If you’re waiting for the “right time” to invest, I need you to hear this––the right time is now.
In this final part of my Personal Finance Cheat Sheet series, I’m breaking down exactly how to start investing in 2026 — step by step, without the jargon and without gatekeeping. Investing isn’t just for rich people; it’s how many people become rich, and I’m walking you through how compound interest, long-term strategy, and simple systems can help you build real wealth even if you’re starting with very little. If the stock market has felt confusing, intimidating, or downright scary, this episode will show you how to finally get off the sidelines and start making your money work for you.
What you need to know:
Investing is a long-term wealth-building tool, not a get-rich-quick strategy.
If you’ve been avoiding investing because you think it’s risky, confusing, or basically gambling, you’ve been sold the wrong story. Real investing is about time, patience, and consistency––not day trading or chasing trends. Historically, every 20-year period in the stock market has resulted in gains, even through crashes and recessions. The longer you stay invested, the safer your money actually becomes, which is why starting now, and staying put, matters more than picking the “perfect” moment.
Time in the market always beats timing the market.
Waiting for the “right” moment to invest is one of the biggest reasons people never start. There will always be something happening, whether it’s economic chaos, elections, inflation, layoffs. But the data is clear: getting into the market and staying there is far more effective than trying to predict what it will do next. No one can consistently time the market, so your best move is to start now and let time do the heavy lifting.
Your investing account is not the investment.
One of the most common mistakes new investors make is thinking that opening a Roth IRA, 401(k), or brokerage account means their money is invested. It doesn’t. The account is just the container — you still have to choose investments inside it. Leaving money uninvested is basically putting it in financial purgatory, where compound interest can’t work for you. Investing only happens once your money is actually buying stocks or funds.
Simple, diversified investing is not lazy, it’s smart.
You don’t need fancy strategies, insider knowledge, or hours of research to be a successful investor. In fact, overcomplicating things often leads to worse results. Index funds — which hold thousands of companies at once — help spread out risk and remove emotion from investing decisions. Simplicity, consistency, and automation will outperform trend-chasing and panic-driven decisions every single time.
Doing nothing is the most expensive investing mistake you can make.
So many women stay stuck in “research mode” because they’re afraid of making the wrong decision — but not investing at all guarantees you’ll lose money to inflation and missed growth. Analysis paralysis feels productive, but it’s often just fear in disguise. You don’t need to be perfect to start investing; you just need to start. Compound interest only works if you participate, and the sooner you begin, the more powerful it becomes.
Notable quotes
“Investing isn’t for rich people — it’s how people become rich.”
“The worst mistake you can make when it comes to investing is doing nothing.”
“Stop letting perfection delay action — compound interest doesn’t work if you never start.”
Episode at-a-glance
00:00 Intro
00:22 What Investing Really Is
01:40 Why Investing Works Long-Term
03:00 Debunking “It’s Too Confusing”
08:11 Time in the Market vs. Timing the Market
10:00 Step-by-Step Investing Roadmap
17:30 Where to Set Up Your Account
18:37 Biggest Mistakes New Investors Make
21:34 Long-Term Wins Over Short-Term Gains
Missed an episode in our Personal Finance Cheat Sheet series? Get caught up:
The 3 Mistakes You’re Making with Your Money Resolutions (Personal Finance Cheat Sheet Pt. 1)
How To Budget & Pay Off Debt (Personal Finance Cheat Sheet Pt. 2)
Visit https://herfirst100k.com/ffpod to register for our FREE workshop, Stock Market Secrets: Debunking Common Myths for Successful Investing.
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Transcript:
Tori Dunlap:
If you’ve been meaning to invest, no more excuses. This is your year. Investing isn’t for rich people. It’s how people become rich. And on today’s episode, the final episode of the Personal Finance Cheat Sheet series, I am walking you through exactly step-by-step how to make your first investment. If you’re someone who is just starting investing or maybe hasn’t started at all, this is not going to be jargon-y. This is not going to be overwhelming. I know that that’s probably why you haven’t gotten started or why you bail every time you log into your Fidelity, Vanguard, Schwab, Robinhood account. It’s because everything’s so crazy and confusing. This is what we’re debunking today. It’s so important that this information is accessible. So if you know somebody in your life who is also trying to figure out how to invest or has been putting it off, share this episode with them too.
