I'm still having trouble understanding investing. I'm not sure where the extra money comes from but also isn't it risky? What if I make all of the wrong decisions and make things worse for myself?
Sweet pea, we are so proud of you for approaching investing with caution and making sure you fully understand it before diving right in. You are a wise and prudent baby bitchling and we love you for it!
First things first, here's everything we've ever written about investing:
MASTERPOST: Everything You Need to Know about Investing for Beginners
Now, to answer your specific concerns:
Think of investing like borrowing and lending money. When you borrow money (let's say, to buy a car), you pay it back with interest. That interest is an extra bit of money you pay for the privilege and convenience of borrowing the money in the first place. The lender gets their money back from you PLUS interest for their trouble. Thus also with investing... except YOU are the "lender" and the companies you invest in are the "borrowers." That's where the extra money comes from: It's interest you earn back from the companies you invested in.
What makes investing so potentially lucrative is the concept of COMPOUND INTEREST: the interest you make gets reinvested, and you make more interest on it, thus growing your investment much faster than if you only made interest on the amount of money you initially invested. That's why we recommend investing as a way to build wealth to secure your future.
And yes--all of this is risky! Depending on how the stocks in your portfolio perform, you could indeed lose money. But there are ways to mitigate those risks and invest with caution. The tl;dr of it all is to invest regularly in index funds with automatic deposits, sit back, and ignore your investments for the most part. We explain all of this in the link above.
Hope that helps, my dear! We're happy to answer any other investing questions you have.
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