How To Invest Your First $100 (Long-Term Investment Portfolio)
Small investments can grow into something powerful when done correctly.
Most people will tell you that $100 is not enough to start investing. Well, they’re wrong. And I’m about to show you something that’ll make you mad you didn’t start earlier.
If you had $100 to invest 50 years ago, back in 1975, and you threw it into the stock market, I’m not saying you’re trying to find the next Tesla, Amazon, or Apple.
You just put this money into a fund that grew with the market, and you never invested another penny.
Over the last 50 years, this $100, assuming that the dividends were reinvested, would have grown not to $1,000, not to $10,000, not to $20,000, not to $30,000, but to over $34,000 over the course of those 50 years without you doing anything.
Now, I know what you’re thinking. But what about inflation? In 2025, you need $600 to buy what $100 could buy back in 1975.
So, if you adjust the numbers for inflation, you’re still way more ahead because you invested your money.
But $30,000 isn’t enough for me to retire. I agree. But remember, you only invested $100 one time.
You never made another investment again over the course of those 50 years.
Not to mention that this is more than the $100 you started with. I’d rather have this $34,000 than $100.
And if you’re feeling a little spicy and you want to kick it up a notch.
If you invested $100 a month for every month from 1975 to 2025, and you only invested that $100 a month, not $1,000 a month, just $100 a month, well, now you’re not going to have $34,000.
You’re not going to have $500,000. You’re not going to have a million. You’re not going to have $2 million. You’re not going to have $3 million. You’d have over $3.1 million if you invested $100 a month in the markets over those 50 years.
I don’t want to wait 50 years to be a millionaire. Well, my friend, you are in the right place because this is actually one of the slowest ways to grow your money. And I’m going to describe to you how you can start investing your money with as little as $100.
That way, you can actually build wealth for yourself and not just throw it away as everybody else does.
So, you have an extra $100, and you want to turn this $100 into something more. $1,000, $10,000, $100,000, a million dollars.
But before you actually do that, you have to establish the base.
Which means you have to have at least $2,000 sitting there to protect you against an emergency.
So, $2,000 in a savings account is extra money in case something were to go wrong.
Because if you start investing your money and then your car breaks down, or your window breaks, or your kid breaks their arm, well, now you end up going into credit card debt to fix the problem. So, you took two steps forward, and you take four steps back.
We don’t want to do that. So, have at least $2,000 to start in your savings account. That’s not the total goal, but it’s the starting point.
Then, step number two to establish your base is you have to pay off your credit card debts first before you think about investing your money into the stock market or anywhere else.
The stock market grows by an average of 10% a year. Your credit card debt is costing you 18 to 25% a year.
Which means if you take that extra money and you pay off your credit card debt, you’re going to get a guaranteed 18%, 19%, 20%, 25% return on your money, versus when you put it in the stock market, you’re hoping for 10%.
So, take that money, get the guaranteed return, and pay off the credit card debt first.
Once you pay off the credit card debt, let’s talk about how you actually invest that money to grow this $100 into a whole lot more.
There are 2-broad categories of ways that you can invest that $100.
- You can start by investing this money to generate more income. That way, you have more money to invest.
- Or you can take this $100 and actually start investing it for growth. This is what we talked about at the beginning of the story, which is something like investing your money in the markets.
#. Income
Let’s start by talking about how you invest this $100 to generate more income.
Because the reality is, investing is taking your extra money and throwing it into something so that it can grow.
The more money you have to throw into your investments, the wealthier that you can become. And $100, well, yeah, it’s a great start, but if you really want to build more wealth, it’s more helpful when you have more money to invest.
So, let’s talk about income. What I used to tell people who didn’t have a ton of money to invest, but wanted to increase their income, was to go out and read as many business books and investing books as possible.
But now, if you just have $100, that’s still a great strategy. And I’ll talk about what types of books you want to read in just a second.
