd
IRS Topic 409: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc409

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 - The $10,000 That Turned Into $96,000
0:39 - Why Your Bank Account Is Losing Value Right Now
2:34 - What Warren Buffett Actually Tells Regular Investors to Do
5:16 - Two Questions to Answer Before You Invest a Dollar
9:06 - Buying a Real Stock Live on Camera
14:37 - The Mistake That Wipes Out Most Beginners
16:55 - The 3 Funds I'd Start With Today
20:48 - My Honest Take After Investing Since 2006
______

ABOUT ME 👇

My mission is to provide my viewers with actionable content that helps them build financial wealth. My videos reflect my real-world experience as a real estate investor, stock market investor, finance major, and entrepreneur. 

This channel allows me to share my passion for personal finance, stock market investing, real estate investing, and entrepreneurship. I produce content that I would want to watch, and because of that, I give 100% effort in every video that I make. I also believe in complete transparency and open communication with my audience.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a financial adviser. These videos are for educational purposes only. Investing of any kind involves risk. While it is possible to minimize risk, your investments are solely your responsibility. You must conduct your own research. I am merely sharing my opinion with no guarantee of gains or losses on investments.

AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE: Some of the links on this channel are affiliate links, meaning, at NO additional cost to you, I may earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase and/or subscribe. However, this does not impact my opinion.

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msCh6TookM) The $10,000 That Turned Into $96,000

If you put $10,000 into one fund back in 2007, it would be worth almost $96,000 today. You didn't need to pick stocks, watch the market every day, or have a finance degree, or have buddies on Wall Street. Okay? All you needed was to start and let your investment grow. The problem is, most people never start. By the time they figure out what to do, they've already missed out on years of compounding that they can't get back. In this video, I'll explain why your money is already losing value and why you need to invest. And if I were to start investing today, this is exactly what I would do. Let's get into it. Let me start with the question most people don't even know they should be asking.

### [0:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msCh6TookM&t=39s) Why Your Bank Account Is Losing Value Right Now

What is happening to your money while it sits in your bank account? The answer is that it's losing value every day. You are losing purchasing power, PP, every day because of inflation. Inflation means things get more expensive over time, so your dollar buys less each year. If an orange cost $2 last year and now it's three, that $1 difference is what we call inflation. So your paycheck might stay the same, but what it can actually buy and the purchasing power of that paycheck changes. In the US, inflation has averaged about 3% a year, and most savings accounts don't keep up with this. So, when someone says they're keeping their money safe in the bank, they're really saying they're okay with their purchasing power shrinking. Their PP is getting smaller without realizing it. I'm not trying to be harsh. This just isn't explained clearly enough. Now, here's the other side. When you invest in the stock market, your money can grow in two main ways. First is appreciation. So, what you bought becomes worth more. If you own a small part of Apple and Apple sells more iPhones, for example, your share becomes more valuable. Obviously, that's oversimplified, but you get what I'm trying to say. Second is compound growth. This is supposed to be a snowball going down the hill. And this is where things get really interesting. If you invest $1,000 and it grows 10% in the first year, you have $1,100. In year two, you earn 10% on $1,100, not $1,000, which makes this $1,200. In year three, 10% on,10 is $121. So you end up with 1,331. You didn't add any extra money. The money just kept compounding on itself. So do you see how powerful this can be over a long period of time? That's why this is much more powerful than this. Okay. So you've been binge watching whiteboard finance videos on YouTube because you're smart, good-looking, and have an incredible hairline, and you're ready to invest. The next question is

