How much should I save up per trade?
"I'd answer it this way:  What do you want to do? I'd say any amount is acceptable from as low as $100.  When you look at the specific ""tree"" of investing paying $5 for a $100 seems unacceptable.  However when observing the ""forest"" what does it matter if you ""waste"" $5 on a commission?  Your friends (and maybe you) probably waste more than $5 multiple times per day.  For them buying a latte might empower them, if buying another share of HD, for a similar cost, empowers you than do it.  In the end who will be better off? Studies show that the more important part of building a significant investment portfolio is actually doing it.  Rate of return and the cost of investing pales in comparison to actually doing it.  How many of your peers are doing similar things?  You are probably in very rare company. If it makes you happy, it is a wonderful way to spend your money."
The simple answer is that you are correct. You should not purchase a house until you are financially stable enough to do so. A house is an asset that you must maintain, and it can be expensive to do so.  Over the long term, you will generally save money by purchasing. However, in any given year you may spend much more money than a similar rental situation - even if the rent is higher than your mortgage payment. If you are financially stable with good cash savings or investments plus a 20% down payment, then anytime is a good time to buy if that is part of your financial plan. As of now in 2016, is is safe to assume that mortgage rates   would/should not get back to 10%?   Does this mean that one should always buy a house ONLy when mortgage   rates are low? Is it worth the wait IF the rates are high right now? The mortgage rates are not the primary driver for your purchase decision. That might be like saying you should buy everything on sale at Target... because it's on sale. Don't speculate on future rates. Also, keep in mind that back when rates were high, banks were also giving much better savings/CD rates. That is all connected.  Is refinancing an option on the table, if I made a deal at a bad time   when rates are high? You need to make sure you get a loan that allows it. Always do a break-even analysis, looking at the money up-front you spend to refi vs the savings-per-year you will get. This should give you how many years until the refi pays for itself. If you don't plan on being in the house that long, don't do it. How can people afford 10% mortgage? Buying a house they can afford, taking into consideration the entire payment+interest. It should be a reasonable amount of your monthly income - generally 25% or less. Note that this is much less than you will be 'approved' for by most lenders.  Don't let good rates suck you into a deal you will regret. Make sure you have the margin to purchase and maintain a home. Consider where you want to be living in 5 years. Don't leave so little financial breathing room that any bump will place you at risk of foreclosure.  That said, home ownership is great! I highly recommend it. I have about $1K in savings, and have been told that you should get into investment and saving for retirement early. I make around $200 per week, which about $150 goes into savings. That's $10k per year.  The general rule of thumb is that you should have six months income as an emergency fund.  So your savings should be around $5k.  Build that first.   Some argue that the standard should be six months of living expenses rather than income.  Personally, I think that this example is exactly why it is income rather than living expenses.  Six months of living expenses in this case would only be $1250, which won't pay for much.  And note that living expenses can only be calculated after the fact.  If your estimate of $50 a week is overly optimistic, you might not notice for months (until some large living expense pops up).   Another problem with using living expenses as the measure is that if you hold down your living expenses to maximize your savings, this helps both measures.  Then you hit your savings target, and your living expenses increase.  So you need more savings.  By contrast, if your income increases but your living expenses do not, you still need more savings but you can also save more money.  Doesn't really change the basic analysis though.  Either way you have an emergency savings target that you should hit before starting your retirement savings.   If you save $150 per week, then you should have around $4k in savings at the beginning of next year.  That's still low for an emergency fund by the income standard.  So you probably shouldn't invest next year.  With a living expenses standard, you could have $6250 in savings by April 15th (deadline for an IRA contribution that appears in the previous tax year).  That's $5000 more than the $1250 emergency fund, so you could afford an IRA (probably a Roth) that year.   If you save $7500 next year and start with $4k in savings (under the income standard for emergency savings), that would leave you with $11,500.  Take $5500 of that and invest in an IRA, probably a Roth.  After that, you could make a $100 deposit per week for the next year.  Or just wait until the end.   If you invested in an IRA the previous year because you decided use the living expenses standard, you would only have $6500 at the end of the year.  If you wait until you have $6750, you could max out your IRA contribution.  At that point, your excess income for each year would be larger than the maximum IRA contribution, so you could max it out until your circumstances change.   If you don't actually save $3k this year and $7500 next year, don't sweat it.  A college education is enough of an investment at your age.  Do that first, then emergency savings, then retirement.   That will flip around once you get a better paying, long term job.  Then you should include retirement savings as an expected cost.  So you'd pay the minimum required for your education loans and other required living expenses, then dedicate an amount for retirement savings, then build your emergency savings, then pay off your education loans (above the minimum payment).  This is where it can pay to use the more aggressive living expenses standard, as that allows you to pay off your education loans faster.   I would invest retirement savings in a nice, diversified index fund (or two since maintaining the correct stock/bond mix of 70%-75% stocks is less risky than investing in just bonds much less just stocks).  Investing in individual stocks is something you should do with excess money that you can afford to lose.  Secure your retirement first.  Then stock investments are gravy if they pan out.  