But what’s even more powerful today is not to take this money and throw it into a Netflix subscription, but it is to take that money and go out and buy yourself a premium version of ChatGpt and Claude.
ChatGPT and Claude are two of the biggest AI tools out there. And when you pay for the premium subscriptions, not only do you get access to more tools, but you get access to more data, you can ask more questions, and do more stuff.
So, if your goal is to create more income, you’d better be smart with AI because this has some of the biggest and fastest-growing opportunities that our economy has ever seen.
And so many people are still behind, and it doesn’t cost a lot of money to be able to upgrade your subscription on these AI tools.
So, let’s put this into action so you can see how you can generate more income by investing in AI tools.
So, if you were to upgrade your Chat GPT subscription, it’s not going to cost you hundreds of dollars or $100.
It’s going to cost you tens of dollars a month. Now, when you do that, you’re going to get access to more tools.
For example, at the time of writing this story, you will get access to something called Chat GPT agents.
What is a ChatGPT agent? Well, it is a tool that can do work for you on the internet.
It’s a new feature where this agent will go out, and it’ll crawl websites. It’ll fill out forms for you. It can use APIs, and it can build code for you while you’re doing something else.
The reason why this is so powerful is that it’s almost like you can build an army of VAS (virtual assistants) that can do whatever you need them to do at a fraction of the price and much faster.
Now that you have access to the tools, you have to figure out how to actually monetize them.
So, you come up with a business idea. Let’s say you want to come up with a window cleaning business. You want to clean people’s windows.
Now, what you can do is you go to this agent, and you say, “Give me a list of 50 commercial businesses in my city, in Detroit, in Baltimore, in Miami, wherever, that are likely to have dirty windows.
Give me the business name, and then find me the decision makers in this business who are actually going to decide if they’re going to pay for window washing or not.
Give me their first name, give me the email address, give me their phone number, and then organize it for me, and then draft me a custom email to send to each one of these businesses.”
This might take somebody 5 hours, 8 hours, or 10 hours to do. This AI agent can do it for you in 10 minutes.
Now, what you can do with your time is actually contact these business owners and try to secure business.
If each deal is worth $500 and you can close one deal a week, that’s $2,000 worth of business that you just closed off for less than a $100 investment to get this tool.
I don’t care what the business is, whether you’re window washing, car detailing, you’re building some tool on the internet, or you’re a freelancer, understand how you can use AI.
That way, you can create more income. It costs you less than $100 to use it for a month. Use it, spend time on it, play with it, break it, and see how you can amplify what you’re doing to grow your business.
And if you don’t know what to do, here’s what you do. You go and ask the AI tool, “What should I be asking you? How can I use you to increase my income?” That way, you have a way to turn this $100 into a,1000, 10,000, 100,000 or something more. That way, you have more money to actually invest in growth.
So, if you only have $100 to invest and you’ve already established the base, start by understanding how to use AI.
Then what I want you to do is go back to what I was talking about just a minute ago and start reading books because there’s a ton of value in books that you’re not going to get directly out of an AI, yet that can help you scale your income even more and build real wealth.
What kind of books should you be reading? Well, it depends on what stage you are in your financial journey. And I will lay out the seven types of books that I would recommend you start reading.
- Personal development books.
A lot of times, people overlook these, but if you don’t have a good grasp on how to have a growth mindset, a positive mindset, a success mindset, you have to start here.
This is one of the most powerful things that you can do, and it’ll lay the foundation for anything you want to do.
2. Money management.
Learn how to organize your money the right way. How to spend less money, how to organize your money.
3. Investing
4. Career Growth.
If you have a job, I don’t care what type of career you are in; learn how to advance in your career. Spend some money learning how to do that.
5. Learn how to scale a business.
Even if you’re working a job, this is one of the most powerful things that you can do if you’re working a job.
If you understand how you drive revenue for your business and how you can drive more revenue for your business, it’s going to help you excel in your career and get more promotions than other people.