And if you’re joining us here at part three and you haven’t watched part one and two, please go watch or listen to episodes one and two of the Personal Finance Cheat Sheet series. We are getting started in 2026, giving you everything you need to know to start building wealth this year. And before we get into the rest of the episode, we are doing a free investing workshop called Stock Market Secrets. I have taught this workshop to over 200,000 people who are trying to figure out how to start investing, how to overcome the myths you’ve been believing, and some of the most common mistakes I see on people’s investing journeys so you don’t make them too. Go to herfirst100k.com/ffpod to register. It is entirely free. So I expect your butt to be there, herfirst100k.com/ffpod. Sign up for Stock Market Secrets. We’ll see you very soon in that free workshop.
First, we have to talk about what investing is and what it isn’t, and investing simply defined is using money to make more money. It is putting money in the stock market and allowing it to grow using what’s called compound interest. Now, compound interest simply defined is when your interest earns interest earns interest. That’s what makes investing so powerful, because you’re no longer the only person who’s working hard to make money. Your money is now making you money. Compound interest is one of the things that is so incredible if used correctly and awful if it’s used against you. A lot of people get into debt and then compound interest is the reason that debt accumulates. However, rather than having this harm you, it’s actually now used for your benefit to grow your wealth. A lot of people hear the word invest or investing in the stock market and they think about short term gains.
Quite literally, right? People think about chasing the hot stock or day trading. It’s this very short-term focus. And it makes all of us believe that investing is gambling, that it’s risky and that it’s no different than going to the casino or going and playing the lottery. And in actuality, it’s very, very different. If you’re someone who’s been believing that investing means doing all of that, all of the short-term day trading, spend eight hours a day trying to figure out how to do this, that’s such a myth. That is a specific group of people who is usually trying to scam you and is trying to convince you of this get rich quick overnight kind of situation. But investing is meant to be done over the long term. And I’m not just talking like months. I’m talking years, if not decades. I wish I could come on this video in this episode and tell you I could make you rich tomorrow, but I would be lying to you and or trying to sell you something. And that’s just not how this works.
When you see people who are successful day traders, and I’m putting like success in the biggest air quotes here, they’re not telling you the high amount of risk they’re taking on. So when it comes to investing, investing is actually one of the best things you can do to grow your money, but you have to focus on the long term because the truth is, if you’re scared of losing money in the stock market, you have to give yourself as much time as possible. One of the stats I found when I was researching my first book, Financial Feminist, is that over every 20-year period of the stock market so far, every 20-year period, even one that included 2008, even one that included the beginning of COVID, or even the Great Depression, you have been 100% likely to make money.
That means if you’re scared of losing money, the answer is to be patient. The answer is to use the stock market as it was intended, which is a long-term strategy to build wealth. So if you’re someone that thinks it’s too risky to actually invest, you’re believing the lie that the short-term gains are how you invest. In actuality, that is the easiest way to lose money. If you’re someone who’s thinking, “Oh, it’s too late for me to get started.” No, compound interest works regardless of your age. It works regardless of your age and regardless of the amount of money. So whether you are 18 or 88, whether you have $10 or $100,000, investing works, compound interest works. And finally, to everybody who says it’s too confusing, well, that’s literally why I have a job. And it’s also why everybody else has theirs, because the truth is the finance industry is a multi, multi, multi, multi-billion dollar industry built on making you feel like you’re too stupid to understand.
Because if they make everything super jargon-y and like it’s in another language and there’s so many graphs and there’s charts and there’s words you’ve never seen before and you’re just like, “How do I buy a stock and what even is a stock and where do I go to do that?” They’ve done that on purpose, because then you call one of their wealth management advisors and in no time at all you are paying an exorbitant amount of money in fees for them to do what you can do by yourself. That’s not an accident. That’s why this industry exists. And it’s also why I’m here, because nothing drives me more insane than people making money off of patronizing you. So before we talk more about how to actually invest, I have to convince you why this year is your year, okay? Why you should start investing in 2026.
The first thing you need to know is that time in the market is better than trying to time the market. I hear this from our audience all the time is they’ll go, “I have a little bit of money and I’m ready to invest, but I know now’s not a good time.” And then they give me whatever thing they’ve heard on the news, right? “Oh, Trump’s making crazy decisions, or the economy’s bad, or the job market’s down, or we’re about to have a war, and that’s going to be…” All of these things are real and might have a sway in the stock market. They might influence the market performance. However, as I proved to you before, the day-to-day in the stock market doesn’t really matter. We’re in this years, if not decades, and it has been proven time and time again that if you just get in the stock market, regardless of what it’s doing on that day or that week or that month, you are more likely to make money than you trying to time the market.
