What do Apples and Oranges have in common with ETFs? And a simple tip to get you investing.

If you aren't an expert investor we have an easy tip to help you get started.

Click to listen to our podcast episode: "Why don't you invest in the stock market"

Tip#1: Invest for the long term

Often times it can feel very overwhelming to invest in the stock market - in fact the number one reason people fear investing is losing all their money! A lot of times this all or nothing roller-coaster type investment can feel like gambling. It doesn't help that all you hear in the news is about the major crash or the major booms of specific stocks.

However the real key to investing is to invest for the long term and to stay invested instead of trying to find the perfect time to buy and sell. Not only is this style of investing the most profitable over the long term, it is also the most stress free!

If you are invested in the long term, the next time there is a boom or a crash, you just have to remind yourself that this is temporary. In fact there are thousands of studies that confirm that. Goldman Sachs analyzed market returns over a 140 years and identified that over a decade the market grew at least by 9% every decade since the 1880s! That is including all the crashes, recessions and depressions.

Tip#2: Start with an ETF

The easiest way to get started is by investing in an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). Think of an ETF as a basket of stocks. For example, if you are grocery shopping and you want to buy fruit, you're buying a category - FRUIT. This includes all different kinds of fruits such as apples, oranges and bananas and that ETF is now tracking how fruits are performing. Are fruits going up? Are fruits going down?

If you want to expand beyond fruits and get into lets say vegetables and track that separately, there is another ETF for that - lets say VEGGIES. Or if you're like, hey, I want to track the whole grocery store - how's that doing? And that's another ETF.

So a simple way to think about it is, that each of these different categories of fruit, vegetables or lets say the baking section are different sectors in the market. Similar to Fruits and Vegetables, we have Technology, Clean Energy, Gold and others and there is an ETF for each one of those sectors.

Or if you want to track the entire stock market or the grocery store from our analogy you can purchase and ETF like VTI and have an expert managing this basket of stocks for you charging a very low fee to do so. This is a simple way to invest in the stock market and not have to be a professional.

You don't even need a minimum dollar amount to invest (you only need to be able to purchase 1 ETF and it can be $25 of even lower) and you can buy and sell your ETF at any time during the day.

Learn more about starting to invest here and access free resources here!