### [2:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msCh6TookM&t=154s) What Warren Buffett Actually Tells Regular Investors to Do

what you should actually invest in. This is where many beginners make a common mistake where they end up buying stocks that have gone up the most recently. Okay, I get why that seems logical like your Invidas of the world, your Teslas, things like that. So, if something is rising, it must keep working, right? But this approach, especially in tech, almost always backfires. So, for example, Nokia was once the top phone company in the world, holding nearly 40% of the global smartphone market. A decade later, their market share dropped to almost nothing and their stock price fell about 90% from its peak. Nokia isn't the only example. In the 1980s, the biggest companies were oil and gas giants like General Motors, Exxon, and GE. In the early 2000s, it was Exxon, Walmart, and Cisco. Today, it's Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Cisco was trading at $77 a share in March of 2000. Okay, it's over 26 years ago. is now trading at $79 26 years later. The top companies change every decade. If you had invested everything in the leaders of any one era, you would have been left behind in the next era for the most part. So, what should a beginner do? This is where index funds come in. I've been talking about this for years. I've been doing this for years. I'm not trying to sell you anything, but Warren Buffett, one of the greatest investors ever, wrote in his 2013 Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letter that for most investors, the best way to own stocks is through a lowcost index fund. So, let me explain. An index fund is just a list or an index of companies. The S& P 500 is an index of the 500 largest publicly traded companies in the US. A fund is a pool of money from many investors used to buy assets. So, investing in an S& P 500 index fund means your money goes into a pool that buys a small piece of all 500 companies at once. Instead of putting all your eggs in one basket, this is a basket. These are eggs. Okay, sorry. You spread them out. Think of it like buying a basket of stocks, but by buying one index. So, if one company fails, your whole portfolio doesn't get decimated. That's the point of diversification. Every index fund has an expense ratio, which is the annual fee to keep the fund running and so that fund managers can buy bigger yachts. Okay? That's why you have expense ratios. So, for example, if you have $100,000 in a fund with a 1% expense ratio, you pay $1,000 a year in fees. That might sound high, but there are great index funds with expense ratios as low as 0. 02%, which would be just $20 a year on the same amount. I'll share three specific funds to consider later in this video.

### [5:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msCh6TookM&t=316s) Two Questions to Answer Before You Invest a Dollar

So, before you open a brokerage account and start investing, I want you to stop and answer two important questions. Most people skip this step, so pay attention. First, do you have any high interest percentage debt or high interest rate debt? By high interest, I mean anything above about 10%, okay, which usually means credit cards. Here's why this matters. If you have $10,000 and invested and expect a 10% return, you'd make $1,000 in gains that year. But if you also have $10,000 in credit card debt at 25% interest, you'll pay $2500 in interest that same year. Your net result is negative $1,500. You didn't get ahead. You actually went backwards. So, it's like trying to fill a car with gas. This is a gas tank. uh when there's a hole in the tank. Okay, it's whatever. You know what I mean? Container. So, you can keep pouring money into this uh tank, but it drains out faster than it fills up. So, fix the leak first. These leaks are high interest rate debt. So, paying off a credit card with 25% interest is like getting a guaranteed 25% return, and no stock can promise you that. That's also a tax-free rate of return as well. Second, do you have 3 to six months of living expenses saved in an emergency fund? If not and something goes wrong like a job loss, medical bill or major car repair, you might have to sell your investments at a loss just to cover the emergency and you create a taxable event. So that defeats the purpose of investing. My wife is a nurse practitioner and between our real estate stock investments and what it costs to actually run a household, I can tell you that 3 to six months of savings is not too much. It's the minimum before you start investing. So, pay off high interest rate debt first, build your emergency fund second, and then every dollar you invest can actually stay and grow. If you're an entrepreneur or a commission salesperson, I'd lean more towards 12 months. Okay. In the next section, I'm going to show you how to actually buy your first stock using a real trading platform. But before that, here's a word from today's sponsor, investing. com. Real quick, before I keep going with the video, I want to show you exactly how I check whether a stock is actually priced right before I buy it. And I'll use a stock everyone always has an opinion on. Apple. So Apple's been beaten up lately because of tariff fears, hardware cycle concerns, and obviously the overarching AI question. So is it finally cheap or does it just feel that way because it's down from its highs. So this is where I open investing pro. This is the flagship product from investing. com. It runs 14 different valuations simultaneously. Okay. So here, let me open up Apple real quick and let me zoom in just a little bit. So, some of those valuation models are discounted cash flows, earnings multiples, analyst consensus, and it spits out one combined fair value. Right now, it's showing Apple at $229. 13 per share uh versus its actual price at the time of this recording at $26360 per share. That one number tells me whether the dip is real or if it's just a stock that's less overpriced than it was before. So, this is a crucial step in my process every single time. Not because it makes the decision for me it doesn't, but because I want data behind every buy, not just the gut feeling about a company that I've followed for years. So, if you want to use the same features, uh, check out this executive report. This is really cool. There's so much stuff you can do here, you guys, but I don't want to take too much time in the middle of the video explaining it. I would definitely check it out. You can get investing pro at the lowest prices available. Okay? They're running a flash sale for a limited time. Plus, you can get an extra 15% on top of that with my link down below. Thank you for watching. Okay, so we're at the computer. Let's walk through how to actually buy your first investment. Okay, so many people think it's more complicated than it is and that keeps

