How to invest 10k dollars, at the age of 23?
"An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest, as Ben Franklin said. However, this is not a question I can answer for you, as it depends on the opportunities that are specifically available to you as an individual. Sometimes opportunities will knock on your door and you can take advantage, other times you have to create that door to allow opportunities to knock. Maybe you have a friend that is opening a side business, maybe there is a class you can get into at a trivial cost. What I suggest is to start investing just to get into the habit of it, not so much for the returns. Before you do, however, any financial advisor will advise you to begin with a emergency fund, worth about 3-6 months of your expenses for that time. I wanted to hit the ground running and start investing in stocks, but first things first I guess. ""Millionaire Next Door"" will help you get into a saving mindset, ""I will teach you to be rich"" is ok, plenty of other books. My advice is keep doing what you're doing, learn to start saving, and once you have obtained an emergency fund of the amount of your choosing, start looking to invest in Index Funds or ETFs through any platform that has LOW FEES!! I use Betterment, but Vanguard is good too, as they allow you to get your feet wet and it's passive. Hope this helps."
I'm going to diverge from most of the opinions expressed here. It is common for financial advisors to assume that your portfolio should become less risky as you get older.  Explanations for this involve hand-waving and saying that you can afford to lose money when young because you have time to make up for it later.  However, the idea that portfolios should become less risky as you get older is not well-grounded in finance theory.  According to finance theory, regardless of your age and wealth, returns are desirable and risk is undesirable.  Your risk aversion is the only factor that should decide how much risk you put in your portfolio. Do people become more risk averse as they get older?  Sometimes.  Not always.  In fact, there are theoretical reasons why people might want more aggressive portfolios as they age.  For example: As people become wealthier they generally become less risk averse. Young people are not normally very wealthy. When you are young, most of your wealth is tied up in the value of your human capital.  This wealth shifts into your portfolio as you age. Depending on your field, human capital can be extremely risky--much riskier than the market.  Therefore to maintain anything like a constant risk profile over your life, you may want very safe investments when young.  You mention being a hedge fund manager.  If we enter a recession, your human capital will take a huge hit because you will have a hard time raising money or getting/keeping a job.  No one will value your skills and your future career prospects will fall. You will not want the double whammy of large losses in your portfolio. Hedge fund managers are clear examples of people who will want a very safe personal portfolio during their early working years and may be willing to invest very aggressively in their later working and early retirement years. In short, the received wisdom that portfolios should start out risky and get safer as we age is not always, and perhaps not even usually, true.  A better guide to how much risk you should have in your portfolio is how you respond to questions that directly measure your risk aversion.  This questions ask things like how much you would pay to avoid the possibility of a 20% loss in your portfolio with a certain probability. The earnings portion will be taxed at your marginal tax rate + 10% penalty. If the total is $100, then the earnings portion is probably not very significant for this to be a concern. But it's something you could put into a Roth IRA and let it compound with the rest of your retirement savings. Depending on your age, the compounding effect of $100 invested early enough tax free can be thousands of dollars at retirement. i.e. You have 60 days to deposit it into a Roth IRA. Don't let that pass you by. I would strongly suggest you select an answer: all the above two cover everything I can possibly recommend, but perhaps my perspective as a person who was exactly in your shoes a year ago might appeal to you more. My first bank was Chase, and they usually give out a free checking account to students that come with leaves of 100 checks. Unfortunately, I was 24 at that time, and the max possible age to qualify was 23 or 21. Paying $25 for any number of checks was a big deal for me as I had no job, and transportation and rent was costing me $1k/month anyways. I came here and asked questions: lots of them. MrChrister, God bless his soul, recommended credit unions to me. I never knew they existed. A year later, I am a proud member of 3 CUs: I recommend Alliant, DCU and SchoolsFirst: I am their member and very proud of it! "You can use the 6900 to make an investment.  Or to buy something.  That's why people keep reminding you that you could make interest.  Because most people think of either 7200 now or paying the same 7200 over time.  So you could just be storing the 7200 under the mattress until you pay it out.  Obviously in that case, inflation doesn't matter (""is not applicable"").  You've given up the use of the 7200 from the beginning.   Think of it instead as 7200 now and twenty-three payments of 300 each.  So 14,100 total.  Then you can spend 6900 on something else at the beginning or spend 300 a month on other things.  The difference between spending 6900 now and 300 in each of twenty-three months would be measured in inflation.  Of course, this requires you to have both 7200 now and an income stream producing at least 300 a month.   Another way of doing things is to take 6900 and invest it.  Each month you remove 300 and use it to make a payment.  We're now back to just one 7200, plus the interest over time.  