If you have a business, learn how to scale a business. This is so important.
You have to read books on how to start or scale a business to help you get there even faster. I found it to be very valuable for me.
6. Leadership.
Again, for anybody, learn how to be a good leader.
7. People’s biographies.
Find successful people that you admire. Read their biographies.
It is going to be extremely inspiring, and you will learn so many things, not just about somebody’s life, but about success, about motivation, about different things that people have done to reach the level of success that they had through these biographies.
So, you have an extra $100. You’ve laid your foundation, meaning you have at least a couple of thousand dollars saved in an emergency savings account. You don’t have any more credit card debt.
Now, we talked about how you increase your income by using AI, by learning how to grow some sort of business idea by using AI tools, the more advanced ones, to help you get more clients, to get more business, to grow more income.
When you have more income, now let’s talk about how you actually grow this money. And this is where you’re going to be actually investing your money more passively.
Now, this is where I want to be very careful with how I use my words because there’s a different type of passive when it comes to investing.
There are active investors and passive investors. Both of these investors are passive compared to building a business.
But when we talk about investing your money, active investing is when you’re going to actively manage your portfolio. Passive investing is when you’re going to invest your money into a fund.
So, let’s break this down to see how you can actually start investing your money and growing your money. And the reality is, you don’t need a ton of money to start if you want to become wealthy.
We talked about this in the beginning, but if you have $4 a day, that’s about $100 a month, you can retire a millionaire, assuming you have enough time.
If you invest $100 a month consistently, and you do this for 45 years, and you just get the return on the markets, which historically the stock market has grown by more than 10% a year, but let’s just say you get 10% a year, you’re going to retire with over $1 million in your account.
Now you might say, “Well, a million dollars is not enough for me, but just before I don’t want to wait 45 years.”
That’s fine, but remember, we’re just talking about investing $100 a month.
If you want more wealth, either work to invest more money, invest it for more time, or work to get better returns.
TRM (time, return) money. Those are the three factors that will determine how much wealth you build.
And small changes on the back end can add up to a lot more dollars.
For example, if you can get a 13% return instead of 10% return, now you’re not going to have $1 million or $1.5 million or $2 million or $2.5 million.
Now you would have $2.8 million just because you got a slightly better return. That’s the power of understanding how to invest your money.
So, how do you actually go about doing this? Well, the best way to understand what you should do is also to understand what you shouldn’t do.
What you should not do is go and try to trade stocks. Being a day trader, being a trader, is a losing proposition.
Some people will make a lot of money. Most people will lose money. There’s a reason why most people lose.
And some people can make money when markets are going up, but markets don’t always go straight up.
We see markets go up and down. Trading is very attractive because people can lure you in with huge gains.
But it has been proven to be a losing transaction, especially when you look at it over time.
The goal is to build wealth. And if the goal is actually to build wealth for you, you need to be an investor, not a trader.
Mistake number two is waiting until you have quote-unquote enough money to actually start investing. We see that, well, $100 is enough.
And this is where mistake number three is just blindly throwing your money into whatever is on CNBC, Reddit, or whatever your friends are talking about. This is another form of gambling.
When you go and invest your money in the markets, you can be an active investor in the markets or a passive investor in the markets.
As a passive investor in the markets, your goal is just to get the return of the market.
And we know that historically the stock market has grown by a little bit over 10% a year.
So, if that’s your goal, then, well, there are funds that give you exposure to that.
For example, VTI, this gives you exposure to the total stock market. If the stock market goes up, this fund goes up. If the stock market goes down, the fund goes down.
So, when you buy VTI, you’re getting exposure to 2,000-plus stocks in the stock market.
If you want to get a little bit more niche, SPY. SPY gives you exposure to the S&P 500.
That’s a group of the 500 largest companies on the stock market. So now you’re getting a little bit more niche, but still focused on the 500 largest companies.
