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Investing can be over­whelm­ing. There real­ly are a lot of options, even many good ones.

How do you decide where to start?

It’s a big deci­sion. You have cash in your hand. You know it’s there and what it’s worth. You worked hard to get it. You can feel it. You can touch it. Yet you have to let go of it in exchange some­thing less cer­tain. Whether the anx­i­ety is about the invest­ment itself or the source of the advice, it asks a lot of any ratio­nal per­son to give up the cer­tain for the less-so.

That anx­i­ety is exag­ger­at­ed by one impor­tant thing I come across all the time — peo­ple don’t tell you how to do what they think you should do.

I often have ques­tions myself, for exam­ple about run­ning this web­site, and I get the answer, a cor­rect answer, but not instruc­tions on what to do with that answer.

I have seen the same thing in many books that want to teach you some­thing. They share an idea, but not the pre­scrip­tive steps it takes to imple­ment the idea.

Beginners need a pre­scrip­tion. A pre­scrip­tion elim­i­nates the fric­tion of start­ing (and I believe you should start!). Starting is the first step towards con­tin­u­ing, and grow­ing. Learning more and try­ing even more new things.

There are many suc­cess­ful ways to start build­ing wealth that you should be doing before read­ing any fur­ther:

1. You’re max­ing out your con­tri­bu­tion to a 401K or IRA, right? This is espe­cial­ly impor­tant I your com­pa­ny makes any sort of match­ing con­tri­bu­tion.
2. You’re pay­ing down cred­it card debt. This is a form of invest­ing because the inter­est rates are cost­ing you a lot and by pay­ing down your bal­ance your return is not pay­ing that inter­est. Pay your cred­it cards down, even if it means not hav­ing a safe­ty net.
3. If you’re a par­ent (or grand­par­ent!) are you putting mon­ey into a col­lege sav­ings plan? Probably a good idea but get bet­ter advice than I’ll give you on this one.

I found this short arti­cle about invest­ing in the face of pay­ing of debt while also try­ing to build a safe­ty net use­ful.

While I’d love to sell you my book or have you take my email course, the best way to start that requires noth­ing from you but a few min­utes is to read the fol­low­ing 5 posts, in this order:

1. What are div­i­dends?
2. What does it mean to rein­vest div­i­dends?
3. What are the div­i­dend aris­to­crats?
4. How do you get start­ed?
5. What do you mea­sure?

These posts will help you get start­ed with some­thing called “div­i­dend growth invest­ing.” I pre­fer to call it “free­dom.” You call it what you want. There’s noth­ing new, secret, or mag­i­cal (well, oth­er than the idea of com­pound­ing, the eighth won­der of the world) in these posts.

Some peo­ple call this ‘div­i­dend growth invest­ing,’ I pre­fer to call it ‘FREEDOM’ Click To Tweet

The best thing about start­ing to build wealth these days is the low bar­ri­er to entry. You can get start­ed for $5. That means there’s no excuse for not start­ing, and by start­ing learn some­thing. Even if what you learn is what a big mis­take that was, you’ve learned.