A mere three weeks ago, the stock market and GameStop were trending wildly on all our platforms and channels. People who hadn’t given the stock market a second thought now wanted to understand what was going on and how it worked. There have been several great explanations on the topic, so I won’t pretend to be an expert by repeating plagiarized details here. You can have a listen on a great explanation here. My take is that what happened with GameStop was a phenomenon, driven by Zoomers and maybe some Millenials who rallied together on reddit to buy the stock. The more people who buy a stock, the higher the value. Elon Musk helped drive up the price by tweeting the reddit link to the thread on the subject. It was probably driven by a lot of nostalgia for the store from this generation, which is why it would be difficult to get that many people on the same page again to repeat it. Still, I was happy with the interest in the stock market and think that it would be a great time for anyone to participate, even for the purpose of adding savings for your kids. Even if your shares are unlikely to grow to the proportions the GameStop stock did, there are many long term gains to be made. Though volatile, the stock market will still give you more interest than any traditional savings account. Of course you probably shouldn’t go out and buy a 300.00 stock as a newbie.

Many people are intimidated by the thought of investing because they think they need a lot of money to get started. You can start with as little as five dollars a week and in the age of technology there are many apps that make investing simple for newbies. For longterm gains, I personally use AmeriTrade but for every day trading I really enjoy the app Stash. Stash has some features that make it easy for everyone to invest and when you sign up through a referral link, they give you a $20.00 stock. If you sign up for the Beginner subscription account, the small one dollar monthly fee more than pays for itself with the 20.00 stock. The stock I was given was a fraction of an Apple stock which I was already paid a dividend of 3 cents on. That’s more than most savings account give you for such a small contribution. This brings me to something else I enjoy about Stash. You can acquire fractions of stocks even if you don’t have the full amount for a high priced stock such as Apple and Tesla. The final feature from Stash, I am really excited about is that if you choose to upgrade to a Growth subscription, which gives you a bank account, they will provide a debit card which rounds up your purchases to invest in stocks for you. For busy moms that don’t get a lot of time to ourselves alone with our devices or screens, that makes investing effortless. There is also of course the referral perk. When you sign up through a referral link, Stash gives you the twenty dollar stock I mentioned and for every person that signs up through your own link, you’ll make an additional 20.00. If you’d like to sign up, you can use my link here for your free stock. I opted for the Growth subscription plan because I wanted the debit card but you can start with a beginner account which is only one dollar a month. The final tier of the subscription within Stash, which I have not upgraded to also allows you to create custodial accounts for your kids and invest for them. I’m going to see how I do with the Growth features first but if I’m happy with it and choose to upgrade to Stash +, I’ll be sure to review it.