Stash Invest: A Great Way to Get Started in Investing

I have been using the Stash Invest app for almost a year now. It's a great platform for new investors and takes away a lot of the barriers to investing. They say you can start investing with as little as $5, but considering you have to pay $1 a month for accounts under $5,000, it is too little to get any benefits out of it. The biggest feature they offer is the ability to buy fractional shares.

Let's start by talking about fees. For a standard Stash account, you will pay $1 for accounts under $5,000 and then 0.25% a year for accounts above that threshold this may sound like a lot, but you have to realize there are no trade fees. The best thing about no trade fees is you can let your money hit the market as soon as you get it instead of having to wait until it makes sense financially allowing you to take full advantage of your money.

They also provide a lot of valuable information. This is much more relevant as you are starting out, but they helped me not overreact during the correction earlier this year and to learn about things like dollar cost averaging and how dividends work. It's a great added benefit and they are very high-quality posts, but you can also find all of the same information elsewhere.

Stash Invest allows you to start investing very easily. In fact, it can be quite addictive. The thrill you get from seeing the money in your Stash grow really makes it fun. The longer you spend with Stash you worry less about the little ups and downs looking for long-term gains instead. 

Currently, my favorite investment is Robots Rising. I have always loved robotics and found it interesting to have to opportunity to invest in them. You can learn more about this investment here.

Easy Ways to Save Money on Groceries

I am a big fan of saving money on things. It's often better worth your time-saving money rather than making extra money because any money saved is tax-free. There are many ways to save money on groceries, but some methods I use are printing online coupons, adding coupons to my savings card and using rebate apps that give a discount for buying specific products.

One straightforward way to save money on groceries is printing online coupons. My favorite place to print coupons is Swagbucks because at the time of writing this they currently offer 10 cents extra in the form of Swagbucks when you redeem and an additional 2 cents just for printing them. For most people that should more than cover the cost of printing allowing you to keep more of the savings. It's also easy to find reasonably high-value coupons on things like cat food and dog food. I've even used coupons as high as $5 off.

The next best thing you can do is add coupons directly to your savings card. At Giant, for example, you can add many of the coupons you would see on Coupons.com directly to your card. That way you don't even have to bother with printing them. The nice thing here is that you don't have to worry about printing cost and can add any coupons you think you might use. The only drawback here is that if you find at higher value coupon somewhere else you usually can't use that instead of the digital version, so it's worth checking your print coupons before activating them.

Finally, you can save money through cash back rebate apps like Ibotta. I have been amazed by how much money you can save. This is how it works before you go shopping you activate any offers you may like. They even have any brand offers and sometimes any item offers. Then you purchase the items you activated, you can even scan them to ensure they are the correct item. Last you upload your receipt and may have to scan the items. After a little while, they will deposit the money to your account and you can redeem for PayPal or gift cards once you reach $20.