And if one of those big companies, say Amazon, starts to struggle, they are on the verge of bankruptcy, this fund will kick Amazon out and replace it with somebody else. You don’t have to do anything. That’s why I call it passive.
You want to get a little bit more niche? QQQ.
This gives you exposure to the NASDAQ 100. That’s a group of the 100 largest companies in the stock market that are not financial. So, this is primarily tech.
These are market funds that give you exposure to the broad market. You can get more niche to find even more niche sector funds.
For example, some funds give you exposure to AI stocks. Some funds give you exposure to healthcare stocks. Some funds give you exposure to international stocks. Some funds give you exposure to dividend stocks.
So, if this is the game that you’re going to play, being more of a passive investor, great.
You can get the returns of the market, which we’ve seen to be a little bit over 10% a year for the last 100 years.
The way that you win as a passive investor is by doing an ABB (Always Be Buying).
That means you set up a cadence every week, every two weeks, every month, and money is automatically pulled out of your checking account and invested into whatever funds that you want to invest in.
That’s passive investing. Active investing is for people who want to be more involved and take on more risk for more potential return.
Now, you’re going to be looking for individual companies to invest in.
This is the Warren Buffett strategy. You want to find a company that you believe is undervalued, and you want to own it for the long term.
And the way that you succeed here as an active investor is by looking for what I call market shifts. This is what my firm focuses on.
We research these types of shifts. We’re studying where the economy is moving, where money is moving, and how that can change investment opportunities. More work for more potential return, but also more risk.
Because if you invest your money into Amazon, thinking that Amazon’s going to take over the world, and then Amazon goes bankrupt, you lose all of your money.
But if Amazon does actually take over the world, well, now you can make a lot of money because you own those shares of Amazon.
So, the way you succeed here as an active investor is to actually spend time doing the research.
You actually spend the time reading financial statements. You actually spend the time studying what companies are doing.
Now, as a little disclaimer and a little kind of exciting poin.
That’s how you can start to allocate this money. So, it’s not about investing $100 one time. It’s about starting with that $100 and then finding another $100 the next month, then finding another $100 a month after that.
That is a proven strategy to retire a millionaire, even if you’re just doing the basics of throwing your money into the markets.
But then, if you want to get a little bit more involved and you want to get into active investing, now you can start to get better potential returns, assuming that you’re investing in your own research, and now you can have more than what you would have had here. Potentially more risk as well.
But you’ve got to figure out where in your journey you are. Are you going to be working for more income first? Because, well, if you only have $100, yeah, it’s probably a good idea to figure out how you can earn some more money first and then take the extra money that you don’t need and just start throwing that into your investments.
That way, your money can start working for you when you’re not working, and you’re working your butt off to earn some more money.
That way, you can get to the point where your money is producing enough income.
That way, you don’t have to actually keep working to produce more money.
You have enough assets. You have enough investments that can produce that income for you.
So, if you have the extra $100, what do you do? Start by laying your foundation. I just saved your first $2,000. Pay off the credit card debt.
Then, if you want to create more income, that way you have more money to invest, we talked about taking that money, using it to get access to some of the more powerful AI tools. That way, it can work to increase your income.
Once you increase your income, you’ve got to be smart with your money.
Take the extra money that you’re not spending and throw it into your investments.
We talked about growing your money by investing it. You can do that by being an active investor or a passive investor.
And we know that if you invest $100 a month over the course of your career, you can retire a millionaire.
But if you want more than that or you want to get there sooner, you have to understand TRM (Time Return Money).
The more time your money has to compound and grow, the wealthier you’re going to become. Return.
The faster your money grows, the wealthier you’re going to become. And money, the more money you can invest, the wealthier you’re going to become.
When you understand that, you start fueling the process. And you don’t need a ton of money to start, but you do have to start.
Thank you for reading 🙂 & FOLLOW ON SUBSTACK.