### [9:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msCh6TookM&t=546s) Buying a Real Stock Live on Camera

them from starting. So, I'm going to show you a live demo of how to actually buy a stock here, but there are two main ways to invest and it's important to know the difference. So, stay with me here. The first is a retirement account like a 401k through your job or a Roth IRA you open yourself. So these accounts offer big tax benefits that add up over time making them great for wealth building long term. So the downside is there are limits on how much you can contribute. Usually can't access the money before retirement uh without penalties typically 59 and a half. So the second option which I'm going to show you right here is a regular taxable brokerage account. Okay. So, you can open up with uh companies like Fidelity, Schwab, this is Robin Hood, uh Vanguard, SoFi, there's a bunch of them. So, if you want to get started, I have links in the description below uh to a couple of my favorites so you can compare and pick what works for you. Um so, there are no contribution limits to a taxable brokerage. And without getting too much in the weeds, let me just show you on how to actually buy the stock. So, if you look at this right here, um you can see we're inside of Robin Hood. com. They also have a really nice like mobile app, if you will. You can use it from like an iPad or a phone, but I'm just going to use the desktop because it's easier for me to record this way. So, let's use a company called Apple. I'm sure some of you have heard of this company before. If not, uh, welcome to Planet Earth. So, right now, you can see Apple has a share price of $263. 88 per share. Okay. All that means is that if you wanted to buy one share of Apple, uh, that's how much you would pay for it. The nice thing about a brokerage like Robin Hood is that you can buy uh and there's a bunch of different orders, but that kind of goes beyond the scope of this video. If you want, you can watch my old stock market for beginners videos, and I will be coming out with one for 2026. So, you have a buy order, a limit order, a stop-loss order, etc., etc. Now, basically, the only two you really need to know about for the context of this video is basically a buy order or a limit order. So, buy is basically buying at market. So no matter what um Apple's share price is, this is basically instantly going to close or execute at that price. So if I wanted to buy one share, you can see right here, it's going to cost me $264. 7 and this will fluctuate because that's the actual market share. Okay. Now, if I wanted to uh place a limit order, this is basically telling Robin Hood that, hey, I want to buy uh one share of Robin Hood when it reaches $250. It may never reach $250. It may grow forever, right? It may go to $170, but you'd be buying at $ 250. So, this is the thing with a limit order. You can kind of tell it where you want to buy at. Okay? So, it' say estimated cost right here. $250 per share times one share during market hours expiring at 5:00 pm today or good till cancelled up to three months from now which would be July 14th 2026. You will buy one share of Robin Hood if it ever wicks down to $250 per share. Right now it's at about $264 um. 18. Okay, $264. 18 per share. Now just for the sake of this video um I will buy one share of Apple. So, I'm going to go here. The nice thing about Robin Hood, though, is that say I didn't have $264 per share. Okay, that's what Apple is trading at right now. Say I only had $100. So, if I wanted to type in $100 here, you can see that I'm going to get about a third of a share of Apple. Okay, 37 shares. Um, and you can do it that way, too. So, that's the cool thing about Robin Hood is that you c can own fractional shares. You don't necessarily have to own whole shares, you know, 1 2 3 4, you know, 234 shares, right? So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to buy uh one share of Apple. I'm going to hit review order. What this is going to do is give you a brief little summary. And I'm buying it at market, remember? So, whatever Apple is trading at, it's going to buy it at. And I'll show you here in a second once it closes. So, if I hit buy, you can see here your market order to buy one share of Apple is complete. And you can see if I go back to my screen here um at Robin Hood, you can see that my buying power right here went from $500 to $23,553. That's because it cost me about $2647 to buy this share of Apple. So now I can click here and see that my average cost was $2648. I own one share and since it's the only thing I hold on uh on Robin Hood at this time, my portfolio diversity is 100% in Robin in uh Apple, excuse me. You can see here your today's return total return. So I'm already up seven basis points. Great. I can buy my kids a stick of gum right now. But again, you're investing for the long term and that's why I made this video. So hopefully this cleared up some things between buying orders, buying at market, buying fractional shares versus whole shares, buying limit orders. Okay, I could have set that for 250, but who knows when it would have executed, so I didn't do that for this video. But hopefully you learned a little bit more on how to actually buy shares. Most beginners lose money in the stock market, and it's usually not because they picked the wrong stock. It's because they make emotional decisions. Okay? It's at the worst possible times. So here's a real example. Imagine you invested $10,000 in QQQ, which is an index fund for the top 100 tech companies in the US at its 2007

