It's only meaningful if you have enough disposable income to invest that it eventually (and I don't mean in 50 years) makes a dent against your living expenses.
If you make $4k/mo and rent is $3k, it's pretty silly to state that it's a meaningful thing for someone to scrimp and invest $100/mo into a brokerage account.
They definitely should do this, but it's not going to have any meaningful impact on their life for decades at best. Save for a decade to get $12k in your brokerage account, say it doubles to $24k. If you then decide you can get a generous 5% withdrawal rate you are talking $600/yr against rent that is now probably $3500/mo or more. Plus you're killing your compounding.
It's good to have so emergencies don't sink you - but it's really an annoying talking point I hear a lot lately. Eye rolling when you are telling someone struggling this sort of thing.
It really only makes a major impact if you can dump large amounts of cash into an account early in life - or if you run into a windfall.
It's only meaningful if you have enough disposable income to invest that it eventually (and I don't mean in 50 years) makes a dent against your living expenses.
If you make $4k/mo and rent is $3k, it's pretty silly to state that it's a meaningful thing for someone to scrimp and invest $100/mo into a brokerage account.
They definitely should do this, but it's not going to have any meaningful impact on their life for decades at best. Save for a decade to get $12k in your brokerage account, say it doubles to $24k. If you then decide you can get a generous 5% withdrawal rate you are talking $600/yr against rent that is now probably $3500/mo or more. Plus you're killing your compounding.
It's good to have so emergencies don't sink you - but it's really an annoying talking point I hear a lot lately. Eye rolling when you are telling someone struggling this sort of thing.
It really only makes a major impact if you can dump large amounts of cash into an account early in life - or if you run into a windfall.
It's not like the individual share price of e.g. VTI or FZROX is all that high to begin with.