Hello everyone! I am planning on moving out of my family's house soon enough. I will be making about 2400 dollars after taxes. I work extra full time (60 hours a week) plus pharmacy school. I don't feel like that's enough. I do have a budget set up and I am estimating that I will have 500-700 extra a month.
Here is what I feel like I should do if I have 600 dollars extra a month.
add an extra 100 dollars to my saving account.
use acorn(investing app) and invest 100 dollars in there.
Maybe start putting some money in my 401?
What else should I do?
What other forms of investment are there?
I was thinking of opening an ebay store but with my current schedule I wouldn't have that much time to run it. Any ideas?? THANKS!!
If it were me....if I was working and my objective was to get through pharmacy school....I would just stack up cash. You think you have extra...but pharma school is tough...there will be bumpy times. I wouldn't fund any investing. I would stay liquid and stack up cash until I was debt free with 6 months to maybe even a year of expenses set back before I thought of doing anything else. If you want to learn some investing in your spare time...do some paper trading in Thinkorswim w TDA...it's free. And watch Tastytrade.
Different forms of investments
I ran an eBay store in college. It sucked. Too much competition. Margins were too low and drained my time. There is even more competition now. Unless you have specific niche with very little competition, it will be extremely had to make decent money on eBay without a full team to crank out volume or selling very high end items. Most people lose money on eBay stores after paying the monthly and listing fees.
I'd agree with Acstudio, save the money. Staying out of debt slavery and being prepared in case of emergency is far more important than gambling a couple hundred bucks on an investment. Once you have a solid Pharmacy job and/or learn enough to be consistently profitable in the markets; then you can start into that process.
The 401 sounds good. I'd refrain from putting in more than 60 hours per week in something work-related. Focus on the studies as they might remain your primary and most reliable source of income and don't damage them with fatigue and limiting your attention span.
Regarding Acorns - any investment tool that limits my options is a bad one. Thinkorswim is indeed a great way to get to know trading and investing and forming your own knowledge and opinions. I think there's better value there than that of some app looking to make a buck from your buck. It remains to be seen how they perform over the long-term with their portfolio types.