And anybody, by the way, who tells you you can, who’s like, “Well, I have a finance degree and I work at Charles Schwab or JP Morgan and I know how to do this.” They’re also lying to you, because no one can time the stock market. Nobody. There are people who might have a inkling or might have a suspicion of what’s going to happen, but they have been wrong as many times, if not more, as they’ve been right. The second reason you need to start investing in 2026 is because there’s a lot of stuff going on. It’s the very reason you’re nervous to invest, right? Inflation, the job market, the economy. All of these things feel very high stakes. And of course they do. They’re affecting our day-to-day lives. Layoffs and the price of eggs are things that we have to think about as individuals and as a collective all the fucking time.
But this actually is one of the biggest reasons why I need you growing your wealth, because the stock market over the last nearly 125 years it’s been around has brought in consistent gains. Now, some years, it’s low. Some years, it’s actually in the negative. Other years, like since the beginning of COVID, we’ve seen an average of like 15, 20, 25% interest in the stock market. So the average you can expect over a long period of time is anywhere from seven to 10% in interest. That is incredibly powerful, and you can’t get that percentage return anywhere else. Not for a massive level of risk. So when we’re thinking about growing our money in the midst of all the chaos that’s happening, this is actually one of the best ways that we can ensure that our money is working harder for us, that we’re not losing money due to inflation, that we’re not feeling financially behind.
So if you’ve been waiting on the sidelines because now’s not a good time and everything seems chaotic, now’s the best time. We have to get you in to using compound interest as your kind of like silent worker, right? It is earning you money literally when you sleep. I remember when I started investing at 22 and then hit my 100K at 25 and then hit multimillionaire status by 27, right? All of these things happened. One, because of entrepreneurship, I had a successful business, but two, I used those entrepreneurship gains, put them in the stock market, and then allowed my money to work harder for me. And I still remember, invested my Roth IRA, we’ll explain what that is in a second, when I was 22, and I woke up and I checked my stock market app and I realized that while I was asleep, my money had made me more money.
That’s incredible. That’s the feeling I want for you. And especially if you’re feeling broke, you’re feeling tired, you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re like, “I don’t have thousands and thousands of dollars to invest, Tori. Why would I invest now?” Because that’s your best tool. That is your best tool for building new economic stability and building your wealth. And as a reminder, before we get into the roadmap, the beginner’s roadmap for investing, we have that Stock Market Secrets workshop that is so incredibly helpful to give you more information about how to invest, especially if you’re feeling intimidated, especially if you’re feeling overwhelmed, especially if there’s that fear that’s holding you back from actually getting started or investing consistently. And again, it’s entirely free. It’s with me. I would love to see you there. So go to herfirst100k.com/ffpod and we’ll have the link to Stock Market Secrets, our free investing workshop right there. So herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
All right, let’s talk about the step-by-step ways we can start investing. Now, I have so much more in that free workshop, right? This takes a little while to explain. I can’t explain it to you all in this episode, but I’m going to give you the TLDR of how to do this, okay? So the first step is to pick an investing account. Now, you have a couple different options. You can choose what’s called a retirement account. This is an investing account for retirement. You’ve probably heard of something like a 401k or an IRA. We have more episodes that break these down, but a 401k is a tax advantage retirement account that is set up by your employer. The reason I say tax advantage is because 401ks, IRAs, any sort of retirement account is tax-advantaged, meaning that the government is incentivizing you to save for retirement by offering you tax breaks, like legal tax breaks.
An IRA is an individual retirement account. And you can open up an IRA regardless if your employer has a 401k or not. This is a great way for you to use those tax advantages at your disposal. If you just want to start investing and you don’t want to worry about, do I qualify for these accounts? What is the maximum for these accounts? You want to open what’s called a brokerage account. A brokerage account is just a general investing account. Now, it doesn’t have the tax advantages, which is the con, but it doesn’t have any of the restrictions either. You don’t have to worry about hitting a maximum or qualifying or even having that account available. However, if I was getting started, this is what I did at 22, I’d open up a Roth IRA because Roth IRAs are the best way for me to save money on taxes, contribute to my retirement, and I can start investing at a micro level.
So after you’ve chosen your account, step number two is to choose the investments that go in that type of account. Now, this might already be blowing your mind, because this right here is the number one mistake I see new investors make. So if you’ve been tuning me out, if you’re watching on YouTube and you, I don’t know, have me on mute, you’re going to crank me up, crank up that Soulja Boy, okay? Because you need to know this. This right here is a mistake that I see that costs millions and millions of dollars, and I get DMs about it all the time. People think the Roth IRA or the 401k or the brokerage account is the investment. It’s not. It is the account that holds the investments. So when you pick the account, the 401k, IRA, brokerage account, whatever, you put let’s say $1,000 into that account.
