So, about a year ago today, I was in your shoes. I remember driving home after a 10-hour shift and sitting through 2 hours of traffic. But such is the life of a young scientist. The hardest part was just staying awake on the ride home. 

For 2 years, I would fight to stay awake on that drive home. Several times, I remember just waking up and being on the feeder road, realizing that by sheer luck my muscle memory had kicked in and knew exactly when to exit, brake, and more importantly, not hurt anyone. I knew that I was starting to go through burnout. As if losing a dear mentor and friend not even a year before wasn’t enough, I was feeling my love for science slip away. I was getting tired of my experiments constantly failing. My personality is trained to persevere...fail, think why, try again. But when the odds are against you (90-95% of the things we do in basic science eventually never get published, there’s a lot of testing, optimizing, validating, etc.), this can drain you incredibly fast. 

I was looking for something new to rejuvenate me. Something to make me excited to learn again and to give me the energy to tackle everything. That’s when I stumbled across Graham Stephan. He got recommended on my feed by the infamous YouTube algorithm probably because I was doing a ton of research into mortgages and refinancing, but for some reason, I clicked on this guy’s clickbait-ey thumbnails, and next thing I knew, I found my next passion project. 

For months, I was just scraping by, not sure where all my money was going (I mean, I guess I knew...5 dogs...mortgage...family...bills...food…), but then it hit me. I wasn’t investing my money. Since 2016, I’ve been studying, evaluating, and really dipping my feet into the real estate investing world to try to get some passive income because Mama Nguyen got interested. But she never had the time to fully dive in, so I figured, why not? It was just the perfect chance for us to bond and learn together. Problem was that I didn’t have enough capital, and I was too scared to lose any of her hard earned cash after our very first deal went south. 

Take us to present day and Graham’s Roth IRA video. Sitting on the couch, I facepalmed so hard. 

“Nick...how could you forget about the stock market? Weren’t you telling EVERYONE to open up an IRA in college and start investing in index funds?” 

Looking across all the different accounts I managed (me and my siblings’ Roths and my brokerage account), I averaged a 27.3% return. I had beat the market — okay that’s exaggerating a bit, I got super lucky because early 2020, the market crashed and that was right when I was learning how to evaluate companies, build my instincts, and saw how much easier it is to just park that money into index funds.  

It was worth it. I learned so much about my personality and how to really control my psychology to not make rash decisions. And although we’re not making ‘Wallstreet Bets’ kind of money (we didn’t even have that much to put in in the first place…), the fact that we picked some solid companies that are still going strong now was totally worth it. 

Not to mention, seeing the joy from all our friends and family who decided to hop on and learn with us, making some pretty awesome returns on their money too! Whether we started with $10, $50, or $100, just seeing that amount go up ignites this fire inside that made us want to keep going. 

So this post is for you new investors who are afraid to get started because “I don’t know what brokerage to use!” or “everything’s overpriced, there’s going to be another market correction and everything’s going to dip!” 

Don’t be afraid to get started. Take small steps! Open a brokerage/IRA first. Then look into index funds. You can’t lose if you buy EVERYTHING! And yes, you can buy everything, even if you only had $1. Look into index funds that track the total stock market, the total bond market, the total international market, and there’s even one for the total world market! 

So I guess my big takeaway is I was a new investor too. I’m still young and learning, but I don’t regret starting. I lost some money along the way, learned a ton to make it all back and then some, and more importantly, found a community to help me do it along the way. So don’t be afraid, check out some of our blogs, videos, and even some books we recommend and let’s build wealth together!

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