Experience in Investing

When it comes to investing at a young age like ours, we usually think of college as a thing to start saving up for.  To be honest, investing doesn't come up to our minds at all when it comes to saving for college. It's just saving scraps of money you get from your allowance or a part time job. Maybe it's praying that your parents will pay a portion or all of it for you. Student loans are scary. Once in awhile, I hear a kid around our age on the news investing and getting huge amounts of money. In my mind, I'd be like, "Woah, that's cool. You do that, kid." It never occurred to me that I could do it myself. From this project, I realized how accessible investing is to people of all ages. My dad told me he started investing in his 20s to pay for his college. He didn't make much, but it was enough to not worry about student loans. Sure, it takes quite awhile to find a company that'd give you a high annual return rate, more or less, save money to invest into that company. Additionally, you have to do more math. All these numbers and charts strain your eyes and eat your soul away, but truth is that it's worth it. At the beginning, I had no clue what any of these business terms meant. I screamed to my friend, "WHAT'S A SHARE? WHAT'S A DIVIDEND? HOW DOES ONE EVEN?" It took me two hours just to find out what they all meant. After I had that all down, I started searching. It took me another 2 hours to find just the right one (I'm really picky). I started getting less and less picky as my patience diminished. "19%? Meh, that's good enough." And so I began calculating at the speed of lightning. The saddening truth, however, was that I only had a 143% increase over the next 10 years. My dad said it was good, especially in the business world. He even joked that I should go into the investing world as my career (maybe). If I were to do so, I would need to put more time into it. Investing isn't just some one day does the job thing. It takes weeks, even months, to find the right company to throw your money at and strategically get that money. I actually really enjoyed this project and would want to do it again.