Investing was something that I paid lip service to for too many years, I knew a long time ago that it was a good idea to invest but I didn't know where or how to do it, neither did I have the motivation to learn how to. It was only when I got older and money became more important to me was when I started to take notice.

You see, when I was younger I simply saw money as a means to get what I wanted, my priorities were to earn money and spend it on whatever took my fancy, I was quite happy living paycheck to paycheck and living my life how I wanted, it's not that I didn't want to have a second income it's just that I didn't know how to create it. And so, on I went just wasting all of my money until something changed.

This happened over time, I met a beautiful woman, we got married and eventually had kids (this was the start), I started thinking about how I could support my family if something would go wrong. The obvious answers are insurance, if something were to happen to me or my wife the other would be able to carry on with the insurance payout. Although this is a viable solution for most (and what we had to do) it didn't sit easy with me, here I am paying premiums to a company in good faith that they will compensate my family if the worst happened to me, now you don't have to look far to see that this system has backfired on a lot of people and left them in the lurch. To me this wasn't a good enough, but unfortunately I didn't have any other option at the time, if I dropped dead the next day at least we had insurance.

And then I started to think about other options, there were people talking about investing in the stock market, but it seems to be just words no one really explains how to buy shares or what you should do when you acquire them. I also thought about property, house prices do go up and down but then again so do stocks and with a house you have something physical that you own, the price may go down but you can just hold on to it until the prices go back up.

Property for me was a no brainer, after all businesses can go into administration and the stocks become worthless, but a house will still be there. Don't get me wrong houses can cost additional money (repairs maintenance council tax etc), your money is tied up and there is no get out quick method but that didn't matter to me because at least I would own it.

Stop consuming and start owning - Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett has earned Billions on the stock market and to be honest it was him who set me on this path, the quote above has stuck in my head since I first heard it, I just can't shake it off. It came at a time when I was looking for ways to earn extra cash and it is still in my head to this day.

So where do I invest my money?

Well, with Warren Buffett's principle in my mind I looked at the property market, this is not an easy thing to get into but both my wife and myself both wanted our own home so we started looking at properties, we eventually found one and bought our first house. I had made my first investment and I felt really good about it, I took comfort in knowing that although the house was very expensive it was something that we owned and every payment on my mortgage is a little bit closer to owning it completely.

Property is a great investment but as I have explained before your money is tied up and you can't get out quick, so with that in mind I looked for ways to invest but my money with the option to withdraw it at short notice if I needed it. This is where I looked at investment funds, these are accounts were all you have to do is put some money in it and the fund manager will invest it for you, of course there some fees that come with this but as long as you do your homework they are minimal. So I started putting my money in to that as well.

While I had made two investments I had the bug and looked for other ways to invest, the idea of owning property was still attractive to me so I looked at how I could do that, with paying a mortgage and paying into my investment fund I couldn't afford to buy a house outright so I found another option........Crowdfunding.

I had found an opportunity to be an investor in property and better yet I could do it from £10, this is similar to the stock market, I can buy shares in a house which is then tenanted out and the rent that gets paid by the tenant gets distributed to the investors. This was awesome, I could invest in property for as little as £10 and earn a regular monthly income from doing absolutely nothing, all of the hassles of owning and renting a house are handled by the management company. This is a win win situation for me and one I couldn't turn up, so I immediately started buying shares in houses and I still do to this day.

The main motivation for this is that I wanted to start creating other streams of income, there are many ways to do this that out of the scope of this (but I'll be happy to write on them if you want, just let me know in the comments below) but these are two ways that I am doing it, I have come to realise that just having a full time job will not sustain me forever and although I do have a pension (through my work) I fear that it will not be enough. Rich people are rich because they have multiple streams of income so I'm just trying to replicate that.

Where do you invest your money and why? Let me know in the comments below.

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Until next time stay safe and dream big