### [14:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msCh6TookM&t=877s) The Mistake That Wipes Out Most Beginners

peak of about $50 a share. Um, obviously this is not to scale. I'm going from 25 to 50 to 170 to 480, but you get what I'm trying to say. So, you buy it at $50 a share in ' 07. You have 07, 09, 10, 18, 20, 25. So, the financial crisis hits and your investment drops to about $25 a share. So, you've lost half your money on paper, 50%. Every instinct tells you to sell, panic sell, and cut your losses. That reaction is completely normal, and I've definitely contemplated it, too, back in '08. Uh, but here's what happens if you hold on. By 2010, QQQ is back to $50 a share. So, you break even. You're basically at a 0% gain or loss. Um, if you bought at 50, went down to 25, and now it's back at 50. So, by 2018, it's at $170. By 2025, your $10,000 has grown to nearly $96,000, even after the worst financial crisis in a generation. That's almost 10 times your money, but only if you stayed invested. JP Morgan Asset Management tracks what happens if you try to time the market instead of staying in. The research shows that if you miss just 10 best days in a decade, you lose most of the gains you would have made by staying put. Those 10 days are unpredictable. They don't come with a warning and often happen during scary times. If you're out of the market on those days because you panicked, you can't get that money back. The market moves up quickly and often when you least expect it. Trust me, I speak from experience. I've been doing this since ' 06. That's why staying invested beats trying to time the market. Time in the market beats timing the market every single time. So, some of you are asking about day trading, which isn't, you know, the scope of this channel or the video, but as for day trading, studies show about 90% of people who try it lose money. Only about 1% make consistent profits. The best investors I've known buy their positions and then leave them alone. You need to understand what you're buying and have the conviction in the position for the long term. Let me give you three specific index funds to look at as a beginner because I think naming actual tickers is more useful than just talking about hypothetical scenarios. So the first is VTI, the Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF. And this is one of my personal favorites. U it's a good