If they don't, you're still all right.  But if they do, you can make bigger decisions, e.g. buying a house.   Realize that buying individual stocks is about more than just buying an app.  You have to both check the fundamentals (which the app can help you do) and find other reasons to buy a stock.  If you rely on an app, then you're essentially joining everyone else using that app.  You'll make the same profit as everyone else, which won't be much because you all share the profit opportunities with the app's system.  If you want to use someone else's system, stick with mutual funds.  The app system is actually more dangerous in the long term.   Early in the app's life cycle, its system can produce positive returns because a small number of people are sharing the benefits of that system.  As more people adopt it though, the total possible returns stay the same.  At some point, users saturate the app.  All the possible returns are realized.  Then users are competing with each other for returns.  The per user returns will shrink as usage grows.   If you have your own system, then you are competing with fewer people for the returns from it.  Share the fundamental analysis, but pick your stocks based on other criteria.  Fundamental analysis will tell you if a stock is overvalued.  The other criteria will tell you which undervalued stock to buy. Would if I had the capital it is an intensive and low margin area, it requires serious creativity and drive to do it and often needs at least one person per store that is seriously locally invested.   Not sure where anger comes from, just stating my opnion as a 20 year professional consultant who has worked at the executive level for BB, Target and GSK and a lifetime of being a customer. Sorry my opnion is both appreny offensive and entirely incorrect. I honestly don't read much of the retail distribution industry trade publications. I just work here.  EDIT: It's important to note that big box reailers and how they treated customers was already on the downslide and had been for nearly a decade prior to Amazon showing up. As such honestly very hard for one to make a direct comparision as the retailers had alredy given up much of thier competitive advantge prior to Amazon coming on the scene. "I think that people only use the phrase ""only spend what you can afford to lose"" when they are talking about the most risky or speculative investments, or even gambling.   When talking about gambling, the following quote is a bottom line: The speculative investment that brought me to this question via google is how much should I invest in Bitcoin?  I was tempted to put in 10% of my investments, not including the 6 month safety fund and not including equity in my home.  Now thinking about this question, it seems that it depends on your income as a percentage of your investment income (which should grow in proportion to the whole over time).  For example: Early stage of career, not much investment income: 20% Mid career: 5% Mid-late career, moving to more safe investments: 5% Late career, retirement: 1% Another way to calculate would be as a percentage of the amount you put into retirement savings per year.  Maybe 10% of this figure when you're young and 1% nearer to retirement." "Your broker, Ameritrade, offers a variety of Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) that you can buy and sell with zero commission.  An ETF is like a mutual fund, but you buy and sell shares the same way you buy and sell shares of stocks.  From your point of view, the relevance of this is that you can buy and sell as many or as few shares as you like, even down to a single share.  Note that to get the commission-free trades on the available ETFs you have to sign up for it in your account profile.  Be sure to do that before you enter any buy orders. You'll want to start by looking at the Ameritrade's list of commission-free ETFs.  Notice that they are divided into different categories:  stocks, bonds, international, and commodities.  Which categories you pick from will depend on your personal investing goals, time horizon, risk tolerance, and so on.  There are lots of questions and answers on this site that talk about asset allocation.  You should read them, as it is the most important decision you will make with your portfolio. The other thing you want to be aware of is the expense ratio for each fund.  These expenses reduce the fund's return (they are included in the calculation of the net asset value of the shares), so lower is definitely better.  Personally, I wouldn't even consider paying more than about 0.10% (commonly read ""10 basis points"" or ""10 bp"") for a broad-based domestic stock fund.  For a sectoral fund you might put up with as much as 20 bp in expenses.  Bond funds tend to be a little more expensive, so maybe allow as much as 25 bp, and likewise for international funds.  I've never invested in commodity funds, so I'll let someone else opine on appropriate expense ratios for those. Once you've decided what funds you want (and have signed up for commission-free trades), all you have to do is enter the trade orders.  The website where you manage your account has tutorials on how to do that.  After that you should be all set. Good luck with your investing!" Put £50 away as often as possible, and once it's built up to £500, invest in a stockmarket ETF. Repeat until you retire. I was asking myself the exact same thing.  And i have come to the conclusion that most of your money should be invested, In index etfs and maybe some bond etfs too.  If Inflation is about 2% and the interest you make in a savings account is less than 1%.  Your actually loosing money in a savings account.  Keep a few thousand bucks in your savings account and the majority invested and working for you. Littleadv has given you excellent general advice, but to my mind, the most important part of it all and the path which I will strongly recommend you follow, is the suggestion to look into a mutual fund. I would add even more strongly,  go to a mutual fund company directly    and make an investment with them directly instead of making the    investment through a brokerage account.  Pick an index fund with low expenses, e.g. there are S&P 500 index funds available with  expenses that are a fraction of 1%. (However, many also require minimum investments on the order of $2500 or $3000 except for IRA accounts).  At this time, your goal should be to reduce expenses as much as possible because expenses, whether they be in brokerage fees which may be directly visible to you or mutual fund expenses which are invisible to you, are what will eat away at your return far more than the difference between the returns of various investments.