Scotttrade Power Of Attorney: Fill & Download for Free

So first things first. If you are young, You should look to build an emergency fund. you never know when your job will get downsized, or you have a medical emergency or whatever.Also, if you have credit card debt, pay it down. most companies will charge you between 14% and like 29.99%. for comparison the average annual return of the stock market since its inception is 10%. you can’t really rely on making better returns than the interest payments you save on credit cards.Check out Dave Ramsey/Suzie Orman or Ramit Seti for the “too poor to hire a CFP myself” financial planning stuff stage. remember though all three are really just good starting points and as you evolve your nest egg and your investing, you need to go beyond what you can see on their podcasts and blogs and get personalized help.What I would do If I was in your positionI would, even at the overpriced level of the stock market, start using the money by buying conservative stocks whose companies you know and products you use. use these tiny bets to learn lessons about evaluating companies, investing the the stock market, etc.When I started investing, It was 2003ish and I started buying what I called ‘sin’ stocks. Playboy, Budweiser, cigarette companies and gun manufacturers. Not that I consumed any of this stuff (I was 17) but I could articulate well what the companies did, Terrible strategy, but it did provide me with a lot of stocks where I only had to worry about the price going up or down, not about whether they were going to go bankrupt.I made some money, lost some money, but learned a lot of first-hand valuable lessons. I probably lost 10% of what I invested over the first couple of years, but the knowledge I gained has been immeasurable. Even if you don’t want to become a full time investor, it’s a huge leg up in how to look at the world. It is what allowed me to feel confident enough to buy AIG at ~ $0.35/share in March 2009 using a student tuition payment.I normally recommend people seek out a licensed professional to guide them (because I am not a licensed investment advisor and it’s almost impossible to know via a Quora question everything you need to appropriately guide someone) but with $100/week I don’t think you will have the money you need for a while to have someone take you on.Mind you, the easiest way to invest your money so that it grows with the power of compound interest over time is to buy a no-cost S&P 500 ETF, but you won’t learn anything and a lot of people suspect we are due for a market downturn soon, so blindly building a position in the S&P 500 may just have you feeling pissed off in 6 months. This is a long term play though (talking 30–40 years). You can “safely” (no investment is ever truly without risk) participate in the market this way but you will not learn anything.Here’s are the steps I would take:Google ‘Bill Ackman reading list’. Bill is a famous and divisive hedge fund investor and people may not agree with him, but the 11 or 12 books on his recommendation list will be invaluable to your learning and save you thousands of dollars in the long run, even if you end up investing completely differently to the way he does. Add to that list two more books (if they aren’t listed).First is called “The Richest Man in Babylon” by george s. classon (its short, tiny, written in 1932, but has a lot of principles anyone looking to invest should take to heart first).Second is “Money: Master the Game” by Tony Robbins. This one is not a short book, but Tony (whether you like him or not) got access to some of the best investors on the planet and the book has interviews of them recommending how to invest.Read the books. by book number 3 or 4, you should feel comfortable dipping your toe into the investing pool. During the time before that, save your $100/week. Unless you go nuts and devour the reading list in like a week and a half, you should have enough money saved up to find an account you can open where your money meets the minimum requirement.Find and open up an online brokerage account (etrade, interactive brokers, scotttrade, schwab, etc.). A lot of millennials ask me about Acorn. I personally don’t use, so I don’t want to comment on it. Make sure the online account has low costs associated with it (there are tons of websites to compare the pros and cons of each of these platforms. If you are willing to not touch the money in the investing account, consider using an IRA or RothIRA or a 401(k) if your employer offers it- ESPECIALLY IF THEY HAVE A MATCHING PROGRAM. Your bank can probably explain the benefits of these to you, but do not just sign up for the bank’s one, as it may not be the best deal you can get.Sign up for Stash (it’s an app) or something like it and link your checking account to it. YOU THINK you can save $100 a week, but Stash just rounds up the dollar amounts of your purchases and I think you will find you actually can save a bit more up than that.Read Bloomberg.com, the New York Time’s Deal Book, and any articles you can get from Barron’s or the Wall Street Journal or even listen to podcasts like The Motley Fool on your way to work. If you are not American, the financial times is decent (though I hate navigating their website) as is the Business section of the South China Morning Post (if you are Asian and will be trading in those markets). If you spend 15 minutes a day doing this instead of watching Panda videos on YouTube, you will be ahead of 99% of the investing public.Find a mentor or a meetup group or whatever you can on investing and go to it.Start out with fundamental investing before you move into technical analysis or quantitative analysis.while these are different schools of investing, fundamental investing is probably the easiest for you to build foundationally.If you follow the above, make sure to use stop-loss orders that limit your losses, you will know how to invest in the stock market. If you are older, still do most of what I outlined above, but as soon as you can (on a dollar amount basis), get with a financial planner or use a roboadvisor to help you properly plan for retirement. This will include stuff like IRAs, weighting a diversified portfolio based on your risk tolerance and age, etc.Other asset classes you could invest in that I am not recommending and why:Real estate- requires much more capital than $100 a week generally, and if it doesn’t you have to be extremely savy and willing to take a lot of risk.Bonds- you can invest in bonds if you want, but buying bonds out right usually requires $5k or $10k increments so there its more capital intensive than stocks and the math for bonds is a whole new skill set to learn. Plus Bonds are currently in a tough spot market wise, so while that may be a good time to invest in them, it probably isnt (if the reasons bonds currently suck are alleviated, the general consensus right now is the companies and governments whose bonds you buy would also be suffering, so making bonds suck less could make the places you buy the bonds from more risky)Forex- just no. forex requires some highly technical math skills and an deep understanding of the movement of global financial markets or it requires you to invest because something happened without you understanding Why you are investing that way. It can be mindless and withhout understanding the why, you may not see the volatility that can wipe your investments out completely. plus it’s volatile and usually more capital intensive than stocks to do it right.Commodities- same hell no as Forex, only worse. Commodities is really cutthroat and volatile and can cause you to lose your savings in an instant. Both forex and commodities are investment classes I think you should attempt only after you gain some knowledge of the financial markets and only if you have the stomach for itCryptocurrencies(Bitcoin et. al)- If you were a savvy investor with cash to spend, maybe. but you aren’t yet. These are highly volatile and speculative. by telling you I wouldn’t recommend this as an entry point into investing, know full well that this asset class is the hottest thing on the street and many people may become very very rich by betting on this. but there are tons of scams on this stuff, the underlying asset is difficult for most to understand, and people are always warning of a bubble here. So you may miss this boat, but there is always another one, and if you need to follow the above advice I gave you , this isn’t a place any professional would/should recommend you put your hard earned money.Best of luck.-AndrewPlease note- The above does not form the basis of an investment advisory or attorney-client relationship. I am not a licensed financial adviser, and am not recommending particular stocks or directing a particular strategy. This is an answer for a strategy about finding strategies that work for you. The only reason I wrote out this answer is because it is my understanding that with only $100/week extra (unless you are in a jurisdiction where $100 is a lot more than in the U.S.), you will probably not have the ability to access the proper professionals you should normally seek out and will probably have to start this journey yourself. Make sure you get the proper professionals when you can afford it.