### [16:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msCh6TookM&t=1015s) The 3 Funds I'd Start With Today

starting point because basically, you know, while the S& P 500 gives you like the top 500 companies, VTI gives you the entire US stock market. So this is roughly 3,700 companies from biggest names like uh you know Apple, Microsoft all the way down to smaller companies you've probably never even heard of. Uh it is cap weighted. So obviously the bigger the cap the more percent of the fund that stock is going to have. Um so for example or that company I should say. So like your Magnificent 7 are going to have a higher cap weight in something like this rather than the 3700th company if that makes sense. So the expense ratio is 0. 03% which on $100,000 is $30 a year. That's nothing. Okay. You get maximum diversification, extremely low cost, and the broad US stock market has historically returned roughly 10% annually over the long run. This is a set it and forget it option for someone who wants total stock market exposure without overthinking it. A majority of my net worth is in VTI. Um not net worth, but equities net worth. The second equities just mean stocks. The second is VUG. Okay, the Vanguard Growth ETF. This one focuses on companies expected to grow faster than average because of innovation and technology. The expense ratio is 0. 04% also extremely low. The trade-off is that growth funds swing harder in both directions, up and down. So, this fits better for someone who's younger, uh, has a longer time horizon, and can stomach more volatility without flinching. The third is SCHD. Okay, this is the Schwab US Dividend Equity ETF. This fund holds large established companies that pay regular dividends, meaning they send you cash payments just for owning their shares. 06% at the time of this recording. Uh, this one makes more sense for someone who wants passive income from their investments or someone who is closer to retirement and values cash flow over maximum growth. Now on the tax side, I wanted to touch very quickly. Uh there are two things I want you to know before you ever sell anything. Okay? Taxes are a big chunk of this puzzle, this game. Okay? First, when you sell an investment for more than you paid for it, that profit is called a capital gain. And the government wants a piece. Baby, give me a little chunk of that profit, buddy. But so you buy something for $1,000, for example, and sell it for 1,500. you owe taxes on $500 in gains. When you sell for less than you paid, that is a capital loss, and you can actually use that uh loss to reduce your taxable income, which softens the blow a bit. So, second, how long you held the investment before selling determines what tax rate applies. You hold for less than a year and you pay shortterm capital gains. Okay, these are capital gains rates. They're taxed the same as regular income, so potentially much higher depending on your tax bracket. Okay. If you hold it for longer than a year and you pay long-term capital gains rates, which are meaningfully lower, depending on your tax bracket, you'll pay either 0, 15, or 20% for long-term capital gains tax rates. The IRS is literally incentivizing patience. One more reason the boring long-term hold strategy keeps winning is because they want you to hold longer. keep putting money into the system. That's how all this works. Think of dollars and interest rates just as levers and tools to keep the blood flowing throughout the economy. It's the circulation. It's almost like the heartbeating money throughout the economy, if that makes sense. Okay, as always, my honest thoughts at the end of the video. Guys, I've been investing in stocks since 2006, okay? I chased individual stocks. I check my portfolio way too often, and I let short-term news affect my long-term plans when I was young, when I was in high school and college. So, what actually worked for me

### [20:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2msCh6TookM&t=1248s) My Honest Take After Investing Since 2006

is what I've shared in this video. It's a boring, diversified, consistent, and patient approach. My wife is a nurse practitioner and when we talk about our finances and future, we always come back to the basics. We build a solid foundation first. That was the emergency fund, okay? Paying off high interest debt, her student loans when we first got together. Uh, automate your investments, okay? We have savings buckets. We do all this stuff. And we let time do the work. Again, time in the market is better than time in the market. This is a long-term game, okay? If you do have that little uh itch, that little gambling itch that you want to trade stocks or options or whatever, we do that inside of Whiteboard Finance University, but that's not the point, okay? That's just fun. That's literally a percent of my portfolio. Again, a majority of my net worth and equities is in VTI. But if you want to learn what I'm actually buying, go on a live stream every Thursday at 5:00 pm Eastern Standard Time, if you want courses, if you want a community of hundreds of people, check out whiteboard financeuniversity. com. It's $10 a month, you guys, for perfect hair. Perfect hair, skin, nails, and teeth. Okay, that's what you get for 10 bucks a month. Um, all joking aside, uh, this is the this is literally the best deal on planet Earth. Okay, you pay more for this than lunch and this could literally change your life. So, sorry for the hard pitch, but I'm just being serious. If you guys want to sign up for any of the brokerages that I used in this video, check out the link in the description below. Also, check out investing. com, today's sponsor. Uh, as always, you guys, I make these videos. They take a lot of time and effort to make. Please uh hit the like button. Please subscribe. Please share the channel with 12,000 friends. And as always, have a prosperous day. Hey, Marco. What stocks do you recommend? Check out Lehman Brothers. They're supposed to be really hot.

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*Источник: https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/49492*