You then need to go buy things with $1,000. You need to go buy stocks or funds and then you’ve actually invested. Now, we have so much more information about stocks, funds, all of that over in Stock Market Secrets, but the thing you need to keep in mind is that you cannot just open one of these accounts without doing step two. Step two is choosing the investments to go into that account. Okay? So step number one, understand your accounts and pick one. Step number two is build a simple portfolio. Okay? I personally love index funds. Index funds are groups of stocks. So rather than trying to cherry-pick or find the hot stock, I am picking an index fund, which is a group of stocks that has thousands of companies, and this helps mitigate my risk. The third thing you’re going to do is you’re going to automate contributions to your investing account.
We’ve talked about automating your savings all the time, right? Setting up an automatic transfer from your checking account to your high yield savings account. This is the same principle, but from your checking account or your savings account into the account that you’ve chosen for your investments, your Roth IRA, for example. Automating contributions means that you’re allowing your money to grow on autopilot. You’re not having to think about it, you’re not having to worry about it. Maybe this is every time you get paid, maybe this is once a month. You can decide what that looks like for you. But I highly recommend automating your contribution so you don’t have to think about it. If you are investing in a 401 through work, most workplaces make this super easy. You end up contributing a percentage of your income or of your paycheck to your 401k. And if you’re already doing that, I would encourage you to increase it a percentage. May as well. See what that looks like. You’re probably not going to feel it.
Step number four, stop looking. I know. You’re like, “Tori, but you tell me to look at my money and you tell me to un-ostrich myself and you’ve done nearly 300 episodes about how important it is to look at my money.” Here’s the deal. Once you have systems set up, once you have the account chosen and the investments chosen for the account and you’ve automated this whole process, great. You don’t have to worry about it anymore. That’s the goal, right? My goal is to get you to a point where you don’t have to feel like you have to look at your money every other second because you know that your goals are happening. You know that you’re contributing and progressing towards building wealth. And so if you’ve automated your contributions, I want you to leave it the hell alone.
Don’t feel like, “Oh, the news. Something happened and I have to go in and sell all my stocks.” Right? That’s what causes recessions, by the way. Don’t panic and make some sort of rash decision. And also, don’t see somebody on TikTok talking about this hot new stock or this hot new company that you must invest in and go in and change everything, right? If you have made educated investing choices, and if you follow me, and if you come to the Stock Market Secrets workshop, you will have made those educated investment choices. You don’t have to worry. It’s on autopilot. It’s happening without you having to think about it. Step number five is then to review it every once in a while. Once in a while, I mean like every quarter, okay? I’m not like talking every day or every week. I’m just talking like once every couple months.
Check in, make sure everything’s good. Make sure your automated contributions are going to the things you want them to go to, right? And all of these things, once you set up the system, start to get so much easier. Now, in terms of setting up your account, we’ve talked about this before, but you have a couple options. You can do this yourself through a brokerage like a Fidelity or a Vanguard. You can work with a robo-advisor, which means that they’re choosing your investments for you for a small fee. That’s like a betterment or a wealth front. And we actually built our own investing app over in our stock market school that teaches you how to do this step by step alongside education with me. But make sure to go register for that free Stock Market Secrets workshop first. It’s going to give you a bunch of great info with me.
Ultimately, we want to focus on clarity and simplicity here. Again, this is a multi, multi-billion dollar industry built on making you feel like you’re too stupid to understand, but also convincing you that this is so complicated, that building wealth and becoming a millionaire and securing your retirement is about chasing a fancy stock and joining a hedge fund and making crazy decisions. It’s not. And I’m here to tell you, both as someone who is a expert in this, who has done the research, who wrote a New York Times bestselling book, but also who built wealth, built multi-millions of dollars of wealth this way, that it’s actually not complicated at all. The index funds that I talk about are the exact funds I invest in, because ultimately, simplicity and clarity and consistency are what are actually going to allow you to invest and build wealth in 2026 and beyond, not getting caught up in what the hot new thing is and not getting caught up in trends and not getting caught up in feeling like, “Oh, this has to be complicated in order to work.” It doesn’t.
We’ve talked about some of these mistakes, these like chasing hot stocks, pulling out when the stock market feels scary, which is one that I see all of the time. But the biggest mistake I see with women specifically, and 98% of the people watching or listening to this are women, so hello, I hope you stick around and subscribe, is that you feel like research is a good thing. You feel like I got to do more research in order to figure out what I’m doing. I have to go Google all of these things and spend hours and hours and hours researching. Now, I’m not saying research, true research is a bad thing. I think we should all research. I think we should all make educated choices. However, I’m calling you out because your research is not research anymore. It’s analysis paralysis. You are researching so that you don’t have to make a decision, because you’re too scared to act.