I would argue that this is still an inflation advantage.  It's just that instead of spending the money, you invested it.  And that of course is your prerogative.   The point being that you would not have that opportunity if you paid up front.   Now to calculate the difference in monthly payments of 300 euro using the above webpage what should I do?   As already said, you would have to calculate twenty-three values and then sum them with the 300 you pay up front in the monthly.   There are other ways to calculate it, if you are not using that particular tool.  For example, there are formulas to calculate the net present value of an annuity.  E.g. see Investopedia.   Where: P = the present value of an annuity stream PMT = the dollar amount of each annuity payment r = the inflation rate n = the number of periods in which payments will be made Investopedia talks about interest rates, but you can put inflation there for this purpose.  In that case, r might better be called the ""discount rate"".   PMT is 300. r is whatever estimate you are using for inflation.  E.g. .003 per period. n is 23.   Note that the monthly inflation rate is smaller than the annual rate.  So .003 is about 3.66% annually.  3.04% annually is more like .0025 a month.   I found calculators for this with search terms ""present value of annuity calculator"".  Some of the calculators will take the annual rate (3.66%) and number of periods per year as input.  Or the calculator may take a monthly rate as a percentage (.3%) rather than as a decimal (.003).  So be careful of the inputs.   This gives me a net present value (NPV) of 6,657.69 for the 23 payments of 300, assuming .3%.  Or 6957.69 is the NPV of the monthly payments and 7200 is the NPV of the 7200 up front.   Obviously if you can pay less than 6957.69 up front rather than 7200, then it makes more sense to pay up front.   Even without a discount though, it still may make more sense to pay up front.   How much those intangibles are worth is up to you." The 10K in savings and money market is equal to about 1.5 months of income for emergency funds. You should add additional funds to this account over the next few years to let that increase to 3 to 6 months of monthly expenses. This money should be kept secure so that it will be there when you need it. Growth is not the primary function for this account. Investment at this stage should be for retirement. This means take advantage of 401K matching if it is available. You will have to determine if Roth or regular makes the  most sense for you. In general the lower your current tax bracket the more sense Roth makes for you. If you want an IRA again decide which type. Also remember that you have until the tax deadline to make a contribution so you can decide to use a refund to fund the IRA. IRAs and 401Ks are just account types with some rules attached. They can be invested in everything from CD's to individual stocks depending on how aggressive you want to be. First off, I think you are on the right path not paying 3% to a broker; that sort of fee reduces the money you earn significantly in the long term. For your fund investing approach, 10 funds seems like a lot; one of the point of funds is that they are diversified, so I would expect that the 10th fund would give relatively little diversification over the other 9. I would think about targeting only 5 funds. To invest in the funds, rather than trying to invest in all funds every month, put all of the money into a single fund, and rotate the fund month to month. That reduces your transaction costs significantly. "Without knowing what you are trying to achieve - make a bit of pocket money, become financially independent, invest for retirement, learn trading to become a trader - I'll give you a few thoughts ...  The difficulty you will have trading with $400-600 is that brokerage will be a high proportion of your ""profits"". I'm not sure of the US (assuming US rather than AU, NZ, etc) rates for online brokers, but UK online brokers are the order of £6-10 / trade. Having a quick read suggests that the trading is similar $6-10/trade. With doing day trades you will be killed by the brokerage. I'm not sure what percent of profitable trades you have, but if it is 50% (e.g.), you will need to make twice the brokerage fees value on each profitable trade before you are actually making a profit. There can be an emotional effect that trips you up. You will find that trading with your own real money is very different to trading with fake money. Read up about it, this brief blog shows some personal thoughts from someone I read from time to time. With a $10 brokerage, I would suggest the following Another option, which I wouldn't recommend is to leverage your money, by trading CDFs or other derivatives that allow you to trade on a margin. Further to that, learn about trading/investing Plus other investment types I have written about earlier." "Since I, personally, agree with the investment thesis of Peter Schiff, I would take that sum and put it with him in a managed account, and leave it there. I'm not sure how to find a firm that you like the investment strategy of.  I think that it's too complicated to do as a side thing.  Someone needs to be spending a lot of time researching various instruments and figuring out what is undervalued or what is exposed to changing market trends or whatever. I basically just want to give my money to someone and say ""I agree with your investment philosophy, let me pay you to manage my money, too."" No one knows who is right, of course.  I think Schiff is right, so that's where I would put the amount of money you're talking about.  If you disagree with his investment philosophy, this doesn't really make any sense to do. For that amount of money, though, I think firms would be willing to sit down with you and sell you their services.  You could ask them how they would diversify this money given the goals that you have for it, and pick one that you agree with the most."