You are researching and Googling and watching the videos and doing all of the things, as opposed to attending this free workshop I have available or signing up for the investment account and actually getting started because you’re so scared of failure. You’re so scared of making a mistake, you’re scared of losing money, you’re scared that you’re going to fuck it up in some way. And I’m here to tell you, the worst mistake you can make when it comes to investing is doing nothing, because when we don’t invest, we are losing money every single day. And I don’t say this to freak you out. I say this to give you a reality check. Women tell me all the time, “Well, Tori, I’m so scared that I’m going to go into one of these platforms that I don’t know anything about and like make the wrong decision.”
No, making the wrong decision, the worst wrong decision you can make is doing nothing, making no decision at all because then you’re losing money, then you’re not allowing compound interest to work hard for you. Then you’re losing the precious amount of time that you need, because we can’t get time back, right? And compound interest works with as much time we have available. So don’t wait until tomorrow. Don’t wait until next week. Don’t wait until months and months from now. “Oh, I’ll do this later. Oh, I’ll figure it out later. Oh, I’ll do this later.” Do not do this later. Do this now. I will see you in the workshop. I will see you in the rest of our content. I will make sure that you have the resources you need to be successful, because if you’ve tried to do this alone and it has not worked, great. Stop doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results. That’s the definition of insanity.
You have to stop letting perfection delay action. Stop getting in the analysis paralysis mode and actually just do the damn thing. I know you’re scared. I know you’re freaked out. That’s on purpose. That’s not your fault. That is a system and a industry that has made you feel that way. But as cheesy as it sounds, I got you. I got you. You’re not going to have to do this alone. So as we wrap up this episode, I remind you that investing shouldn’t be scary and it shouldn’t be complicated. It doesn’t need to be. It does not need to be sophisticated, and in fact, it shouldn’t be sophisticated if you actually want to be successful. We need to make sure that when we open the account, we are not just opening the account, but we’re choosing the investments. We don’t want to have our money in purgatory having not actually invested.
And it’s important that we just get started, because compound interest in order to work, you need to be an active participant. It’s not going to work if you don’t do the thing. And when it comes to successful investing, as tempting as it is to chase short-term solutions, especially if you’re economically struggling, especially if things don’t feel like they’re happening quick enough, it is important to remind yourself that investing is a long-term win. It is not a short-term gain, because you’re also scared of losing money. That’s a real fear. And if you’re scared of losing money, the answer is to be patient. And I know that’s not a fun answer, but that’s the real answer. That’s the answer of someone who is giving you the reality check that you need as opposed to you wanting instant gratification towards your goals. This is going to take some time.
It’s always taken time. No one has gotten rich overnight, right? And when it comes to investing, it is so important to keep that in mind. As you encounter different people telling you that this is possible, that you can day trade and quit your job and… It’s all bullshit. It’s all bullshit. Long-term diversified investing does not lose. In fact, it never has. So I don’t want to leave you hanging at the end of this series. If you’ve listened to episodes one through three, amazing. You have so much more info than when you started. This series is a great one to share with people in your life. We all know we didn’t get this financial education in school, right? And maybe you didn’t get it from your family either. These episodes could literally change the trajectory of someone’s life. So sharing this Financial Cheat Sheet series with people in your life who could really need it allows this education to become more accessible and free for people who desperately need to know how to manage their money.
So send this episode to somebody who needs it, and we will see you in the Stock Market Secrets workshop. It is free. It is with me. It is so impactful, and I’ve seen it radically change people’s relationship with investing, relationship with the stock market, and their own confidence and their own ability to be a successful investor. So again, go to herfirst100k.com/ffpod, and I would love to see you in that free workshop. In fact, I expect it. I expect to see you there. Thank you for being here. Thank you for supporting Financial Feminist, our show. And if you’re not subscribed wherever you’re watching or listening now, it’s your best way to make sure you get this free financial content that could increase your net worth, decrease the amount of stress you have about money, and just make you a more financially confident person. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being Financial Feminists, and we’ll talk to you soon.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminists, produced by Her First 100K. If you love the show and want to keep supporting feminist media, please subscribe or follow us on your preferred podcasting platform or on YouTube. Your support helps us continue to bring this content to you for free. If you’re looking for resources, tools, and education, including all of the resources mentioned in this episode, head to herfirst100k.com/ffpod.
Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap. Produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Research by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Daryl Ann Ingman, Shelby Duclos, Meghan Walker, and Jess Hawks. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton, photography by Sarah Wolfe, and theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound. A huge thanks to the entire Her First 100K community for supporting our show.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
